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End User wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

For storage, here's the thing- SSD prices will continue to plummet over time, and storage drives are stupid easy to upgrade.

That is why I suggested getting a motherboard that supports SSD caching. You can add cheaper/bigger SSDs over time to the cache setup.

The performance here is inconsistent- it'd be fine if an SSD was used to cache an HDD in addition to an SSD for OS/Apps/Primary games, sure.

End User wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

I say 6 cores with HT, 16GB of RAM, and at least one high-end GPU with 8GB of VRAM or more, preferably two. That baseline is well within the stated budget and meets the listed requirements.

And for that system it would be a crime to have OS/games/apps running from a HDD.

But when have I (or anyone else) suggested that? A ~250GB SSD and a 3TB HDD are what I consider to be the baseline for storage. Enough room on the SSD for the OS, main apps, and five to seven large games (or many, many smaller ones), along with what'd feel like near infinite backup storage. Install all games to the HDD, then move over the ones played often enough to the SSD; move them back if/when you're done. Simple right?

Just make sure that user directories get moved to the HDD to prevent a stray download or file dropped on the desktop from overloading the SSD, and of course if there's more room in the budget upgrade to a ~500GB SSD. That can be figured out later; by purchase time, we can expect the storage landscape to have changed a bit.

Vonhitz wrote:

I Don't have a ton of games. ( Even though I've been using STEAM more often, and downloading/trying out greenlit games, ect.) I don't mind taking the time to install/uninstall games I don't use frequently. Usually I'm only playing 2 or 3 max on the daily. I'm guessing People tend to move games back and forth from their mechanical HD to their SDD when in use?

There is no need to uninstall games or move games/data back and forth between HDD/SSD. Buy a motherboard that supports SSD caching. Your most frequently accessed apps/data will be cached to the SSD. If you want to increase the size of the SSD cache later on just plug in another SSD. All you will see under Windows is the HDD but the OS and frequently used apps/data will be read from the SSD. The cache setup learns as it goes so it is constantly caches your most frequently used stuff.

SSD caching by Intel

ASUS has their own - ASUS SSD Caching II. I have that in my P8Z77-V PREMIUM. The setup was painless and the performance was excellent.

I also have SSD caching in my Mac mini (Fusion Drive) - disk performance is excellent for data that is cached and there is no need to worry about running out of space on the SSD as the data is managed automatically.

Airmantharp wrote:

End User wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

For storage, here's the thing- SSD prices will continue to plummet over time, and storage drives are stupid easy to upgrade.

That is why I suggested getting a motherboard that supports SSD caching. You can add cheaper/bigger SSDs over time to the cache setup.

The performance here is inconsistent- it'd be fine if an SSD was used to cache an HDD in addition to an SSD for OS/Apps/Primary games, sure.

Hmmm. Your suggestion sounds familiar:

End User wrote:

As Vonhitz has a healthy budget for this build here is my final, over the top, suggestion:

- 1TB SSD boot/apps/games drive
- big HDD + SSD(cache) for storage

Now you can have it all. A dedicated boot/apps/games SSD and secondary storage handled by a big HDD with SSD caching to keep it nice and fast. Brilliant!

I'm so glad we finally agreed upon something.

Airmantharp wrote:

I think that games that make great use of these new consoles will need even more VRAM on the desktop- remember that we're running full operating systems over here, and also that developers are well aware that desktops can easily be three to five times as fast as the incoming consoles today; the consoles are already extremely dated, save the one aspect of available VRAM. Expect developers to push the PCs further, but outright expect them to make all of the game assets available across all platforms- and that means using 4GB-6GB for graphics. I'm considering 6GB to be the minimum, and 8GB or more, per GPU, to be preferable.

For CPUs- same thing applies. BF3 runs on these crappy current generation consoles, albeit with limitations, but essentially the same basic game scales up to chocking the fastest systems we can build today? And now we're going to give these consoles 10 times the power or more, and expect the situation for the PC versions to not budge at all? Think about it.

