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Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:40 am
by Chris76
My old system is due for an upgrade/replacement. I mainly use my machine for office work, but I do play the occasional game.
Truth be told the reason I don't play more games is probably that they don't perform all that well on my old system :)

Case: Corsair Carbide 200R
CPU: Core i5 3570
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H
RAM: 8 Gig Kingston (or other)
Cooler: Cooler Master 212 Evo
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon HD 7750 or HD 7770 OC
PSU: For the time being I'll stick with my current Corsair VX450W
HDD: The jury is still in but SSD seems tempting
A couple questions:

What sort of gaming can I get away with with the above mentioned GPU's?
- Games like Starcraft 2, Max Payne 3, L.A. Noire etc.
- Full HD is not a requirement.

How loud/silent is the Gigabyte GPU cooler?

Is an SSD drive worth it performance wise as a system drive?

Is an SSD drive worth it for games performance?

I hear bad things about SSD reliability. Is that a real concern?

Any comments and/or advice greatly appreciated.

- Chris

Re: Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 6:49 am
by edh
Welcome to SPCR!
Chris76 wrote:Case: Corsair Carbide 200R
As you're going for a MicroATX motherboard, a MicroATX case would make more sense as with the components you're talking about, the extra space will be wasted. Consider the Fractal Define Mini.
Chris76 wrote:Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H
If silence is important and you want quiet fan control, Asus does have better fan control built in.
Chris76 wrote:RAM: 8 Gig Kingston (or other)
OK, I wouldn't be too swayed by over hyped RAM coolers on some 'gaming' RAM. They also get in the way of CPU coolers on some motherboards.
Chris76 wrote:GPU: Gigabyte Radeon HD 7750 or HD 7770 OC
Set on Radeon then? Just interested to know if NVIDIA is absolutely out for you or not.
Chris76 wrote:Is an SSD drive worth it performance wise as a system drive?
Yes and for silence too. SSD is much more worthwhile than any case expenditure.
Chris76 wrote:Is an SSD drive worth it for games performance?
Depends on the game. A lot of games once they're loaded are very light on disk activity unless you're out of memory and things start paging.
Chris76 wrote:I hear bad things about SSD reliability. Is that a real concern?
Maybe there isn't so much operational experience with them as with hard disks but if they were unreliable, I think there would be a lot of threads here about them failing.

Re: Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 9:54 am
by CA_Steve
What's your monitor resolution?

Here's an old Techspot benchmark for Starcraft II. Don't know about the Heart of the Swarm upgrade impact...typically Blizzard games aren't very GPU demanding. At 1080p, you should see 40-60fps for the 7750 at high quality.

Max Payne 3 is more gpu intensive and you'd need a 7850 class card to see 60fps.

Don't know about LA Noire.

Consider the Nvidia comparable class cards, too. Asus and MSI both make decent cards. There are others as well. Additional reading.

+1 on SSD. An SSD used for OS/apps will make for snappy boot/game loading/zone loading. You can often find the Samsung 120GB 840 for ~$90.

Re: Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2013 11:05 pm
by Chris76
Thanks for the input :)

To answer a few of your comments....

I will consider Asus for both motherboard and GPU. Bad luck with the brand in the past has kept me away from Asus on the last couple builds.

I'm not set on Radeon. NVIDIA is definately an option. The cards listed were more an indication of the price range I was considering. But from CA_Steve's reply it seems it would make sense to pay for a bit extra performance, especially since I rarely upgrade my PC's once I've built them.

I will consider an HD7850 og GTX660 instead. That's probably the most I'm willing to spend on graphics. How quiet are the stock coolers on those cards?

As far as SSD's... would you recommend using that for installing games as well? Seems to me you'd be fast out of space with a 120 gig drive. If I remember correctly Max Payne 3 is a 35 gig installation.

Re: Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 6:17 am
by kuzzia
According to this techspot review, the Radeon 7850 2 GB (normal quality, 1920x1200) achieves 69 fps.

http://www.techspot.com/review/537-max- ... page3.html

The Radeon 7770 only achieves 43 fps. The Radeon 7850 definitely hits the sweet spot IMO. You can get the 1 GB version and save some money.

Is an SSD worth it? The biggest yes ever! I don't think any person has ever regretted buying an SSD unless it failed at some point. Many games, however, are not bottlenecked by a regular hard drive at all besides the loading time of course.

Regarding the SSD reliability: As long as you pick an SSD that has been known to be reliable then you should be fine. Samsung, Intel and Crucial make SSD's that I consider reliable. Sandforce-driven SSD's have had some severe issues but the latest Sandforce controller came into market in 2011. I hope they've fixed the issues by now.

Oh, and why spend so much money on the CPU? Do you absolutely need a high-end quad core for office work and (casual) gaming?

Re: Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 7:27 am
by CA_Steve
I'd still go for the quad core. Max Payne uses all four cores, and while Blizzard games tend not to, others do. Plus, even if the game only uses two cores, other apps are running in the background music, VOIP, etc).

FYI: AMD just announced the HD 7790 (performance between the 7770 and 7850). Availability next month. (I'd still go for 7850 /GTX 660 class for 1080p). If you mean the AMD or Nvidia cooler when you mean stock - they fare from ok to lousy. If you mean the coolers that come on mfgr designed cards - they go from awesome to lousy and vary from card to card. So, a great cooler on one, say, Gigabyte card, doesn't mean every card from Gigabyte is great. :) Pour through the reviews I posted earlier. In general, MSI and ASUS seem to be the most consistant.

SSD: I have a 128GB drive overprovisioned down to 119GB. It has the OS and all non-gaming apps on it, plus whatever one game I'm playing the hell out of at the time (currently GW2 @ 15GB). The others and all the multimedia stuff are on the HDD and if a new game comes along, I'll put it on the SSD....and migrate the other to the HDD. I have ~60GB free. You can probably fit a couple. Or, you can go large and get a 250GB class drive. :)

Re: Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 10:40 am
by Chris76
I just checked the local prices on the 7790 and they cost the same as the 7850 so that's an easy decision.

The money saved on getting for example a Core i3 instead of a Core i5 is around 40$, so I think I'll still stick with the i5.

Guess a lot of this comes down to price vs. performance and for some reason I always seem to end up spending a lot more than I had initially thought I would :)

Re: Casual gaming workstation

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 2:53 am
by HellDiverUK
The machine in my signature plays games pretty well, and is pretty quiet. I use Asus' FanXpert+ to keep the machine pretty quiet - it's almost silent at idle, and when I'm playing (EVE Online at 1080p) the only real noise is from the Asus HD7770.

I like Asus boards, and the P8Z77-M Pro I have has Asus' EPU thing which helps keep things quieter.

The case's fans stop at idle, the CPU has no fan on it (Arctic Freezer 7 Pro heatsink), and only a SSD. The OCZ 500W PSU is really quiet as well. The Asus GPU's fans also stop at idle, again controlled by Asus' software.