Building your own pc

Hey guys, I really want a rig that can run CoH2 really well but I want to do it as economically as possible. I'm starting from the ground up here, never attempted to build a pc before, so any links or general info is much appreciated while I do some research.

I'm also wondering what sort of system reqs I would need to run the game on max and still maintain a decent frame rate. Any info, links, anything really is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

if you had an older PC you should start taking it apart, just to get the feel of how it works, what are the main parts and what every part looks like.
i font know about links because i learned by doing it with a friend who knew what he was doing, but im sure the nice people here will help.
just keep in mind, its as simple as plugging in cable as long as you know what are you doing.

on the system requirement you can always lower the image quality to maintain your FPS.
you will 1st need to determine your budget and the screen resolution you will be using, and start getting parts that fits
here some graphs for reference.

I don't even know if they make the damn things anymore, but avoid a cpu heatsink that uses push pins. They're very intimidating for a first-time builder (like I was). Almost broke my motherboard, and I did break the heatsink eventually. Backplates are sooo much easier.

If I could go back and tell myself one thing, it would be pay more attention to the size of the case and the size of the components. The gpu I ended up with barely fit in it, and there was no room for hiding cords.

I just spent around $700 on my new system (not even including the 6850 I already had) and the CoH2 framerate is bouncing all over the fucking place on lowish settings. Not trying to crush your hopes or anything, but if you are building a computer specifically for CoH2 you need to decide between being economical or being happy because you won't get both. This game is possibly the worst optimized out there, just to put things in perspective my 6850 does almost flawless 60fps on ultra Red Orchestra 2, 45-60 medium BF4, and 40-60 high Arma 3. I recommend getting a 6970 or better if you are serious about this game.

A lot depends on your resolution. A $500 PC will max settings on a 1280x1024 monitor but cry blood tears on 1920x1080.

That said, I never thought I'd say this, but at least in the UK, it's actually gotten to the point where it's cheaper to buy pre-built than it is to build it yourself. I would still build my own, just because it's fairly cathartic and I like to pick the exact components that go into it, but if money is your main concern, you might want to consider a solid pre-built.

(also those charts demonstrate just how poorly optimized CoH2 is, and if that's the only demanding game you play, you might wanna sit on your cash for the time being)

My son and I just built a computer for him. It was great fun, a nice father-son bonding experience Half of the parts were hand-me-downs and the other half were spec'd out by Budwise, purchased at newegg in the States and brought back in our luggage.

lulz such a criminal

What is your budget and we can start to pick out some parts for you and see if anything works well in your range.

Well for a budget you don't want to paint yourself into a corner with saving money by buying something you can't upgrade easily in the future, so dont go too cheap and pay attention to sockets and such.

CPU: I'd go AMD as you get the biggest bang for your buck, Intels I5's and I7's are great, but you pay for it. plus they run hot and are power hungry.

So on to amd cpu's, i highly recommend the 1100T 6core BE phenom, best chip out of amd imo, haven't tested a 955T BE on coh2 but i think it would cope.
Steer clear of anything running the FX 'bulldozer' architecture as its poorly designed and loses to the phenom chips in almost every aspect apart from having more cores for the 8's. (some of the more expensive chips do give better results, but we're going for budget)
I hear better things about the newer cpu's with the 'piledriver' arc, but these are new and you'll be paying more for them when a cheaper chip will do just fine for your coh2 needs.

also the phenom, bulldozer and piledriver chips all use the AM3+ socket, so if you wish to upgrade your cpu in the future you will be able to do so without having to fork out for a new mobo.

Motherboard: buy anything with the AM3+ socket with FX support for the latest cpus,. as long as it has 4 ram slots, a pci-e x16 slot it will work just fine,. with most premium mobos your paying for the latest chip-set (990fx i think for AMD boards), but anything will work as long as it has right socket, buying the latest mobo will be a waste of money as regard to gaming performance.