If the OP were looking for a 'standard' gaming machine, with the intention to upgrade over time along with a modest initial budget, sure- I'd agree wholeheartedly. But with a ~$3500 budget? I aim to prepare him as best as possible for the most stringent games being released in the next couple of years. Do you think cutting off cores for $300 or buying a GPU or GPUs with around half the usable memory that these consoles will be making available to games for graphics is good advice? Or that he should go for the overpriced Titan (seriously, GPU's with the same die size once went for $200, and memory was more expensive then), just to get a meager 6GB of VRAM?

I say 6 cores with HT, 16GB of RAM, and at least one high-end GPU with 8GB of VRAM or more, preferably two. That baseline is well within the stated budget and meets the listed requirements.

Oh there's no doubt games will be more demanding, but my point is that if you want to build something "future-proof" (as much as we hate those words in this forum), then you need to put every dollar where it's gonna matter the most, or else it's just a waste of money. What you're suggesting is to basically make a PS4-zilla under the assumption that in the long term there's going to be much benefit in doing so. The console generation is predicted to be the longest we've seen, perhaps a decade. There's a decent chance OP will want to upgrade 3-5 years from now, and if he does then he'll be glad that he didn't spend as much on the parts that will be replaced. Better to spend $250 now and $250 later on a chip that is twice as fast than to spend $1000 now on something completely overkill that will be as fast as that future $250 chip, only with less features/driver support and more power draw/heat/noise. In this situation, you're trying to convince the OP to get something that's not only overkill for his needs, but he won't even notice the difference, instead clinging to hope that it'll pay off when the industry has evolved. By the time it does evolve, there'll be a new set of hardware that will work even better. If I'm gonna spend that kind of money now, I'd at least want to see the benefits right now. Best way to do that is to put the extra money towards graphics. (Even better would be to buy silver, wait a few years, and sell it for a new GPU)

EDIT: Sorry if I'm incoherent right now, running on no sleep.

End User wrote:

Buy a motherboard that supports SSD caching. Your most frequently accessed apps/data will be cached to the SSD. The cache setup learns as it goes so it is constantly caches your most frequently used stuff. The setup was painless and the performance was excellent.

You are aware that those caching schemes are still much slower than a straight SSD in normal use, aren't you?

JustAnEngineer wrote:

End User wrote:

Buy a motherboard that supports SSD caching. Your most frequently accessed apps/data will be cached to the SSD. The cache setup learns as it goes so it is constantly caches your most frequently used stuff. The setup was painless and the performance was excellent.

You are aware that those caching schemes are still much slower than a straight SSD in normal use, aren't you?

Just get 128 GB of NVRAM and turn 120 of it into a RAMdisk.

Airmantharp wrote:

JustAnEngineer wrote:

DeadOfKnight wrote:

Hardware-accelerated physics is going to take gaming to a whole new level.

But it has.

JAE's joking, but I'd actually expect developers to start integrating more physics and AI into their games now that the resources are available across the board.

TressFX is an example of GPU-accelerated physics done the right way. Crystal Dynamics (with help from AMD) wrote this feature into their entertaining game using DirectCompute, so it just works, regardless of which brands of graphics card and CPU you've got, without using a proprietary scheme that some evil marketing geniuses have crippled to run poorly on competing hardware.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

TressFX is an example of GPU-accelerated physics done the right way. Crystal Dynamics (with help from AMD) wrote this feature into their entertaining game using DirectCompute, so it just works, regardless of which brands of graphics card and CPU you've got, without using a proprietary scheme that some evil marketing geniuses have crippled to run poorly on competing hardware.

That was a guess

I figured that responding with TressFX- which accelerates hair- to DOK's comment 'Hardware-accelerated physics is going to take gaming to a whole new level' was a bit of a joke; does GPU-accelerated hair constitute a whole new level of gaming?

But I also agree, and I'm happy you mentioned TressFX, as you're absolutely right- it's mostly hardware agnostic, unlike PhysX was after Nvidia locked everyone out. We remember it running great on AMD GPU's up till that point. And I also agree that accelerated physics across the board actually will lead to a whole new level of gaming, which is now entirely possible as TressFX proves. We can't know what developers will do with that capability, but we can postulate that giving developers the ability to run physics routines on the GPU with assets used for rendering could lead to some very exciting developments. My example would be the use of GPU-accelerated physics to constrain AI routines so that they're just as limited as the player character is. We know that it's easy to make AI that's too easy or too hard, but AI that's 'just right' is very difficult, as AI routines generally have to 'cheat' in order to function at all.

