Holiday 2010 System Builder's Guide
by AnandTech Staff, edited by Jarred Walton on November 19, 2010 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
- Systems
- Holiday 2010
| Ryan's High-End Gaming System | ||
| Hardware | Component | Price |
| Processor |
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 45nm (Quad-core + HTT, 3.06 to 3.33 GHz, 8MB L3, 130W) |
$295 |
| Motherboard | EVGA X58 SLI3 (Intel X58+ICH10R, LGA1366) | $210 |
| Video | EVGA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB | $510 |
| Alt. Video | Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 2GB | $460 |
| Memory |
Corsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600 (TR3X6G1600C9) |
$120 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black 1.5TB (WD1501FASS) | $120 |
| SSD | OCZ Vertex 2 120GB (-$30 MIR) | $205 |
| Optical Drive | LG 22X DVDRW (GH22LS50) | $17 |
| Sound Card | Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium | $80 |
| Case | Antec P183 Black Aluminum | $155 |
| HSF | Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme | $65 |
| Power Supply | Antec TPQ-850 (850W) | $150 |
| Monitor | HP ZR24W (24" 1920x1200, S-IPS) | $400 |
| Alt. Monitor | ASUS VG236H w/3D Kit (23" 1920x1080 TN, 120Hz) | $475 |
| Total System Price (Range based on GPU and LCD choice) | $2277-$2402 | |
Although PC gaming can actually be quite cheap these days (see our midrange systems from Jarred and Vivek), for the hardcore among us a system built with a GTX 460/6850 class video card isn't going to cut it when it comes getting the most out of the PC's graphical advantage. For that you need to turn to something faster, better, more expandable, and ideally not much louder. To accomplish this goal I went to work on piecing together a system for around $2000 that should be able to tackle everything short of Crysis on Enthusiast settings.
The centerpiece of the system is one of NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 580s, which currently holds the mantle as the fastest single-GPU card on the market. Being NVIDIA's highest-end video card the GTX 580 is by far the most expensive component in our system, but it does a great job of mixing performance, image quality (transparency AA), and reasonable amounts of noise. As all the GTX 580s on the market are reference cards, the choice comes down to the manufacturer and whether you want a factory overclocked model or not; in this case I went with EVGA based on availability, their overclocking tools, and their lifetime warranty.
An alternative here is the Radeon HD 5970, which ends up being cheaper. The performance is actually better than the GTX 580 so long as we're not VRAM limited, but the dual-GPU card means we give up some flexibility as 4-way CF scaling is limited at best, and the 5970 is a louder card than the GTX 580. However this option is a better choice if you want to take advantage of AMD's Eyefinity system in combination with 3 cheap 1080P TN monitors.
With our GTX 580 in hand we want to pair it with a fast processor and an SLI-capable motherboard to leave future expansion on the table. For this I'm going with an X58 board, specifically EVGA's X58 SLI3 as it offers strong overclocking abilities and is one of the cheapest SLI capable X58 boards on the market. EVGA has also equipped it with third-party USB3.0 and SATA 6Gbps controllers, giving the board plenty of capability in the future with new generation USB and SATA devices.
For the processor I chose Intel's cheapest X58 Core i7, the Core i7 950. At 3.06GHz base and a 3.33GHz Turbo mode it's already fairly fast, but at this stage in the game Bloomfield overclocking is dead simple. Combined with the massive Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme cooler, there's a very good chance of hitting 4GHz (or more!) on the 950, which should be plenty for even the most stubborn single-threaded game. Just be sure to install the Tuniq Tower on the motherboard before installing the motherboard in the case.
Since this is primarily an overclocked gaming system, I selected Corsair's XMS3 6GB triple-channel DDR3 1600 kit. The CAS9 latency at DDR3 1600 speeds is nothing to write home about, but gaming is rarely latency sensitive and the high speeds of the RAM will be very helpful for overclocking. 12GB is also an option here at a higher price, but at the moment only a couple of games are capable of using more than 2GB/4GB of RAM since few games come with a 64-bit executable.