RAM: i'd say 8gb is absolute minimum, 16gb preferred. g.skill ripjaws have always seemed well priced for capacity and speed imo. Also ddr3 will be kept as the standard for a few more years yet so feel free to confidently spend some money on ram without it being outclassed in the near future, infact RAM is probably the most stable component (future preformance-wise) of any PC, as cpus/gpus are seeing several new 'generations' over a year.
I have tryed the 'value' ram you see about a lot running 32gb in a board, but you really could notice the difference in performance.

Graphic card:, again anything nvidia is great, but you'll be paying a premium for it, and again AMD/ATI gives best value for money.
I know many see it as a risk but ebay is your best option here. you sit in fear of having an Overclocked card burnt to death,. but out of all the components within the PC the graphics card is the one that is upgraded the most due the the latest and best card lasting for about 3-4 months until a newer model is brought out,. which means a higher turn over, which leads to a greater supply of second hand cards and subsequently lower prices as they devalue so quick.

At the moment my card is old, I've got a R6950 MSI 2gb card, but to be honest it runs the game just fine, no frame-rate drop during 4v4 battles with intense fighting. Granted i have no AA enabled however in RTS's it not such a big deal, and AA is where the real strain on gpus comes. Textures, snow etc are all on high and the game looks great.

For an example in the price drop for older cards,. i payed 270 pounds sterling for my card new a few years ago, and the other day i picked up a second one used for 70 pounds (i plan to crossfire them for a cheaper performance increase alternative)
Graphics cards are like cars, as soon as they come off the lot they loose 50% of their value,.. sure some second hand cars are lemons, but 90% of the time a second hand car will be fine and reliable.

PSU: any old shit will do to be honest,. just make sure you get the appropriate wattage,. 600-700 i'd say for the rig.
buy new as the capacitor degradation effects power output a lot,. and obviously the cheaper you buy the faster this will be,. but if it lasts a year or 2 its not bad value

Storage: SSD's are very nice, but if you wanna save cash just get a HDD at 7600rpm. SSD will give the best performance increase of any component as to general pc performance,. but to games such as coh2 you wont see any tangible benefit.

thats all i can think of as regard for building a budget PC.

Oh 1 thing regarding the construction of you PC,. and maby the most important thing of all!!!
HEATPASTE!!!!!! and the use of it.

LESS IS MORE! trust me on this, a very very common thing i see is people slapping on too much thinking it will help, where infact is only buffers the heat exchange and causes a lot of over heating problems.
Buy high end heat paste for sure, its defiantly worth spending some money on (however good stuff is only 5-6 pounds), but remember the heat pastes job is merely to fill in the micro fine texture of a machined metal surface, so only a tiny amount is required, any more and it will be counter productive and only serve to stop the heat exchange to the heat sink
many heat pastes boast a high metal content (i use artic silver formula 5), even so a pastes ability to transfer heat is nothing compared to a solid lump of metal, so the less you use the better transfer of energy you will get.

TL: DR

CPU: AMD Phenom
GPU: ATI 6950 or above
PSU:600-700w any brand
Storgae: HDD 7600rpm
Heatpaste: less is more

Phenom is old sir.

And Intel is hot and power hungry compared to AMD? You're nutz.

They dont make 7600RPM hard drives.

PSU, any old junk will work? Hrm, disagree.

I know you are trying to help but much of your post is inaccurate.

Spend the extra money to get a solid system. If you want to save money then do it in the GPU department, that way if you aren't pleased you only need to upgrade one component. Right now I'm only bottlenecked by my 6850, but when I get my 780 in the next 7-10 days I'm gonna rock out with my cock out because everything else is good to go for a fairly high end rig. If you want hardware advice then ask D3adshot or Budwise they are both experts at this stuff.

Phenom is old sir.

And Intel is hot and power hungry compared to AMD? You're nutz.

They dont make 7600RPM hard drives.

PSU, any old junk will work? Hrm, disagree.