Airmantharp wrote:

JustAnEngineer wrote:

TressFX is an example of GPU-accelerated physics done the right way. Crystal Dynamics (with help from AMD) wrote this feature into their entertaining game using DirectCompute, so it just works, regardless of which brands of graphics card and CPU you've got, without using a proprietary scheme that some evil marketing geniuses have crippled to run poorly on competing hardware.

That was a guess

I figured that responding with TressFX- which accelerates hair- to DOK's comment 'Hardware-accelerated physics is going to take gaming to a whole new level' was a bit of a joke; does GPU-accelerated hair constitute a whole new level of gaming?

But I also agree, and I'm happy you mentioned TressFX, as you're absolutely right- it's mostly hardware agnostic, unlike PhysX was after Nvidia locked everyone out. We remember it running great on AMD GPU's up till that point. And I also agree that accelerated physics across the board actually will lead to a whole new level of gaming, which is now entirely possible as TressFX proves. We can't know what developers will do with that capability, but we can postulate that giving developers the ability to run physics routines on the GPU with assets used for rendering could lead to some very exciting developments. My example would be the use of GPU-accelerated physics to constrain AI routines so that they're just as limited as the player character is. We know that it's easy to make AI that's too easy or too hard, but AI that's 'just right' is very difficult, as AI routines generally have to 'cheat' in order to function at all.

Still, the stuff that benefits most from lots of parallel processing is going to be a better fit for running on the GPU. I mean, I know there is a benefit to having more CPU cores as well, but even games that currently take advantage of more cores don't really run any better on a 6 core than they do on a 4 core, even when looking at minimum frame rates. They simply don't run any core at full load to necessitate splitting code off onto its own core. I'm not saying it can't or won't be done, but as long as we keep pumping up the visuals, we're still going to see our games bottlenecked by the GPU, ESPECIALLY if we've got ourselves a huge 8 GB frame buffer to play with. You already know where we're headed, and it's going to benefit much more from stronger GPUs than it will from more CPU parallelism. Sure, 8 Jaguar cores is going to force devs to code more efficiently for multiple threads and as such multiple cores may not go to waste, but I don't think that necessarily means PC gamers will see much better performance with more CPU cores. A fast quad core is still more than sufficient to beat out an 8-core Kabini, which is exactly what this is. Like I said, maybe HT will become more attractive, but that's it.

On second thought, maybe you are better off with a 6 core, lol. There's a lot of stuff that runs in the background on a PC that can get in the way.

If you're like me then you'll just turn that crap off though. That might change when I get a second monitor and can actually multitask while gaming.

DeadOfKnight wrote:

On second thought, maybe you are better off with a 6 core, lol. There's a lot of stuff that runs in the background on a PC that can get in the way.

If you're like me then you'll just turn that crap off though. That might change when I get a second monitor and can actually multitask while gaming.

I leave Security Essentials, Ventrilo, about 20 Chrome tabs, various utilities for input devices and other stuff (system tray), and maybe even Lightroom (only uses RAM when I'm in game, which I have) or office apps open when I game.

But I see two things- one, my 4.5GHz 2500k still isn't fast enough, even to keep BF3 smooth. It works 'great', but it isn't perfect, and BF3 is old with pretty dated visuals for a shooter. Look at anything close up and you'll see the hard limit on the level of detail in that game; expect BF4 to exceed BF3 visually by leaps and bounds, along with any other AAA title built on Frostbite 3. Two, while the clockspeed itself is serviceable, those four cores get pegged entirely too often- as do the four physical cores and four virtual cores on the i7-3610QM in my gaming laptop- it runs at 3.0GHz.

And we're just running games that were developed to also run on the two seriously under-powered consoles on the market today! They have CPU's that make a five year-old Core 2 Duo look blazingly fast (they were rated at about twice the speed of the single-core Celeron in the first Xbox), slow GPUs that struggle with 720p when pushing any real detail, and had 512MB of RAM total!