As for storage, a high-end system deserves flexibility and speed, so I used both an SSD and a traditional hard drive; unfortunately, the size of modern games makes an all-SSD setup impractical. There are a number of fast SDDs on the market, and while you don't necessarily need something that's great at random reads and writes OCZ's SandForce-1200 based Vertex 2 120GB is no slouch at that or at sustained reads and writes; if nothing else it will keep Windows very responsive. Furthermore at 120GB it's big enough for at least a few games, making it perfect for MMOs and their need to aggressively pre-cache and log everything. For more traditional games that don't hit up local storage between levels, the 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Black is plenty fast and big enough to hold more games than most people could possibly play at once.
Rounding things out I decided to go with a discrete sound card rather than relying on onboard sound. Creative's X-Fi line is still the premiere line of soundcards for gaming, as they bring the audio quality benefits of a discrete sound card with support for OpenAL for modern games and support for EAX for older games. As for external storage just about any DVD burner will do; I'm using a 22X Samsung but there are a number of alternatives. Blu-ray readers are coming down in price, but at this point there's no momentum to distribute games for PCs on Blu-ray discs.
Housing all of this will be Antec's P183, the latest in Antec's noise-optimized P18x series of cases. Ideally we don't want to make any compromises, and a fast system doesn't need to be noisy. Along with the quieter GTX 580 and the Tuniq Tower 120, the Antec P183 is the third and final piece of the puzzle. The triple-layer panels will deaden what sound comes from the CPU and GPU coolers, and the 120mm fans will provide enough airflow to keep things cool. As a mid-tower case it's not particularly huge so I'd suggest removing the upper hard drive bay to give the video card(s) extra room, and consider a 120mm fan mounted behind that if you ever expand to two cards. Antec does build the bigger P193, but this shouldn't be necessary with external exhaust cards like the GTX 580.
In order to power our existing system and to have enough extra power for SLI in the future you'll need a fairly strong PSU, and the Antec TPQ-850 is exactly that; it's also the 850W version of the PSU we use in our GPU test bed. The TPQ-850 balances our power needs against the P183's longer cable requirements (since the PSU is bottom-mounted), and the half-modular cable system means there's no need to clutter the case with extra cables unless they become necessary.
Finally, in a break from most of the other systems, I'm also going to throw in a monitor with this collection. It's my belief that a good monitor should outlast the rest of the system, so it's better to buy something good now rather than something cheap now and something still-cheap later. While this is a high-end system, 30" monitors are in a price category of their own so that leaves us with 24" LCDs. Our choice here is HP's ZR24W, a 24" 1920x1200 S-IPS monitor. It has fast pixel response times that are good for gaming without needing to compromise on the color palate or color accuracy at an angle. However since our default card here is an NVIDIA card, 3D Vision is also an option; if that piques your interest we'd go with ASUS' top of the line VG236H, which is a 23" 120Hz TN panel. The overall image quality isn't as good as the ZR24W, but a 120Hz monitor can be worth it if you like 3D Vision, or just like the 120Hz experience in general. The VG236H also includes an NVIDIA 3D Vision kit, so it won't be necessary to buy that separately.
My high-end gaming build ultimately comes out to just shy of $2000 without the monitor, or $2400-$2500 with it. Peripherals should add another $50-$200 depending on whether you're going to buy anything on top of the mouse and keyboard, such as gamepads, steering wheels, and joysticks.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
112 Comments
View All Comments
Rumpelstiltstein - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
These are all decent builds for the different price points, but I have a few suggestions for future system guides. Before I say anything else, I would just like to note that I am a big fan of your site, it is always a source of some great journalism and analysis of PC Hardware. Keep up the good work. However, when a PC Hardware site puts up a system guide, I like to use it as a source to send friends to that are thinking of building a new PC and I like to compare between different guides before deciding who to send them to. This is an area that I think you could improve in. I personally think that if you changed your approach to these guides a little bit, it would help out immensely. My model for comparison, since I have found it to be the most comprehensive guide out there is The Tech Report's system guide:http://techreport.com/articles.x/19868
This may or may not be the best example as recently released hardware has changed the game up a lot, but I think some of their guides in the past were pretty spot-on. Anyway, what these guys do is create a few budget tiers and all of the TR Staff debate over the best choice for each part, rather than assigning one person per build. I'm sure this could easily be accomplished by your editors. Sure, it might bring up some heated arguments, but I have no doubt that the final choices will be better overall. I understand that you have more builds here for a wider range of purposes, and that's great, but you can adapt this approach to accomplish the same goal. Even TR often has an alternate build every few months for a different audience. In this last one, they came up with a highly upgradable nettop-like system that is a good recommendation for those who would otherwise go out and purchase a system-in-a-box from the likes of HP or Dell.