I know you are trying to help but much of your post is inaccurate.

Yeah, this. In fact, if you're building a new PC, get an SSD. Prices have dropped significantly and they're quite affordable, even in a budget build.

And do spend the extra on a quality PSU. The one thing besides static electricity which is guaran-fucking-teed to fry your expensive components is a dodgy PSU which goes bad. I've always used Corsair, they've done me well.

Skimp on the motherboard, optical drive and grab yourself a cheap and cheerful processor. Invest in GPU and PSU and an SSD if you can afford it.

Bulldozer sucks, Vishera/Piledriver is where its at.

What I built for ~400 dollars and plays everything on ultra settings. I'm omitting my SSD and Case because there's so many to choose from and so many deals.

Motherboard: Asrock 990FX Fatal1ty PROFESSIONAL or Killer - Can be had on ebay for ~80 dollars best AMD+ performance/dollar board. Very high quality VRM cooling 12+2/8+2 powerphases. Basically means it can handle any AM3+ processor you throw at it no problemo.

STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM GIGABYTE MOTHERBOARDS. They are having some SERIOUS VRM cooling/Vdroop issues presumably for the next very long time. Also, TERRIBLE customer support.

If you can upgrade to the 500-600 dollar price point I would highly suggest either an Asrock Extreme 9 or Asus ROG Crosshair Formula-Z for their overclocking ability.

Storage: I'm using a 240GB SSD I got for 130 a couple of years ago, plus a 20TB Ubuntu Server NFS Share to store all my other shit. Your combinations and milage may vary.
GPU: Sapphire GHz OC Edition 7870 - OC @ +25% everything max voltage
CPU: AMD 6300+ - OC @ 4.8 GHz
PSU: Offbrand 800 Watt PSU, got lots of good reviews and it was a 60 dollar shellshocker at the time. Can't go wrong with that I've had it for four years and its still chugging along. Allows for CFire in the future.
RAM: A-Data XPG Gaming Series Ver 2.0 <-- these have HUGE heat sinks on them so be careful, but they overclock better than any RAM performance/dollar. That kid who suggested G.Skill Ripjaws is an idiot. 1600 MHz 9-9-9-16 is the industry standard right now for DDR3 you can pick up 8GB of that on ebay for like 40 bucks. If you're paying a premium it should be for the ability to overclock your ram to some retarded speed like 2133 MHz <-- now were cooking. Really that kid who said 16GB doesn't know his shit. You only really need 8GB especially unless you're too stupid to overclock like a fucking boss.
Cooling:

• CPU Cooling: ARCTIC Freezer A30 Extreme, or any variant. There are two rip offs of this design. One is the Hyper 212 Evo, and the other is NZXT RC-RST40-01. They're all pretty much the same thing
  
• Case Cooling: I have a Corsair Graphite 600T Stormtrooper edition. Take your time and find the right case for you. There are hundreds of great cases to choose from. I suggest hardOCP as a place to look for Case Recommendations.
  

Once everything is tweaked perfectly and your overclocking like a motherfuckin bauss you should be able to hang with the spoiled rotten daddy's favorite boy Intel i7 kids who dropped 2K on a computer they could have gotten for 1/4th the price.

You aren't going to get a better set up than this per dollar/performance. I know there's lots of Intel/Nvidia fangirls, and there is also a lot of misinformation being spread about AMD processors and their future.

As time goes on, lazy shitty developers will start to learn how to harness multiple threads for gaming. They have to. AMD now dominates the console-sphere. As these mainstream development teams take advantage of these cores; what this means for you is your gaming computer stays relevant for longer. Essentially its equivalent to having purchased a Haswell i5 in terms of lifetime expectancy from Vishera processors + market & technology trends without having to spend another 200 dollars. Intel be price gouging like motherfuckers with their locked multipliers and insane prices.

