Advice on my first time build (€1000 Budget)

Pizzle

Hey guys
Building my first PC (mainly used for gaming – Arma 3, DayZ, Witcher, etc.) and looking for some advice to make sure I'm on the right track.

The budget is about €1000 and I already have a mouse, monitor and keyboard.

Here’s what I have so far (prices are from partspicker where I set location to UK, similar prices to the German sites when I use parcel motel):

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor (£164.99 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£24.99 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI Z97-GAMING 5 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£109.99 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£35.98 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£66.85 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£49.98 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Twin Frozr V Video Card (£267.25 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case (£49.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: EVGA 500W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply (£29.99 @ Aria PC)
Total: £800.01

The main things I'm unsure about are the case and power supply. Is there anything better I could get for around the same price? Happy to go a bit higher if necessary. Any comments on the other parts are appreciated too!

One other thing, is it a good idea some buy and use something like an Arctic Cooling compound on the CPU? Or does the stock CPU come with something similar?

Thanks

Digital Solitude

The Hyper Evo comes with its own tube, I got some Arctic Silver for mine anyways. There's no real rush in your case, temps will be low and you won't need to overclock for a bit.

TerrorFirmer

I think it's solid enough, that EVGA PSU is grand, I've used loads of the 430w and 500w models and found them fine.

Digital Solitude

Misread, thought he was buying a Corsair. I'll strike that.

Padovski

Pizzle wrote: »

The budget is about €1000 and I already have a mouse, monitor and keyboard.

Hi
If you have 1000e to spend, go for the real thing

Fractal Design Define R5(~$100 @ amazon)
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 2400 (~$50 @ Newegg)
All other components are more then fine, for cooling... if you don't intend to do some crazy OC then stick to Noctua NH-D14, will do the job nice and quiet

And I will ask you about your monitor, if you don't mind.. If yours is 60hz then what's the point of spending all that money? If you are building a beast of the rig please connect it to 144hz screen.

grindle

Padovski wrote: »

...I will ask you about your monitor, if you don't mind.. If yours is 60hz then what's the point of spending all that money?

The 970 or 390 are about the sweet spot for newer AAA titles @ 1080p Ultra, not a hope of getting near 144fps in any of the games mentioned.

The 4690k is mild overkill but he might want to upgrade GPU in the future for 1440p/4k Ultra settings.

Padovski

I'll totally agree, but there are FPS games that getting level of 200fps wont be a problem for that rig...but we are down to game preferences and choices here...

Digital Solitude

Personally I'd prefer to play all games at 60 than only playing older games at 144, saving myself the money on the monitor.

290/390/970 won't play The Witcher, GTAV, DayZ or any future games that demanding at anything close to 100 without low settings. Nobody likes low settings.

Pizzle

grindle wrote: »

The 970 or 390 are about the sweet spot for newer AAA titles @ 1080p Ultra, not a hope of getting near 144fps in any of the games mentioned.

The 4690k is mild overkill but he might want to upgrade GPU in the future for 1440p/4k Ultra settings.

Yep, that would be the plan long term. The CPU should be fine for quite a while if I go down over-clocking route. Maybe then in a year or two upgrade my monitor and GPU.

Is there much of a difference in practice between the G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB and the Corsair Vengeance 8GB? The difference is speed worth the extra money?

grindle

Pizzle wrote: »

Is there much of a difference in practice between the G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB and the Corsair Vengeance 8GB? The difference is speed worth the extra money?

1% difference at best.

If you were compressing/encoding a lot of files/huge video files or reading hundreds of audio samples from RAM for a multisampler in a DAW, it'd make a difference that you could see or hear in either saved rendering seconds or ability to playback a few more samples out of hundreds.
Gaming... You're not going to notice a half-frame boost in Witcher 3, or an extra frame in Tomb Raider at all. You'd get much more than that (~10%+) by OCing the CPU and GPU. You'd feel those differences, especially in the games you've named which are GPU hogs.

Padovski

First of all do not look at a brand name.. this is purely your own desire and preference, what you have to take in account when buying RAM is Capacity(8gb or more) Latency(CL level), Speed(800-3000mhz), Warranty(desirably a lifetime one) and design(color, profile, heat sink).
At the moment difference between 1600 and 2400(as grindle mentioned above (unless you are using APU in stead of CPU)) is not colossus, but it's noticeable in terms of day to day performance and with a few euro more on price tag I don't see a case here.
This will change in 3 to 6 months time with aps and games using the higher bandwidth and you are willing to spent 1000e so its better to future proof your rig a bit.

Here's some tests done by Corsair with BF4: /i59.tinypic.com/2vnnjiq.png