Guild Wars 2

Hi guys, I just transfered to US and I need to build a new PC, gaming is all I want
I wanna buy an i7 3770K, planning to Overclock it 4,5 – 4,8 hz.
I need a good MOBO, maybe an Asus P8Z77 or ASRock ( which one exactly should I buy because there are many options )
Should I buy 8GB ram or 16GB one, 1600 or higher? shall I buy CL9 or CL10?
Graphic Card, Radeon HD7970 or a NVidea, I never bought a NVidea, so I dont know which one to buy.
SSD I was thinkin bout` gtting one later.

I`m buying all the stuff at Microcenter, best price ever and even discouts if you buy processor and MOBO together.

Thanks alot guys!

I would go for the Asus mothebroard over ASRock, Asus are of better quality.

The Asus P8Z77 V LK should be fine.

If ur thinking of getting the AMD 7970 then the Nvidia equivalent would be the 680, which is substantialy more expensive, if u want to save money ..get the 7970. Try get a Asus or EVGA one as they tend to have very good cooling and high quality factory OC’s.
For RAM 8gb is enough, but it might be an idea to go for 16gb if u dont mind spending a tad more. You wil ldeffinatly want 1600mhz or higher, and deffinatly CL9 or lower. Since ur after a 3770k , make sure u get dual channel RAM (2x DIMMS i.e 2×8GB)

If u want a SSD the only proper choice is the Samsung 840 Pro 128gb ..or same series just bigger storage if u want somthing bigger.

EDIT: If ur planing on 4.5ghz to 4.8ghz OC i hope u ether have:
a top of the line air cooling (which will likely get 4.5 or 4.6ghz),
or a good AIO water cooler (4.7ghz will likely be as high as u would get if ur lucky),
or a custom full water loop (4.8ghz should obtainable)
or any of those along with replacing the TIM under the IHS of the CPU (should drop temps by between 5c and 15c).

Solar knows his stuff, but I will say that an SSD isn’t something I’d wait on.

This game loads a ton of its texture files off the hard drive, and it gets very irritating getting bottleneck lag from a hard drive when you fast turn the camera, or a new area is loaded.

I run the game completely from RAM (as I have 32gb in my system, and dedicate 16gb of it to whatever game I’m playing at the time) and it MOSTLY eliminates this bottleneck. I’ve run the game from HDD, and it’s just nowhere near as good as a decent SSD or a RAMDISK.

All your other choices are proper though.

Good luck.

Well best prices ever is not true. Yes you can get a good deal on some in store only items and combos but for the rest of their stuff just not true. Also remeber you must pay taxes on these items.
Their no need to get a i5 3770k for gaming a i5 3570k will do the same thing at $100 cheaper, 8GB of memory is all thats needed unless you are going the ramdisk way, I really like the Samsung SSD’s but it’s more of a luxery than anything.
I checked the prices and yes if you live near the microcenter this is a really good combo. http://www.microcenter.com/product/393422/P8Z77-V_LK_LGA_1155_Z77_ATX_Intel_Motherboard
http://www.microcenter.com/product/388577/Core_i5_3570K_34GHz_LGA_1155_Processor
$270 as a combo + tax.
The rest can be bought cheaper here free shipping and no sales tax.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/QWrj
Comes out to about 1K without the case as that is up to what you like. Yes you can spend more money if you would like to and buy more expensive parts to get a little better performance.

8gb+titan+anything asus

at Microcenter the 3570k costs 190$ and 3770k costs 230$, not 100$ as other stores, last year i bought a 3570k, I`d like to try the 3770k this time.

Also the stuff there dont have any TAX when you pay, I mean, the final price is that on the stuff.

I was thinkin bout` getting an Asus P8z77-V, they also many kind of that MOBO, like P8z77-M LX, Pro and other things, can anyone tell me the difference between them?

for RAM, 8GB DDR3 1600, the price is 63$, 115$ for 16GB.

I dont understand SSD, for what i know it only helps on loading the zones and such stuff, right? or it improves also the game perfomance?

Should i buy an intel SSD 120gb for 120$ or something?? or there are better choices ?/

While in most cases, SSD’s are only useful for load times, this is a huge gameworld, and it’s mostly seamless, so loading all of the textures for the world into ram is not doable.

Because of this, as you move around, the game engine has to go back to the hard drive (or SSD) to request the data for the area you’re moving towards.

