Gaming Setup - Computer Setup

Whoops, thanks! I'll post over there, and when I get the rest set up, I'll post the whole gaming setup.

I'm tight on money too, how much did you spend, and what are the specs?

I spent a bit more than I wanted to... Totaled out to around $800, because I had to buy a new PSU that I wasn't expecting (I wanted to spread everything out).

A gaming setup is more than just your tower.

Stock cooler, of course it's not overkill

At the least it's the bottleneck. Those stock intel coolers are right shit.

I see your "budget" builds and cry...

You've splurged on two GTX 650's, but use the box-cooler for the CPU? It would've been reasonable to "splurge" further 30-40 bucks for a decent CPU cooling.

Maybe he had the one 650 for a while, then added the second a year or so later when they got much cheaper.

This is effectively the plan going forward, buy one mid-high card, then supplement it later on with another at a cheaper price.

I got a 660, for a phenom x4 9550, then got a 4670k now. now my 660 is screaming for a SLI buddy.

SLI was an awesome choice for me, but I was a little antsy at first because of reading about microstutter and whatnot.

Two GTX 650 ti BOOSTS are about $300 (For EVGA), and while it is usually true that you should go for single card solutions with low cards, These two scale almost x2 to match the GTX 670, which is around $375.

I'm not overclocking, so I don't really need anything wild. In the future (aka when money allows it, I really broke the bank doing this anyway) I'll probably invest in a CPU cooler.

$22~ will get you the nzxt Respire T40, it is sa really solid choice right now and is comparable or beats anything up until the $60-80 coolers.

Sweet, thanks. Do you know if it'll clear the Vengeance's heat fins? That's my primary concern.

Ughhhh those are so tall, i dunno.

I'll have to check it out. My friend's dad has a pretty wild cooler as well that he's been trying to sell me haha, I'll have to look into that too. But thanks for the input!

You definitely don't need to buy aftermarket cooling for your CPU. If you are doing a budget build, it's absolutely the last thing that should be thought of. Especially for gaming as overclocking the CPU does little for FPS performance.

What planet are you on? Intel stock coolers are abysmal, especially with their plastic clip mounting solution and terrible TPM. A CM Hyper 212+ can be has for as little as $20, and is very effective, and will allow him to overclock a bit in the future.

For a budget build it is not necessary. Especially if he has a CPU/Mobo combo that doesn't overclock.

He has a Z77 motherboard perfectly capable of overclocking and he doesn't list his CPU. If he bought a non-K CPU and a Z77 board, I guess it's just a bigger waste, but you still made an assumption.

Your name baited people. Well done.

I didn't say he needed to overclock, I was just saying that getting an even moderately cheap CPU cooler would allow for some potential OC headroom, while also keeping it cool at it's current clock speeds and voltages

So, to clear up a few things:

Nice build but please replace that stock cpu cooler,

I would put a better CPU cooler on that, that SLI of the 650ti's should come last ha ha.

Dual GTX 650 ti BOOSTs, such a smart decision! Is the CX600M definitely enough though? I have the 600M and a single GTX 650 ti BOOST, and I was thinking of adding another.

Yeah, according to PCPartPicker the estimated wattage is only like 485ish watts, so 600 left me with a bit of headroom.

The only overkill here is the case. Also why no single 660ti?

Strapped for cash, and SLI has always been a lifelong dream of mine. Besides, this way when I want to make small upgrades, I can. I'll go from my two 650 Ti Boost Superclocked cards to one 770 later on, to two 770's, and so on and so forth, so I can get cards on my own timeline.

This is true. My situation only allows me to spend a bit at a time though, and so I chose to do it a weird way. And like I said,

I don't understand why... you're getting less performance than you would from a single card. Are you running 3 monitors?

Yes. Well, two and a TV.

You can still run triple monitors from a single card

I know. Apparently this one does up to 4.

I saw this while out to dinner and proceeded to nerd-rage. mM not so nerdish friends thought I had gone mad. For some reason I could not explain it to them.

Because for some people, SLI adds that "high performance" look, weather it be dual 650's or dual Titans. Don't beat down his aspirations to have two cards just because there are a few drawbacks to it. And to correct you, 650 ti Boost cards scale wonderfully, for a little bit cheaper than a single 670 you get equal to greater performance, and if he has the SuperClocked models, this increases even further. Of course some games don't like to scale well, but most do. 650 ti Boosts scale better than almost any other Nvidia card, right up there next to the 660 series. And he would buy two because they are extremely cheap and are one of the highest performance/dollar cards you can buy, $170 for something just about 10% slower than a 660 is not a bad bargain.

GTX 650 ti Boosts scale almost x2 in SLI. The front 200mm fan is enough to cool two blower style cards, since all their heat is vented out the back. He still uses the same number of cables, spends around only $300 for GTX 670 performance, and finally gets to say he does SLI.

CPU might be a little lacking to power those two beast cards and you might want to get an after market heatsink. The base intel ones aren't terrible, but they are no where near what other vendors have for 40-50 smackers.

Lol when I saw he said overkill I thought he'd at least gotten 2 gtx 660ti's

I didn't look at specs, but from what I've seen the 600 series draw alot of power. Are his low end?

They're not low end, but they're also far from a high end card.

Nearing the bottom of most gaming cards. Generally people start at a 650, then it goes 650 Ti, then 650 Ti Boost. Also a new series is just around the corner, the higher end 700 cards are already out (780, 770)

Previous | Next