Sure phenom is old, that is correct, but this is a pc on a budget, old is fine as long as it performs. what is wrong with old?
The bulldozer chips are not good,. this is fact, and the phenom chip out performs them in many ways.
I've run the 955T BE and 1100T BE beside a FX8120 machine, apart from having more cores there was no increase in performance.
They all use the same socket AM3/AM3+ too so i don't see how you would consider it OLD,.. maby just not as new.

As for the temps i've had an I7 running beside the 1100T,. and the I7 was like a cooker, they are better chip but damn they use some power and chuck out some heat.

As for the HDD,. my fault,. typo,. i meant 7200rpm, sorry to confuse you by getting one digit wrong.
As for storage ive had 5400 back in the day,. still use 7200's for storage now, and a 10000 before ssd's came out, had good times with a OCZ vertex3 60gb,. but now ive moved to a OCZ 240gb x2 revo drive.
Also tried 'ram-disk' software and made a partition for the page file on ram, also tried mounting a game completely on to the ram-disk partition to see if performance increased.
However only certain games would show any real benefit from such things, i.e the lame ass arma2 engine by reducing texture 'pop' as it renders landscapes,. with coh2 you wouldn't see much difference expect for load times.

PSU,. well if you've only bought one brand of PSU and always bought expensive units how can you be sure of your knowledge? Sure atm I'm running a OCZ thing, also had a corsair, some re branded thing (i forget name 'x' something), and even some ultra cheap in-house psu's from ARIA.
What you say is correct,. if the PSU craps out on you it 'could' damage all your components, but have you had it happen? Hell ive made rigs from parts ive found in the dump and skips, ive yet to have a psu 'pop' on me (1 exception when i spilt a cup of tea on one, i recommend avoiding doing that)

Now you all seem to be of the same opinion, and yet you all have different components in your rigs, the fact is you've all read the same articles on the net, this however produces fallacy's with what you believe to be fact, hell ive read the same articles.
The difference is that I have always been on a budget and needed to get the best value for money, and i was lucky enough to need several machines for work (botting for real money trading in games), so i was able to have multiple machines running many different combinations of components, and the only way i could be sure was to buy and try everything in every combination i could afford, so i did.

Sure phenom is old, that is correct, but this is a pc on a budget, old is fine as long as it performs. what is wrong with old?
The bulldozer chips are not good,. this is fact, and the phenom chip out performs them in many ways.
I've run the 955T BE and 1100T BE beside a FX8120 machine, apart from having more cores there was no increase in performance.
They all use the same socket AM3/AM3+ too so i don't see how you would consider it OLD,.. maby just not as new.

As for the temps i've had an I7 running beside the 1100T,. and the I7 was like a cooker, they are better chip but damn they use some power and chuck out some heat.

As for the HDD,. my fault,. typo,. i meant 7200rpm, sorry to confuse you by getting one digit wrong.
As for storage ive had 5400 back in the day,. still use 7200's for storage now, and a 10000 before ssd's came out, had good times with a OCZ vertex3 60gb,. but now ive moved to a OCZ 240gb x2 revo drive.
Also tried 'ram-disk' software and made a partition for the page file on ram, also tried mounting a game completely on to the ram-disk partition to see if performance increased.
However only certain games would show any real benefit from such things, i.e the lame ass arma2 engine by reducing texture 'pop' as it renders landscapes,. with coh2 you wouldn't see much difference expect for load times.

PSU,. well if you've only bought one brand of PSU and always bought expensive units how can you be sure of your knowledge? Sure atm I'm running a OCZ thing, also had a corsair, some re branded thing (i forget name 'x' something), and even some ultra cheap in-house psu's from ARIA.
What you say is correct,. if the PSU craps out on you it 'could' damage all your components, but have you had it happen? Hell ive made rigs from parts ive found in the dump and skips, ive yet to have a psu 'pop' on me (1 exception when i spilt a cup of tea on one, i recommend avoiding doing that)

Now you all seem to be of the same opinion, and yet you all have different components in your rigs, the fact is you've all read the same articles on the net, this however produces fallacy's with what you believe to be fact, hell ive read the same articles.
The difference is that I have always been on a budget and needed to get the best value for money, and i was lucky enough to need several machines for work (botting for real money trading in games), so i was able to have multiple machines running many different combinations of components, and the only way i could be sure was to buy and try everything in every combination i could afford, so i did.

