PC gaming and PC building

[Adraps11]

Are any of you out there into gaming and building Computers?

If so, here are my specs,

PSU: Corsair RM 850 watt modular 80 plus gold
Motherboad: ASrock 990fx Killer
CPU: AMD fx 8350 overclocked to 4.8 ghz
GPU: Sapphire vapor-x R9 290 with 1200 on the core and 1525 on the memory
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 windowless
CPU liquid cooling: Thermaltake water 3.0 extreme s 240mm rad with push-pull fan config
SSD: 2 480gb Sandisk ultra 2 one for operating system, the other for games
HDD: 1 Western Digital black 1tb for backups
Monitor: Asus 1080p 144hz 1ms response time gaming Monitor

All of this hardware keeps my room nice and warm for my T lol I've actually stress tested the PC just to see if it increased the room temps and made my T uncomfortable. It didn't appear to. She's done fine with my PC in the room for a year now.

 

[kormath]

Nice build. I'm not familiar with the sapphire card. I've always used PNY or GeForce. The last system I built for gaming had the 560Ti. 32gb g.skills (sp?) Ram. 2.5 tb hdds - 1 500gb for the OS and software. 2 - 1TB for storage. I did a lot of video editing with the gaming.

I used to build all my desktop systems until I beat my pc gaming addiction. Much cheaper than buying a prebuilt.

Now I play games on the Xbox one here and there if I have any free time.

 

[Adraps11]

Sapphire works closely with AMD and makes it's OEM cards as well as the high performance gaming Gpus. I forgot to add that I have 16gb of kingston Hyper-x ddr3 at 1866 mhz. =) I'm thinking of getting 32gb, but if I do the memory controller on my fx8350 cpu may not allow me to run 32gb at 1866mhz, I may have to run them all at 1600mhz. It can depend on the quality of your chip sometimes. Some 8350s will pull off 32 gb at 1866.

That 560ti is actually still pretty decent for running current games with a mix of high and medium settings. Atleast that's what I've been able to gather off of reading PC gaming forums. I've just sold a PNY Geforce GTX 760 on ebay. It was one of the fastest factory Overclocked 760 cards and went pretty fast. The guy who bought it is happy. I've made a killing on ebay selling my recent hardware, so soon after black friday and cyber monday.

What's your cpu? Yeah it is addicting! It's like building a hotrod! MY father is a total gearhead and he passed down the gearhead gene. lol Only I express it in a different medium. It's not so much the gaming as it is the actual building that is addicting. I bought a starter kit, a case motherboard and processor combo off of newegg. I built mine up over the course of a year. It was the only way I could afford it. It has been rewarding with the amount knowledge I've gained.

 

[Adraps11]

Those prebuilts nearly always come with either a crappy power supply or a weak graphics card. You always end up having a cpu or gpu bottleneck.
Often the included power supply dies within less than a month. That is if you buy from the cheaper guys like Cyberpower. The good prebuilts come from the likes of Digital Storm and Alienware, only they cost 3,000 dollars or more most of the time.

 

[Adraps11]

I'm getting a couple noctua 120mm radiator fans today. Under water my CPU idles at about 29 degrees, which is about average for an fx8350 with liquid cooling. The noctua fans should knock down those idle temps by a few degrees. Then I can see if it'll overclock even more. The vicious cycle continues! Everyone always like to joke that an overclocked AMD system will serve as your furnace for the winter.

 

[kormath]

Those prebuilts nearly always come with either a crappy power supply or a weak graphics card. You always end up having a cpu or gpu bottleneck.
Often the included power supply dies within less than a month. That is if you buy from the cheaper guys like Cyberpower. The good prebuilts come from the likes of Digital Storm and Alienware, only they cost 3,000 dollars or more most of the time.

Yep. That's why I build mine. My last one was comparable to what Alienware had at the time but I only spent $700+ instead of the 2200 for their prebuilt.