And yet these same games are somehow taxing our current systems. Personally, I think that a six-core i7 won't actually be fast enough in a year, and that the only single GPU that has a chance is the Titan; and only because it combines a competent GPU with 6GB of RAM.

I think that we'll be both CPU limited again and GPU limited, as games ship with ten times the graphical assets as they have been, and as we start moving towards high-density displays.

So, for me, that means three things-
1. My next CPU will most likely be a six-core i7, supposing a reasonably-priced eight-core i7 doesn't enter the market. This isn't just for gaming, though- it'll also be feeding my photography habit. Would you believe that Photoshop and Lightroom are even more intensive than current games?
2. My next GPU(s) will have at least 8GB per GPU. At least. I want to be able to turn all of the details up without chocking on graphics memory.
3. My next monitor(s) will match or exceed the PPI of 4k at 30". But it'll/they'll probably just be 4k 30". I'll just hang my current 30" above it.

Now, I'm mostly happy with my setup as it is. I wish I'd waited for the 4GB versions of the GTX670's, and I'd like Ivy or Haswell so I could run PCIe 3.0 to the cards, as they're running at PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 right now, which is a quarter of their max interconnect bandwidth. I don't think it makes a difference yet, but I'm willing to bet my system will be chocking with next-gen games above 'medium'.

Can you see why I'm making these particular recommendations? I'm definitely prepared to eat my own words. And I'll be doing my upgrade for less than $3500 .

Airmantharp wrote:

I leave Security Essentials, Ventrilo, about 20 Chrome tabs, various utilities for input devices and other stuff (system tray), and maybe even Lightroom (only uses RAM when I'm in game, which I have) or office apps open when I game.

But I see two things- one, my 4.5GHz 2500k still isn't fast enough, even to keep BF3 smooth. It works 'great', but it isn't perfect, and BF3 is old with pretty dated visuals for a shooter. Look at anything close up and you'll see the hard limit on the level of detail in that game; expect BF4 to exceed BF3 visually by leaps and bounds, along with any other AAA title built on Frostbite 3. Two, while the clockspeed itself is serviceable, those four cores get pegged entirely too often- as do the four physical cores and four virtual cores on the i7-3610QM in my gaming laptop- it runs at 3.0GHz.

And we're just running games that were developed to also run on the two seriously under-powered consoles on the market today! They have CPU's that make a five year-old Core 2 Duo look blazingly fast (they were rated at about twice the speed of the single-core Celeron in the first Xbox), slow GPUs that struggle with 720p when pushing any real detail, and had 512MB of RAM total!

And yet these same games are somehow taxing our current systems. Personally, I think that a six-core i7 won't actually be fast enough in a year, and that the only single GPU that has a chance is the Titan; and only because it combines a competent GPU with 6GB of RAM.

I think that we'll be both CPU limited again and GPU limited, as games ship with ten times the graphical assets as they have been, and as we start moving towards high-density displays.

So, for me, that means three things-
1. My next CPU will most likely be a six-core i7, supposing a reasonably-priced eight-core i7 doesn't enter the market. This isn't just for gaming, though- it'll also be feeding my photography habit. Would you believe that Photoshop and Lightroom are even more intensive than current games?
2. My next GPU(s) will have at least 8GB per GPU. At least. I want to be able to turn all of the details up without chocking on graphics memory.
3. My next monitor(s) will match or exceed the PPI of 4k at 30". But it'll/they'll probably just be 4k 30". I'll just hang my current 30" above it.

Now, I'm mostly happy with my setup as it is. I wish I'd waited for the 4GB versions of the GTX670's, and I'd like Ivy or Haswell so I could run PCIe 3.0 to the cards, as they're running at PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 right now, which is a quarter of their max interconnect bandwidth. I don't think it makes a difference yet, but I'm willing to bet my system will be chocking with next-gen games above 'medium'.

Can you see why I'm making these particular recommendations? I'm definitely prepared to eat my own words. And I'll be doing my upgrade for less than $3500 .