Another thing they do is provide links to newegg, since newegg is a good place to determine the price you would likely pay for the overall build and it provides good user feedback for people to look at as well as a great wishlist system for people to plan their purchase with, whether or not they choose to do their final purchases through newegg. This is not as essential a feature, but it does help. Granted, they do have newegg's sponsorship, so they have more incentive to do this. But they have been doing it even before newegg took notice and decided to give their thumbs up.
They also put peripherals, accessories, and extras under a separate topic since these things really are very much user preference and don't necessarily depend on the system they are using them with. And of course, at the end they provide a conclusion to reflect on the changes and how the industry as a whole has changed since their last system guide to lead them to the hardware picks they have chosen for each build.
Again, I'm not suggesting you try to adhere to the formula used by another site, but there are things that can be learned by reading them. I think if you made a few of these changes, particularly the collaboration of all your staff on each build, you will provide a much better guide that more people will be apt to follow rather than just look at, have a chuckle, and do whatever they were gonna do before reading it. You will likely have less members crying "that is a horrible choice for that build, this would be better." Granted that particular person can make all the changes he wants to suit his personal preference, but they could just build their system from the ground up which would render such a guide useless. You might point a few in a better direction with a guide like this, but more knowledgeable people would likely take it with a grain of salt. I think with a better approach you can hit a larger audience with your guides. It's all about helping people make a good investment in their systems and pick good quality parts with a nice price/performance ratio within the limits of a given budget.
Iketh - Saturday, November 20, 2010 - link
Agree 100% with this... when i read the title, and then read who the author was (Anandtech staff), I thought i was gonna read about "the best of now" systems which all the authors collaborated... i was rather disappointed when i saw otherwise :(it IS fun to read about each author's particular taste (and hence get to know them a little better), but you can better demonstrate this if each system is chosen as a team, and then break down, in the explanation, what one author was fighting for in a particular build over another and the ensuing carnage :)... THAT would be fun to read, as well as explaining why eventually one part was chosen over the other
benrico - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
This is a 32 nm chip... Improperly identified in the mid HTPC build.ERDoc - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
The one system I'm waiting to build is a large NAS. Something with 20 drives, RAID 6, Blu-ray disc player for backing up my content and serving to multiple HTPCs. WHS Vail or Server 2008 would likely be the OS of choice. 2 x SSD RAID 0 as system drives. Now that 3TB drives are available (soon), are there any server boards will support SATA 6Gb/s, 3 TB drives? I was thinking a Norco 4220 as the case. Any other suggestions? Same for for processors (will be transcoding on the fly, 8 to 10 separate output streams True HD)?Dual GB ethernet at minimum. There are companies such as Vidabox selling systems like this for $10k to $15k. I think I could build a better system (with 2 TB drives) for less
Any other suggestions?
hglazm - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
No. Stop right here. Do not, DO NOT do these. They are never unbiased, they are rarely good to suit users needs, they direct a tremendous amount of consumers to products they dont need or are too underpowered for, and they will end up degrading you into the likes of TomsHardware.Just stay the fuck away from these, guys. Don't do it.
hglazm - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
Also, what the hell is up with recommend the Antec BP series?Stuffs a load of crap.
JarredWalton - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
What are you talking about? This was a Holiday Buyer's Guide and we figured it would be nice to give everyone a voice for a change of pace. This is not intended to be the way we do buyers' guides going forwards, but instead is a large article that covers a huge swath of possibilities in time for Black Friday.As for the BP550, can you point me to any good review that shows it's a "load of crap"? The word on the street is that it's a decent Delta-built power supply. Is it the best PSU out there? No, but if you can pick it up for $35 with the current $30 combo at Newegg with the Antec Three Hundred case, it's a heck of a lot better than most other $35 PSUs. Best info I can find suggests there's nothing wrong with the BP550 (unless you're anti-Antec I suppose).
Bad_Wolf_Online - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
I have a dual x5680 system, Brian asked for pictures and benchmarks how do I contact him?http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4974831/Cinebench_R11.5%28...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4974831/Windows_Task_Manag...
Ryan Smith - Saturday, November 20, 2010 - link
brian@ you know the rest.Hrel - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
I think this is the best bang for you buck, period.https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/MySavedWishDeta...