Building your own is really simple now too. Everything is color coded or shaped plugs so you can't really plug something in wrong. Not like my first build where you had to set the board jumpers and primary and slave jumpers and most of the plugs were identical and the boards weren't clearly marked. An hour build out is average with today's hardware. Back then it was build test change a jumper or move a plug, retest and change and repeat till it was complete. Spent half a day my first build lol

 

[Adraps11]

I just spent most of the other day transferring my build to a new case. It was pretty easy, but I'm one to be picky about my cable management. I wanted to make it look like a high end prebuilt. I've went through my autumn upgrade phase, now I'm good for awhile. I just had to go through a few cases, in order to learn how to pick the right case for my high end components. The street racer case looks cool with it's flashy led lighting, but it doesn't function to well. Now I have what appears to be a corporate looking sleeper, with a minimalist aesthetic, and great cooling. No more bright led fans that light up the whole room at night, making it look like I'm at the disco. lol

 

[kormath]

lol i enjoy those cases. My last case and probably my favorite was a Roswill. It had the red LED lights that light up hte whole room. When i sold it i had trouble sleeping for a couple nights because it was too dark lol. I've always gone cheap but cool looking for my cases. Most had the cable guides and ties ready to go but some i had to do myself. On those as long as it was out of the way it was fine. I was the only one that ever looked inside the case except the few times i tried to teach my son how to upgrade or install something.

Now the few computers i built for friends then yes, i spent a good bit of time on cable management and making them look prebuilt. Work for myself i don't really care, get it done so i can use it. Work i do for others has to be top notch, even if they'll never look inside the case i know it was done well and done right for them.

 

[Adraps11]

This is the inside of my PC after some major cable management and dusting. I'm planning on replacing the front intakes with a couple 140mm noctuas, just to keep with that beautiful color scheme.They may not be the prettiest fans, but they do their job well.
I managed to overclock the fx8350 processor to 4.7ghz without the motherboard melting. lol
I found out the motherboard was only a mid-range 990fx chipset, and the board's socket temp is what kept me from achieving 5ghz on the cpu. Still 4.7ghz is a screaming overclock from 4ghz, and has this baby flying.
I belong to an overclocking site and just recently learned about serious overclocking. World Record holders guided me through the process. By looking at this you'd think it was noisy, but all I hear at load is the faint whisper of air.
Now I need to do the equivalent of this to my Tarantula's enclosure!

 

[Chubbs]

I would love to learn how to build one lmao, but I imagine it can be quite costly if you don't have every necessary part to begin with? To be totally honest, I'm not the most techy savvy person in the world, but I'm always willing to learn new things like this. It's actually rather ironic that I stumbled across this thread as I am trying to find a way to find a way to play Jaws Unleashed. I can't get it for console because there is pretty much no way to play it on 360 it seems, so my only option would be to buy an original xbox (which would be cool, and they're not too pricey, but I'm on a shoe string budget at the moment). My other option is to buy it for PC, however it runs for roughly $60+, so I'd actually be better off just buying the entire xbox and the game vs just buying the game for PC. I realize I could torrent it, but I'm also very wary of online torrents (especially video game torrents), as despite having virus protection and things like that on my laptop, I have still had issues with them involving those types of things. Also I realize that's kinda well..... illegal , so there's that Yes I realize lots of people do that, but I do exercise caution when discussing such things where anyone can see it via internet, no matter what site I'm on

 

[Adraps11]

I would love to learn how to build one lmao, but I imagine it can be quite costly if you don't have every necessary part to begin with? To be totally honest, I'm not the most techy savvy person in the world, but I'm always willing to learn new things like this. It's actually rather ironic that I stumbled across this thread as I am trying to find a way to find a way to play Jaws Unleashed. I can't get it for console because there is pretty much no way to play it on 360 it seems, so my only option would be to buy an original xbox (which would be cool, and they're not too pricey, but I'm on a shoe string budget at the moment). My other option is to buy it for PC, however it runs for roughly $60+, so I'd actually be better off just buying the entire xbox and the game vs just buying the game for PC. I realize I could torrent it, but I'm also very wary of online torrents (especially video game torrents), as despite having virus protection and things like that on my laptop, I have still had issues with them involving those types of things. Also I realize that's kinda well..... illegal , so there's that Yes I realize lots of people do that, but I do exercise caution when discussing such things where anyone can see it via internet, no matter what site I'm on

All you have to do is look up a youtube video that goes through each step in the building process. There are plenty of videos! It's like legos really. I learned by watching videos and my father had an old desktop that I took apart and reassembled 6 or 7 times, before purchasing the motherboard, power supply and other components I needed. At first the pc can be more expensive than console gaming, but if you're only planning on playing jaws unleashed, I'd just pick up an original xbox from a pawn shop. Warning: Pc building and gaming can be just as addictive as keeping tarantulas!! Some good channels to look up are Jayz2cents, tek Syndicate, Hardware Canucks, and Awesomesauce Network. I believe all the channels have build videos.