Loading this data from an SSD is much quicker than doing it from a hard drive.

A ramdisk is faster still, but seems to be beyond the scope.

Intel SSD isn’t necessary, just look for a deal as close to 50c per gb as you can get. 120gb is plenty for windows, gw2, and your primary programs.

As far as motherboards, the big differences are support for multiple gfx cards, OC functionality, number of sata and usb connections.

Make sure whatever you’re looking at meets all of those needs, and then buy the cheapest one I’m a big fan of MSI motherboards, but most people will tell you to only buy asus or gb.

Which MOBO should I get then? Asus P8Z77 ones there are alot of options, L, LE, M, alot of stuff, I dont know which one to buy.
I just want a good one to OC, maybe to 4,kitten or more and thats all.

50c per GB for SSD what that means? or better if you can link me a good one, that`s even better

Radeon HD7950 is the best Graphic Card i can get for the price i want, which is around 320$, right? if not, just link me a better one, even Nvidea one would be good.

7950’s are great cards, with a bit of overclocking, they are nearly as powerful as the 7970s OC’d. You won’t do better for ~300 dollars.

50c per GB for an SSD means that if it is a 120gb SSD, you’d want to pay 60 dollars. Those deals seem to be gone these days, but if you can find an SSD (120gb)for between 80 and 90 dollars, I’d jump on that. No reason to spend more for an intel one.

As far as the motherboard goes, the luck of the draw will determine max overclock, but for the most part you can simply raise the multiplier until you need more voltage for stability, and then raise the voltage to match. Repeat until you’re happy with your overclock. Most of the ASUS boards will have the same BIOS, and the same functionality to overclock. The question you need to ask is “will I ever want a 2nd graphics card” if so, make sure the board supports it. How many hard drives/ssd’s do I have (or plan to have) in the tower at the same time? make sure the board you pick has sufficient sata ports to accomodate. Do I need lots of usb 3.0 slots? if so, pick one that has as many as are required.

I haven’t done the research on ASUS boards, mostly because for the feature set I needed, the asus boards were overpriced.

Just match up your needs for the build to the feature list on the ASUS website and you should be good to go.

Asus P8Z77-V-LK would be a good choice.

The Samsung 840 Pro 128gb SSD is top notch.

Why exactly the P8Z77-V-LK? not saying it`s crap, i just dont understand all those letters after the -V.
I want something good to Overclock my i7 3770k, also some MOBO have the feature to lower the latency and make the gaming better, I mean, gaming is all I want on the PC so yeah, a good gaming MOBO

Because why make one motherboard when you can make a dozen each just a little different than the other, all at different price points. Here’s how they differ.

Clear as mud right?

http://event.asus.com/2012/mb/P8Z77_Series_Motherboards/page7_AvailableModelkittenm

(Edit: The profanity filter kittened the URL. It’s _AvailableModels followed by .htm)

The -V-LK supports both CrossfireX and SLi but doesn’t have the extra SATA III or improved voltage regulator bank that the more expensive -V-LE Plus has.

by the way guys, so for the MOBO i`m aiming for an Asus P8Z77-V which costs 180$ then -50$ from Microcenter`s discount.
What`s the Digital CPU, Power Design, improves CPU power or something?

also for Graphic Card, should I go with an AMD Radeon 7950, or Nvidia one, but i dont know which, can you suggest me some?

I`m mainly planning to to play GW2 and WOW sometimes.

Solfan.7531:

by the way guys, so for the MOBO i`m aiming for an Asus P8Z77-V which costs 180$ then -50$ from Microcenter`s discount.
What`s the Digital CPU, Power Design, improves CPU power or something?

also for Graphic Card, should I go with an AMD Radeon 7950, or Nvidia one, but i dont know which, can you suggest me some?

I`m mainly planning to to play GW2 and WOW sometimes.

In that case the HD 7870XT is what you want since its enough to play GW2 and WoW and offers the best price/performance as of right now.

I’m not entirely sure what you are trying to ask about the ‘Digital CPU’ and ‘Power Design’. Are you perhaps trying to ask how much wattage the CPU is going to take so that you can get an adequate power supply?

Solfan.7531:

by the way guys, so for the MOBO i`m aiming for an Asus P8Z77-V which costs 180$ then -50$ from Microcenter`s discount.
What`s the Digital CPU, Power Design, improves CPU power or something?

also for Graphic Card, should I go with an AMD Radeon 7950, or Nvidia one, but i dont know which, can you suggest me some?