I still don't see why we'd be CPU limited. I mean, we are CPU limited already but throwing more cores at the problem hasn't been solving the issue and it's been mitigated by upping visual quality until the CPU isn't the one holding things back as much as the GPU is. The only things that are going to be CPU limited are games that track hundreds of moving parts at a time, which the consoles will still be holding us back on because they're going to want to make a consistent experience on all platforms and the consoles still won't have the power to do this, your i5-2500 still blows that CPU away. We currently see such CPU limitations in massive online and strategy games, ones that call PC gaming home and really won't be affected at all by the new console launches.

I'll give you that your example, BF3, is a very valid example of the type of game that might suffer in a few years on today's systems, but that's only because it's one of the very few games that actually does have an extremely inconsistent experience between PC and consoles. BF3 on PC is not a console game and really wasn't held back at all by the consoles, they intended for it to be a different game. PC Games will continue to push the latest in PC hardware. My point is that attempting to match or exceed every specification on the next-gen consoles, including core count and RAM, isn't really the correct way to go, at least not yet. True PC games, not cross-platform money grabs, are still going to be what stresses your hardware the most. In fact, I think we can expect even the worst optimized ports to actually run BETTER this time around due to similar architecture. However, on PC, you can bet it'll be GPU limited and probably not by VRAM yet, although I can see a strong case for wanting more for the more distant future, probably around the time you'd want an upgrade if you bought a new card today anyway.

I do think, however, that these consoles will at least force developers to learn how best to make use of available resources such as more cores and more RAM (maybe enough to get them to finally start making them all 64 bit) and that those added resources may not go to waste, but at the very most, after several years they will become the baseline for such native PC titles that don't care about consistency on the consoles. However, there's no telling exactly which shape that will take. It's possible that that baseline will want 8 physical cores and not 8 virtual cores so getting that 6-core now is still not future-proof. It could be that they're still stuck on 32-bit and half of that VRAM was wasted.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

End User wrote:

Buy a motherboard that supports SSD caching. Your most frequently accessed apps/data will be cached to the SSD. The cache setup learns as it goes so it is constantly caches your most frequently used stuff. The setup was painless and the performance was excellent.

You are aware that those caching schemes are still much slower than a straight SSD in normal use, aren't you?

I based my recommendation on my real world experience. When I built my gaming rig last year (based on a P8Z77-V PREMIUM) I started with small SSDs for boot and primary apps/games. I got tired of manual swapping games from SSD to HDD and back again so I switched over to SSD caching. The ability of the SSD caching solution to learn which data should be cached was very impressive and there was no noticeable difference in performance between the cached solution and that of SSD only solution after the system cached the frequently used data. A big advantage with SSD caching is that you can add cheap SSDs over time to increase the size of the cache. Ultimately I switched to a single SSD solution as I found a drive that could hold everything. The HDD was removed from the system.

I still use SSD caching in my primary desktop. Comparing it to my identically spec'ed HTPC equipped with just a HDD the difference is night and day as far as boot/app performance is concerned.

As a stepping stone to SSD only primary storage, SSD caching is an excellent option and one I highly recommend.

End User wrote:

I based my recommendation on my real world experience. When I built my gaming rig last year (based on a P8Z77-V PREMIUM) I started with small SSDs for boot and primary apps/games. I got tired of manual swapping games from SSD to HDD and back again so I switched over to SSD caching. The ability of the SSD caching solution to learn which data should be cached was very impressive and there was no noticeable difference in performance between the cached solution and that of SSD only solution after the system cached the frequently used data. A big advantage with SSD caching is that you can add cheap SSDs over time to increase the size of the cache. Ultimately I switched to a single SSD solution as I found a drive that could hold everything. The HDD was removed from the system.

I still use SSD caching in my primary desktop. Comparing it to my identically spec'ed HTPC equipped with just a HDD the difference is night and day as far as boot/app performance is concerned.

As a stepping stone to SSD only primary storage, SSD caching is an excellent option and one I highly recommend.

The only real question is the budget- I use the term 'baseline', because there are other more important details than SSD size to be figured out first. Of course, I really wish one of the spinner houses would just strap ~32GB to each/all of their drives; I'd love to get one of those larger Hitachi's with a built-in cache. 4TB with a little boost on the side? Count me in.

I have the 24" ASUS 144Hz monitor and I have a few things I want to mention about it:

I only use it with the Lightboost "hack" to give it a CRT-strobing effect, which was the selling point for me. For StarCraft 2, my accuracy has improved dramatically. It's an RTS so it requires extremely precise clicks and the lack of motion blur allows me to much more quickly predict unit motion.