The only problem I have with you is your boner for Phenom. That's such an old, power hungry, hot platform. Its cute hearing you compare Intel to that relic. Their IPC's compared to Vishera/Piledriver are shit. Especially when overclocked side by side, yes they can both do 4.2 GHz but how much they do with 4.2 GHz is the difference. Its like Intel, they've been hitting 4.2 GHz since 2005 but now they can do 3x per cycle than the old Pentium 4 beasts. [/rant]

'Budget PC' (not what can be overclocked better)
performance v's cost. phenom are old, cheap, and will work just fine for coh2.
yep alot of chips are better, and more expensive.
don't forget its trying to get the most for the least cost


however feel free to repeat second/third hand information you've read about components you haven't owned or tested and copy and paste statistics ignoring the OP's parameters, hell its the way of the interweb!! [/rant]

Wow thanks for the reply's guys. I have been at work the last two days and just got back to the thread.

My budget right now is about $850-900, so I have some flexibility to build a pretty beefy computer. I considered buying a pre-built, but I want to know how to build my own PC, so as time goes on and I need to upgrade myself, I won't feel intimidated in doing so.

Oh 1 thing regarding the construction of you PC,. and maby the most important thing of all!!!
HEATPASTE!!!!!! and the use of it.

LESS IS MORE! trust me on this, a very very common thing i see is people slapping on too much thinking it will help, where infact is only buffers the heat exchange and causes a lot of over heating problems.

Noted, thank you!

I don't even know if they make the damn things anymore, but avoid a cpu heatsink that uses push pins. They're very intimidating for a first-time builder (like I was). Almost broke my motherboard, and I did break the heatsink eventually. Backplates are sooo much easier.

If I could go back and tell myself one thing, it would be pay more attention to the size of the case and the size of the components. The gpu I ended up with barely fit in it, and there was no room for hiding cords.

Good to know, i'll keep that in mind.

Okay, so step one, get a components list together, doing some research right now.

I actually bought a computer about 7 months ago for ~450$. It uses AMDs trinity APU processors, and its set up to easily run crossfire with another card, so on one hand I could just upgrade the PSU and install my other GPU, but my concern is that I wont have room to upgrade it further, and won't get the results that I want from my current setup.

Wow thanks for the reply's guys. I have been at work the last two days and just got back to the thread.

My budget right now is about $850-900, so I have some flexibility to build a pretty beefy computer. I considered buying a pre-built, but I want to know how to build my own PC, so as time goes on and I need to upgrade myself, I won't feel intimidated in doing so.



Noted, thank you!



Good to know, i'll keep that in mind.

Okay, so step one, get a components list together, doing some research right now.

I actually bought a computer about 7 months ago for ~450$. It uses AMDs trinity APU processors, and its set up to easily run crossfire with another card, so on one hand I could just upgrade the PSU and install my other GPU, but my concern is that I wont have room to upgrade it further, and won't get the results that I want from my current setup.

Here are the specs for my new rig, most the parts were suggested by D3adshot and Bud:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131983
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116895
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231428
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438007
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147184
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148321

That comes out to around $650 (DVD drive not included). On that budget+build you have just enough money to pick up a R9 270x, GTX 660ti or GTX 760 for your GPU.

^ That is still what I'd recommend for a budget build. The case, hard drive, and PSU has some flexibility on what you want though.

anyone has an opinion about very transportable gaming laptops: im hesitating between
- ASUS G750JW-T4071H
- Gigabyte P35K-2 W8
- lenovo y500
thanks for any input