Upgrading my rig for $500-$600

No. I'm mostly comfortable with standard ATX. If I was going to experiment, I'd do it for my own system. I am using an SSD in her computer for the first time, though. Besides, there's far less of a choice in ITX boards and I'd probably just use one when I get around to building my first HTPC. Not to mention that I need as many features as I can get, since this will be a gaming PC.

Most of the parts came in today, but we're waiting on the monitor and case. Should be in tomorrow. I need to swing up to Richardson (40 minute drive) to pick up the CPU today. They don't know if and when they're restocking the i5 4670K, so I'm just going to spring for the extra 20 bucks and get a 4690K.

 

What features do you need for a gaming PC other than X16 PCI slot (2 for SLI/Crossfire), overclocking ability and maybe a higher quality audio setup? All of these you can get in an ITX board.

 

I look at those things and instantly have huge concerns about cooling issues. Water cooling is pretty much mandatory in a mini-ITX case and I have 0 experience with those so far. Also, there's much more of a restriction on the parts you can use because you're being constrained by clearance. Building such a compact system looks like too much of a pain in the ass to me. I've been good with mid-towers for 15 years. I may be open to experimentation sometime down the road when I have the time and money to spend on trying it out. For now, I'll stick with that I'm familiar with.

 

I can see the draw of the Mini-Itx for situations in which space is at a premium, but for me... it's not at all. Not to mention, after the first time I built a system with a full tower and reveled in all the glorious space to maneuver my meat hooks... I'll never go back to a smaller case. lol

 

I totally understand the meat hooks thing, lol. Yes ITX builds take a bit more finesse than mid tower builds in regards to cooling and space. It becomes a matter of picking the right case. But yes Frothy I wasn't trying to talk you into an ITX build just curious about the features you mentioned you needed that you couldn't get with an ITX board.

 

Well, I just meant that there are fewer boards to choose from, hence less ability to weed out the bad boards from the good ones. I'm an Asus man all the way, when it comes to motherboards. Waited until the last minute for the case and monitor today before I had to go to work. Saw the UPS guy coming my way when I pulled out of my neighborhood... dammit. Should get the rest of my parts tomorrow.

So, the final verdict:

Intel Core i5 4690K - $200
Asus Z97-K/CSM - $125
16 GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz CL9 - $162
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - $25 (after MIR)
EVGA GeForce GTX 760 FTW 4 GB GDDR5 - $270 (after MIR)
EVGA 600 B 80 PLUS Bronze PSU - $40 (after MIR)
Zalman ZM-Z9 U3 Black Steel mid-tower - $50 (after MIR)
Samsung 24x DVDR - $15
SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD - $110
Acer S240HL Abid 24" LED - $140
Windows 7 OEM - $100

About $1235 for a completely new and modern gaming rig WITH a new monitor and OS. Not too shabby... My gf is going to have a better computer than me and I don't know how long I'm going to be able to stand for that.

 

About to say, she that hardcore of a gamer heh.

That SanDisk Ultra Plus look like a pretty nice drive for that price. Can't wait till 1TB drives are down to $200 range.
Being an Asus MB man, why the Acer monitor? Some great Asus gaming monitors out there.
She doing anything non-gaming to use 16GB of ram? Be a while before any games go past 8. I use VirtualBox on mine, so i7\16GB was a must but otherwise its makes no difference in system performance.

Overbuilding hers now though makes it easier to get what you want for yours later heh.

If you still want some good fans there at $9 off with promo code discount right now. Just ordered a cpl more, never know when you could use some good cooling.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835553002

 

She's not hardcore, but she enjoys gaming quite a bit. We met in a pickup game of Left 4 Dead 2 over 3 years ago...

I actually have an Asus monitor for my gaming PC. I just got the Acer because it was the best bang-for-our-buck. The Asus monitors were slightly higher-priced than the Acer. This monitor also came with an HDMI cable, so that's what made it the clincher for me.

I am future-proofing her computer, which is the reason I went with a Z97 chipset, 16 GB of RAM, 4 GB of GDDR5, and a 4th-gen Intel processor.

You'll also notice that I didn't get a mechanical HDD. The SSD is the only storage device on her computer and the 256 GB should be more than enough. I have a 150 GB HDD on my rig and I barely scratch 100 GB used. I have Planetside 2, WoW, Torchlight 2, Civ 5, Cloudberry Kingdom, and Minecraft installed. We share a 1 TB external HDD as an archiver, so we don't really need ridiculous amounts of storage space.

 

Wound up getting an evga 760 with 4g of ram for free with my amazon reward points. boom.

 

Nice, sounds pretty solid.

 

This was my single adventure into mini-itx, though this was also an insane budget/"green" build, prior to SSD and AiO cooling price drops. Also my only SandyBridge build.

http://s69.photobucket.com/user/nilkilla/story/23093

 

Finally finished putting the computer together yesterday. I had my gf do it with me so she could learn a thing or two about how to build her own system. I got all of the essentials installed, but the Ai Suite 3 wasn't working the way I'd hoped it would. I have Ai Suite 2 on my PC and it goes through and tests a myriad of BCLK and CPU ratio values before it crashes and has to reboot. After doing both, it picks what it feels is a stable setup. Ai Suite 3 won't do that, for some reason.

After doing a bunch of research and reading, I just selected the two values and tweaked them until they actually worked. I got the 4690K to go from 3.5 GHz to just over 4.5 GHz. Ran the Unigine Valley benchmark for about an hour and the CPU temperature never exceeded 45 degrees Celsius. I placed the case's temperature probe right next to the processor (electrical tape on the motherboard) and it never exceeded 42 degrees C.

It's pretty amazing how fast that SSD can boot up Windows. Through all of my testing and tweaking and installing, I had to reboot the computer at least 50 times. It's nice when it only takes a few seconds each time around. My current PC is bogged down with BS and is begging me for a reformat; it takes well over a minute each time to boot into Windows.

The case looks good, but I can't figure out how to get the front panel fan controls to work. The fans run, but the controls won't change their speed. I'd put them on the motherboard, but they're 3-pin. I believe that means they'll only work on DC mode? This PWM mode is the 4-pin connector and that's the type that can be controlled by the motherboard?