Colors kind of suck with Lightboost turned on. I get the feeling like there is slightly too much pink. This is non-configurable without perhaps an additional BIOS hack, because trying to change hue, saturation or brightness from Catalyst Control Center did not make any adjustments at all and, in fact, only caused my games to crash.

I haven't used it in regular 120Hz/144Hz mode since day 1. I gladly accept 5% too much pink instead of 400-500% more motion blur. I also have a late-2012 21.5" iMac here at work and I do notice that it has more colors, but I'm much happier with the significant improvement in motion clarity. I don't need my colors to be accurate in games, but if you do any kind of photo editing or any kind of visual design such as web pages, you will want an IPS monitor. Some people go for both an IPS and a 120Hz TN monitor, and switch to whichever one depending on the situation. It's up to you.

Star Brood wrote:

I have the 24" ASUS 144Hz monitor and I have a few things I want to mention about it:

I only use it with the Lightboost "hack" to give it a CRT-strobing effect, which was the selling point for me. For StarCraft 2, my accuracy has improved dramatically. It's an RTS so it requires extremely precise clicks and the lack of motion blur allows me to much more quickly predict unit motion.

Colors kind of suck with Lightboost turned on. I get the feeling like there is slightly too much pink. This is non-configurable without perhaps an additional BIOS hack, because trying to change hue, saturation or brightness from Catalyst Control Center did not make any adjustments at all and, in fact, only caused my games to crash.

I haven't used it in regular 120Hz/144Hz mode since day 1. I gladly accept 5% too much pink instead of 400-500% more motion blur. I also have a late-2012 21.5" iMac here at work and I do notice that it has more colors, but I'm much happier with the significant improvement in motion clarity. I don't need my colors to be accurate in games, but if you do any kind of photo editing or any kind of visual design such as web pages, you will want an IPS monitor. Some people go for both an IPS and a 120Hz TN monitor, and switch to whichever one depending on the situation. It's up to you.

I thought about it, but I don't really play anything competitively so it's more worth it to me to enjoy the visuals.

Airmantharp wrote:

Of course, I really wish one of the spinner houses would just strap ~32GB to each/all of their drives; I'd love to get one of those larger Hitachi's with a built-in cache. 4TB with a little boost on the side? Count me in.

The current HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 with just 64MB of cache is $350. I shudder to think how much that drive would cost with 32GB of cache.

How much of a performance boost is possible with a cache that is only .8% of total drive capacity? Such a low cache size would make no sense on a OS/apps/games/photos drive. I'd say the sweet spot for OS/app/games/frequently used data is 120/256GB of SSD cache per 1TB HDD up to 2TB HDDs. I don't bother with SSD caching for long-term storage volumes.

End User wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

Of course, I really wish one of the spinner houses would just strap ~32GB to each/all of their drives; I'd love to get one of those larger Hitachi's with a built-in cache. 4TB with a little boost on the side? Count me in.

The current HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 with just 64MB of cache is $350. I shudder to think how much that drive would cost with 32GB of cache.

How much of a performance boost is possible with a cache that is only .8% of total drive capacity? Such a low cache size would make no sense on a OS/apps/games/photos drive. I'd say the sweet spot for OS/app/games/frequently used data is 120/256GB of SSD cache per 1TB HDD up to 2TB HDDs. I don't bother with SSD caching for long-term storage volumes.

...why are you comparing RAM to NAND? Remember that people like Sandisk make single-chip SSD's that would be perfect for this application. It's a matter of choice, not technology or development/production cost. And yeah, if your SSD (however big it is) runs out of space, you'll have to revert to installing stuff to the HDD, that is unless you install everything there first and then just move over what few games that could make use of the SSD that you actually play.

And I've seen the 3TB versions for around $150 before. There are certainly deals to be had.

Airmantharp wrote:

if your SSD (however big it is) runs out of space, you'll have to revert to installing stuff to the HDD

By the time my 960GB SSD runs out of space we will see 2TB SSDs on the market.