You can also go to PC part Picker.com and make your own build, recommended after you've watched a few build and cpu videos. For a decent gaming pc I'd say $ 600 is a good beginning point, the stuff that sony and Microsoft put into the ps4 and xbox one are basically cheap, off the shelf laptop parts. They didn't want to take any losses, so they cheaped out, which is why the ps4 and xbox one generation will be a short one. 4K resolution Televisions are getting cheaper, 1080p resolution has been obsolete for awhile, and these "new" consoles can barely output 1080p, with how hard developers are pushing them.

 

[Lee Sanchez]

No building but been playing Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade

 

[Adraps11]

I've been playing Darksiders, Path of Exile, and fallout 4. I'm waiting for GECK to come out, so I can really start with some heavy modding. I still play skyrim because of the sheer amount of mods available.

 

[Kymura]

I'm playing E.S.O because my kids are and we like to game together, Fallout 4 (of course, been a fallout fan since the beginning) still jump on Diablo III for some dungeon crawling and because I quite simply enjoy it.
We share our steam accounts at my house so at the moment there are 371 games on my steam between mine and my sons. Not including the non steam and console games. (I am strictly a pc gamer)

 

[Adraps11]

I'm playing E.O.S. because my kids are and we like to game together, Fallout 4 (of course, been a fallout fan since the beginning) still jump on Diablo III for some dungeon crawling and because I quite simply enjoy it.
We share our steam accounts at my house so at the moment there are 371 games on my steam between mine and my sons. Not including the non steam and console games. (I am strictly a pc gamer)

Awesome! I am PC only as well, because the current gen consoles don't really have anything I can't already get on PC. I loved playing Diablo 3 on my PS3 and am thinking of getting it on PC. You should try out Path of Exile, it's free to play, and plays just like diablo. I love the action RPG games, especially after I finish an emotional, story heavy game. It's fun to just mow down the waves of demons and undead. In my Skyrim game I'm playing as the PREDATOR! No one can see me or hear me closing in for the kill.

 

[Kymura]

I play POE on occasion

 

[Adraps11]

I play POE on occasion

Is E.O.S Echo of Soul? I might download it and see how it is. I love RPGs. I'm not into the military shooters, but if it has Sci-Fi elements or horror elements to it, I like it.

 

[Kymura]

Is E.O.S Echo of Soul? I might download it and see how it is. I love RPGs. I'm not into the military shooters, but if it has Sci-Fi elements or horror elements to it, I like it.

Well I'll be a N'wah!
Naw it was me making typos' hun
ESO , Elder Scrolls online,
Fallout and any and all Morrowind games are must haves in my family.

I have some permanent nerve damage in both arms so shooters and the like are no longer things I can play,
my reaction time is like playing on dial up with a wireless mouse , my brain says shoot and a second later my hands obey,
definitely not a working combination for shooters..love rpg games though

 

[Adraps11]

Ahhh!

Well I'll be a N'wah!
Naw it was me making typos' hun
ESO , Elder Scrolls online,
Fallout and any and all Morrowind games are must haves in my family.

I have some permanent nerve damage in both arms so shooters and the like are no longer things I can play,
my reaction time is like playing on dial up with a wireless mouse , my brain says shoot and a second later my hands obey,
definitely not a working combination for shooters..love rpg games though

Ahh! That's what I was thinking. lol. I may try out ESO when I get back to work, but for now I simply go to nexusmods.com and from there I find a ton of mods for Oblivion, Skyrim, and even morrowind. I've tried going back and playing vanilla Morrowind, but I've been to spoiled by the HD graphics. I'm waiting on a remake that is almost finished called Skywind, a remake of morrowind made with Skyrim's engine. My own reaction time has recently been effected by the new medication I'm on, I notice I die a lot more when I try to play a shooter or something that has you quickly jumping from moving platforms or knocking out combos. I rage quit Mortal Kombat, after getting owned by Sub-Zero for the hundredth time. I guess something that is classified as a heavy tranquilizer will do that to a person. If I ever manage to mess up the dose It'll be a trippy day.

 

[Adraps11]

View attachment 14508

Predator heat vision activated.