Computica said:
Ahh I see. A 24-26" monitor like you suggest is about a $500 product last time I checked (3 days ago), rather than the $125-140 FullHD monitors I suggested. To be honest I built out both home and work PCs for much less than your budget, but you do want the very latest. Might I suggest the Corsair Neutron GTX SSD for boot drive and warband modding, with either a RAID-0 data pair in your secondary chipset for SATA drives (as RAID and SSD don't mix, they have to be on seperate chipset controllers - thus many motherboards offer for example Intel for boot and Marvel SATA controller for a secondary set of SATA drives that can be configured in RAID.) Or if economy, try a SSHD 2 TB seagate at around $150 as a decent complement to a $200 550 MB sustained write capable drive (very very few are capable of sustained 500+ MB writes after the SATA-3 buffer fills).
You should carefully consider the CPU heat sink and case you put those into -- cross ventilation, ability to add secondary cooling fans to lower air temperature inside the case, cooling of drive bays, all these make a difference. A decent motherboard will allow BOTH AMD and Nvidia multi-GPU solutions. Don't feel you have to choose one over the other - you can defer the decision if you aren't sure. I'd say more important is your decision as to how much power supply you need, and if you live in the sticks some sort of protection against brown outs and surges. I still think you're spending too much (the PC I write on was budgeted about 1/3rd your amount, and I assure you it can outperform your rig, ever so slightly, in real world activity -- at least, if I require the CPU should never be heated beyond lets say 45 C in ambient air cooling, which I certainly achieve daily. But then again, I have some experience in picking a build.
I like your pieces so far, but the motherboard seems likely to be expensive, and the decision to buy "cutting edge" seems nice, except a year from now the cutting edge aspect of the monitor will be 33% cheaper from mass production, so I wonder if its not better to upgrade as you go and focus on the box first. Even then waiting for a traditionally October release to grey market of a new processor (I had to wait until November when I bought mine, even though official launch was October)... well, the monitor is seperate from the box. The box is dependent on CPU+MB+RAM and otherwise needs enough vertical clearance for the aftermarket heat sink, which you'll certainly need if you ever plan on overclocking. The box, with OS, with SSD, with at least 2 channels of RAM, really shouldn't be more than $2000 USD delivered to your doorstep, even with the build you want. Adding some graphics cards later so you have a nice pair might burn what, $200 each further, and its debateable whether much more than that really helps frames per second in Warband or Bannerlord. Your huge number of addressable pixels implies a PCIe-v3 bus need and true x16 + x16 lane PCI trace layout at chipset and motherboard, and not the classic x16 + x8 + x4 layout most use, but again its a matter of reading carefully before selecting your motherboard. Even most high end boards select x16 + x8 + x8, since it isnt certain you don't need for example a raid controller or multi-gigabit fiber channel card when the motherboard designer makes a high end workstation motherboard as opposed to simple gaming build. I'll assume you want a pure gaming rig but the underlying properties in terms of bandwidth versus latency still apply, as do heat (thermal) considerations in an optimum build - which is something I *do* know about.
I rather doubt any of you could drag race my cheap boxes at even twice the budget I spent, and anything after that will seem foolish in 2 years when yet ANOTHER tick occurs and your box, like mine, is now 1 tick behind the curve, and probably 33% cheaper. I mention it because I see "waiting for my box" as a monthly excuse, and indeed its a good excuse as excuses go. If you change the CPU you change in this case the chipset, which means you change the motherboard, which means you change operating system, which those 3 things together mean you blow most of your budget, plus you still need RAM and a hard disk to qualify for the Microsoft DSP pricing that keeps the cost relatively "modest". Understood. I guess you could feel the same way waiting for your first high end car. After you have say 10 cars you still have the enthusiasm but the pressure to spend is less. I still remember my first PC - my wife and I borrowed $1389 to buy an IBM PC-2 without even a floppy disk drive, with DOS 1.1 and Microsoft Assembler and IBM Pascal. I had a strong instinct to go ahead and buy the Pascal, which landed me my first job with a PC. I had to mail order the floppy, couldnt buy a 10 MB hard disk for another year (and it was $1000 from my mom, which she didnt really have but I was insistent - I "needed" it).
Always interesting to see myself from a distance, when I read this thread...
- GS