End User wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

if your SSD (however big it is) runs out of space, you'll have to revert to installing stuff to the HDD

By the time my 960GB SSD runs out of space we will see 2TB SSDs on the market.

Which means that you (who isn't the OP) will have to invest further in additional storage and deal with either splitting their current installation or cloning everything over, or deal with the inconvenience and remove old stuff to make space for new stuff.

I don't disagree with your perspective; but what I'd do for myself isn't necessarily what I'd recommend for others. Recommendations have to be put into the recipient's frame of reference.

Airmantharp wrote:

Recommendations have to be put into the recipient's frame of reference.

Which I have done. My recommendations have been in tune with the users budget. Your head is in the sand if you think a 1TB SSD or SSD caching is not worth considering for this build. It would be an absolute crime to run apps/games off of a HDD for this build.

Airmantharp wrote:

End User wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

if your SSD (however big it is) runs out of space, you'll have to revert to installing stuff to the HDD

By the time my 960GB SSD runs out of space we will see 2TB SSDs on the market.

Which means that you (who isn't the OP) will have to invest further in additional storage and deal with either splitting their current installation or cloning everything over, or deal with the inconvenience and remove old stuff to make space for new stuff.

And at that point I'll have 3TB of SSD storage. The horror!

Cloning would take well under an hour SSD to SSD. Big deal.

I'd rather start from scratch - something about the smell of installing an OS on a SSD in the morning:

Step 1 - install new SSD (5 minutes)
Step 2 - install Windows 8.1 from ISO located on fast USB 3.0 stick to fast SSD (10 minutes)
Step 3 - boot Windows 8.1 from the new (incredibly speedy) SSD (45 seconds)
Step 4 - Log into Windows 8.1 via my cloud account - Windows prefs are set automatically (5 seconds)
Step 5 - Install drivers (10 minutes) then reboot (45 seconds)
Step 6 - Install Office 365 (10 minutes)
Step 7 - Install remaining apps from installers located on the original SSD (10 minutes)
Step 8 - copy over Steam/Origin/etc. folders from original SSD (20 minutes)
Step 9 - sync folders to new setup (20 seconds)

Less than an hour of your time and BOOM! -> total awesomeness and not a HDD in sight. Welcome to 2014.

Thanks for all the info guys. I'm still watching the thread, I've just gone a tad dormant while we wait for the end of September to come. Still looking around and weighing the options though.

Also.. I've been looking at the

"COOLER MASTER HAF 922 RC-922M-KKN3-GP Black Steel + Plastic and Mesh Bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case with USB 3.0 and Black Interior
$119.99
Your Price: $79.99
With Promo Code
EMCYTZT4057"

instead of the 932
For consideration as my Case. Any opinions/concerns/comments?

Vonhitz wrote:

Thanks for all the info guys. I'm still watching the thread, I've just gone a tad dormant while we wait for the end of September to come. Still looking around and weighing the options though.

Also.. I've been looking at the

"COOLER MASTER HAF 922 RC-922M-KKN3-GP Black Steel + Plastic and Mesh Bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case with USB 3.0 and Black Interior
$119.99
Your Price: $79.99
With Promo Code
EMCYTZT4057"

instead of the 932
For consideration as my Case. Any opinions/concerns/comments?

I have 2 of these cases, so I understand the bling factor of them. However, I wouldnt recommend them, I've become lazy and dont like blowing them out with compressed air every six months due to the lack of removable/washable filters. They are pretty big too and at this point I'd prefer smaller cases. If neither of those are issues to you then it won't matter. If I still had the passion I used to have about enthusiast computers , I'd probably look at replacing them with a Corsair or Silvestone case. I'm sure you'll get recommendations from others.

Icanhasthis?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 35-103-189

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ8t_Sc1Gj4

wonder if it would fit in my midtower.. hrmmmmmm


Also.. I don't mind what size the tower is nor do i mind blowing it out to be dust free.

Oh... and...I've decided to go with this GPU setup


.....No. .. not really.

Vonhitz wrote:

Oh... and...I've decided to go with this GPU setup

Sweet!

Vonhitz wrote:

.....No. .. not really.

The noise reduction in that shot numbs my eyes...

But anyway, we're still here with you; we're all just as interested in the upcoming releases.