I`m mainly planning to to play GW2 and WOW sometimes.

If you overclock your CPU, it will need to run at a higher voltage. The actual amount of power it uses scales linearly with clock speed but square of the voltage. That means if you can overclock the CPU by 20% without needing to increase the voltage to keep it stable, it will use 20% more power. However if you need to up the voltage by 10% to keep it stable, it will use 1.2 × 1.1 × 1.1 or 45% more power.

Top end overclocking can require a rather large percentage voltage increase. So to provide stable power in these situations, the voltage regulator on the mother board, the parts around the CPU socket that are heat sinked usually that converts 12 volts down to the voltage the CPU uses, needs to be more complex. The degree of complexity is reported as phases. The more phases, the more stable the amount of power it can provide. The downside is the more phases, the less efficient it is as well as cost and overall complexity.

Hard core overclockers will gravitate toward motherboards that have a very high number of phases. It’s unclear when enough is enough however. There is a lot of MORE BETTER philosophy out there. But if you aren’t trying to eek out every last cycle per second out of a CPU, then it’s not needed.

Of course the other end of this is more power used means more heat the CPU generates so you need an ever increasingly large and/or expensive CPU cooler to dissipate that heat.

I managed to OC my old i5 3570k to 4, kitten on an Asus P8Z77-V LE, this LE I dont know what means tho. I just wanna know which MOBO I should buy, since there are lots of choices.
As for Graphic Card, Radeon 7950 sounds good cause I wanna try it on a 120hz monitor, what you think?

What should I get to play it smooth at 120fps, I dont do crap WvW, just sPvP and PvE

bump, bump 15chars

Okay, it seems we have a bit of a language problem here. What exactly are you looking for in a motherboard? As in features. Do you want CrossfireX (AMD dual video card) support? Do you want SLi (nVidia dual video card) support. Do you need a lot of SATA III connectors (how many hard drives)? Are you planning to overclock the CPU at all? moderately? or push it to the max? What’s your price range?

All those Asus motherboards are fine. Since the link I provide up top gets kittenfied by the profanity filter I’ll manually list the differences between the -LK and the -LE.

-V-LK
2 SATA III and 4 SATA II drive ports
2 PCIex16 V3 slots and 1 PCIex16 V2 slot (but really only x4 actually x2 if you enable the 2 PCIex1 slots)
Supports full CrossfireX and SLi at x8
4 phase CPU power

-V-LE
3 SATA III, 1 ESATA III, 4 SATA II drive ports
1 PCIex16 V3 slot and 1 PCex16 V2 slot (but really only x4 actually x2 if you enable the 2 PCIex1 slots)
Supports degraded CrossfireX with one at x16 and the other at x4 or x2 and NO SLi support
6 phase CPU power plus “intelligent” automatic power management for easier overclocking

Those are the differences between the two talked about here. If you are planning to ever only use one video card but you want to overclock the CPU to it’s maximum, then choose the LE. If you want to leave the door open to use two video cards and it’s alright to not reach peak overclocking then pick the LK. Otherwise both motherboards are fine.

I want to OC the CPU only, to 4, kitten, I also want only 1 graphic card, atleast for now.
Thing is there are also Sabertooth ones that I dont know the difference with p8z77.
Are they any good?

If not, im planning to get the p8z77-v for 175$ at Microcenter, which has the wifi inside

Sabertooth is a gamer gimmick motherboard (which will draw some ire from those who went with it). It’s $240 at NewEgg. It’s selling point is it looks cool in a case with a window.

Well what they did was litter the motherboard with a few more temperature sensors, add a plate just above the components that has a dedicated mini fan to cool them plus another mini fan that funnels air in from the back of the case to blow across the CPU/RAM voltage regulator blocks (but reviews seem to indicate it doesn’t work well, hence my gimmick comment). They also say they used more expensive military spec components to toughen it up the overall motherboard. It’s also a legacy free motherboard, no old style PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, no PCI slots. No loss really unless you are still using a keyboard or mouse that’s not USB or have some really old expansion card you aren’t willing to give up.

The -V is a very nice board. It comes with a dedicated wi-fi card that fits into it’s own slot (which may be an issue if it goes POOF one day) and it’s $60+ cheaper.

Both support two videocards fully, either CrossfireX or SLi.