I know that the PC community can be a **** at times, but we do know that a Raidmax PSU is legitimately dangerous to your components. That has a very high chance of failing and when it does, it'll take all your other components with it and/or start a fire. I'm serious.
If you want a cheap quality PSU, the B2 750W from EVGA is a solid Tier 2 choice coming in under $60.
The x4, when overclocked at least, will perform better than a FX 6300 per core.
Overclocking isn't some super-risky and difficult procedure. There's a ton of tutorials out there, and all it tells you to do is raise the clock multiplier one by one and raise the voltage a certain amount while doing so. Stop when max temps in AIDA/IBT/whatever other tester that's not Prime reach whatever you think is too high.
I'd say that the best all-round gaming PC budget is $1000. There, you can get a decent CPU with a decent GPU and a SSD.
For any casual headphone (Sennheiser Momentum, AT ATX-m50x) the motherboard's onboard sound will fully support it. If you have a very high resistance headphone (Sennheiser HD800, Beyerdynamic T1) and also need the highest possible sound accuracy, you'd get a sound card and DAC.
I think you'll be fine because I don't know a lot of people with headphones at that range.
Well I need IPS for some colour work, but I'd recommend it for sure for even a gamer or a casual user because the colours and viewing angles are very nice.
Check your motherboard manual to make sure you plugged in your RAM into the correct slots for dual channel operation. I had the same problem as you with my quad channel kit and it turned out that I simply put two sticks too far to the left.
But it's just not living up to all the hype the 'leaked' benchmarks proved and the hype AMD drew upon themselves. So it'll basically be down to what brand you prefer and that's not what I wanted personally because I prefer nVidia (CUDA for Adobe is better, sorry).
It's kind of important because if you have a 1080p monitor all you'd need is a 980 to run all games at Ultra. If you had a surround setup or a 4K monitor there'd be a point getting two 980 Tis.
Thanks. The ports that worked before reboot are still working just fine so it seemed like that was the issue.
The funny thing is after I flashed the BIOS I searched it up on curiosity and a lot of people said the M-FLASH is unreliable and that there's no '99% safe' way of flashing the BIOS on a MSi motherboard...
No, it's just a list of RAM timings the motherboard supports. It supports XMP profiles as well so all you have to do is go into the BIOS and enable that setting.
You can skimp down to an EVGA GS 650W PSU (Tier 2 but Tier 1 isn't necessary at this budget) and get him a SSD. Trust me, for regular day-to-day use, a SSD will provide the most meaningful improvement in terms of speed.
Alright, I live in Dubai and I built my PC by ordering from here, or rather from Korea and shipping them here and these are the things I've realised.
Don't buy online from Dubai. The stores overprice everything by x2 or above and trust me they DO NOT come in 3-5 days (you should be happy if they come in 3-5 weeks).
If you have to buy here, there is a computer plaza in Bur Dubai that sells all the standard PC parts (they don't have some companies for monitors, cases, SSDs, etc. but they have the parts). They'll add ~$30 or so to the price (or even more for the high end stuff) but you can try and bargain for $5-10. It's called Al Ain Computer Plaza; check it out on Google Maps.
Ordering from the US is a pain in the ***. Newegg doesn't ship here and you can't ship certain PC parts out of the US due to some export law or something. Furthermore, I've had multiple instances where the transaction would be completed on my side (credit card) but not on the US side which led to a long and almost legal process of getting everything sorted. I even got one credit card blacklisted.
This is a message to everyone else that'll try and help him as well.
I actually have a 5820K w/ a 960 for Maya, After effects and NUKE but I know for sure that a 380 will decimate a 960 because a 280 does the same thing.
128-bit isn't enough to actually handle 4GB in games that will actually use it. I guess it'll go up to...3.5GB ;)
The reviews claim that it has a 1-year warranty not 5 and some people said that they received a used drive.
I think it'll have a higher failure rate in the first few months than something like a WD Blue. Can't be sure though; all HDDs have some horror story that a lot of people experienced.
H97 is a board that has the clock multiplier locked preventing you from overclocking...but the H97 boards from the major companies (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSi) have BIOS updates that allow some overclocking. However, it's not as versatile in OCing as a Z97 board that is unlocked and packed with all the necessary settings for a proper overclock.
If that motherboard has a PCIe slot that's PCIe 2.0 16x, 3.0 8x, or 3.0 16x it'll work. PCIe 2.0 16x will make the 970 run at a 3.0 8x (no performance decrease at all).
That would take some serious collaboration from all the different vendors and it'd be very difficult to handle all the data. PCPP isn't like Amazon where it can 'securely' save all your info and track your orders. Furthermore, if anything went wrong the blame would go to PCPP not the actual vendor.
It's not a big deal to order one by one. Don't be lazy.
It'll be 100% safe. I have a NH-D15 that's multiple times heavier than the Evo and it's not like it rips out the socket and comes crashing down or anything.
However why are you getting a CPU cooler on a locked motherboard? I know you can still OC on H97 but it won't be as high as what a Z97 mobo can go up to. I'd recommend a cheap Z97 board.
E3 is an i7 without overclocking abilities, and it performs as such. It is a fantastic balance between gaming/rendering for a good price.
Agree with the PSU. A GS650W PSU from EVGA would be a good Tier 2 PSU that still has room for a GPU upgrade.
There is no problem at all with the motherboard. B85 supports that Xeon perfectly well and it'll support everything else just fine. I'd even recommend H81 to lower the budget even further.
So a PCIe lane might be 16x but if the CPU/motherboard can't give 16x to multiple GPUs, it'll downgrade the bandwidth so every GPU can run at the same time. Has 0 performance difference whatsoever as long as it runs.
Well sorry, but refresh rates don't directly affect FPS as such. His monitor limits his maximum 'viewable' FPS to 60FPS but it doesn't prevent the GPU from pushing more frames.
970 would probs get 30-40FPS and would also run into VRAM problems with games like Shadow of Mordor.
Interesting. Personally, I have 8GB and whenever I do anything in AE it'll infinitely loop saying "Not enough system memory" and crash. I know Adobe is very RAM-heavy so I thought it'd apply to Vegas as well but apparently not.
If you won't be gaming, I'd say you could downgrade the GPU to a 960 or even a 750 Ti because the software you'll be using doesn't use the GPU for much.
As with all video editing rigs, I'd recommend 32GB of RAM. I know that AE just eats up every last bit of your RAM and then some and my research concludes that Vegas isn't much different. Furthermore, Vegas uses a rather unique system where you can optimize your RAM for smooth previews or rendering.
