About to order! Check it out 1.5k gaming build! I will post pics later!

Pahlehvahn

Alright guys any last comments/changes/tips? Because I'm about to order all this.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/z4f3NG

ers101284b14_ESO

Scrap windows 8 go with windows 7 get an I7

ItsGlaive

Definitely don't go for Windows 8, go with Windows 7 as already stated or possibly even hang on for a few weeks to see what Windows 9 is like - it's due to land at the end of Sept

SantieClaws

I got my PC in April. I had to pay extra to get win 7 instead of 8 but was happy to do so. I knew from beta that ESO ran very well on win 7 on my lappie and l have heard nothing good at all about win 8.

Tapio75

Just change to AMDFX chipset motherboard and AMD FX processor so you save money. There is few performance differencies between Intel and AMD but you only notice them in Benchmark programs which is just useless numbers.

And indeed Windows7

And Important! Get at least 900w powersupply so you dont run out of power, 650w is too litle.

KariTR

I thought this was in pounds. I paid £1300 for my first built to spec 20 years ago!

staxjax

I would go with an 990FX chipset as well. Both of the new consoles are running on AMD hardware and the game will definitely be most optimized for consoles...

My PC cost $1500 ( a year ago), and I have an fx8350@4.5ghz and two 7870s (I don't know the R9 2xx equivalent, 280?)...max graphic settings, 60fps in PvE and 30fps in large scale PvP. The price on the 7870s went up to $250+ now though, where I bought them for $190 each last spring before the AMD transitioned to the R series GPUs.

Another one of my computers, a $700 AMD A10 APU laptop with dual graphics (gpu core on the APU, and discreet card running in crossfire). The game runs at 30+ FPS on high settings in all situations.

crislevin

I run the game on one of my machine with windows 8.1, it's fine. I don't understand the hate of it.

I would suggest put in some money and get 3 display for eyefinite, it would be epic.

Sarenia

Congratulations on the new build.

I, too, would urge you not to go with Windows 8 and instead choose 7. Windows 8 is already abandoned in lieu of Win 9 develpment, much the same as Vista being an alpha for 7. Myself and many others find it an abhorrent mess to use (unless you're on a touchscreen device).

Have fun, whatever your choice.

PS: To those below, I'm not "hating", I stated a personal opinion, and clearly indicated it as such. There's no need to have an aneurism. To say that I don't like 8 because I'm adverse to change, is to generalize me. I've used more operating system distributions in the past year than most people do in a decade.

Morvoldo

if your gonna spend that much cash why not go for an I7 much better processor with an Asus board much better setup

I also see some items are from amazon,there good but some items can be over priced, try and look around for a good Computer Hardware store, in UK i Use Ebuyer best online store around.
change some of your items dude you can get much better , faster stuff for the money your gonna spend.
graphics card is a nice choice tho, but all that deserves to go into a nice Coolermaster case with Fans all around, unless your doing water cooling.

just shop around a bit more dude, its what i do )

raglau

As a counter, I've been running Win8.x on all my devices since RTM and think it is vastly superior to 7 in terms of usability. I've not had a single issue with it and once you are used to navigation (which took me about one week as a heavy professional user) it is faster to use IME.

The universal instantaneous search renders the Start Menu useless as you can immediately find whatever you want with app name, file name, metadata etc.

Once you get used to this, you quickly forget the clunky old Start Menu ever existed as you simply type the first few letters of whatever it is you wish to do.

WRT AMD vs Intel, it can make a difference in some cases. Basically in AMD architecture a 'core' is not actually a full core as it is in the Intel world. Each AMD 'core' is really an execution unit within a module and these units share cache, bus and FPU. So these items get contended in certain situations, which can stall threads. This does not happen in an Intel CPU because each core is a true core that has its own FPU, bus and cache so threads can never compete for on core resource.

A real life example of the above is where I was called into a customer of ours who had just completed an app deployment using 66 AMD servers with 4 * 8 core CPUs in each but had terrible performance issues. I managed to work out that it was this architectural limitation causing the problems (the main issue was cache contention as the app did a lot of intense memory access). We swapped these 66 servers - blades from a well known vendor - to Intel blades and gained a performance increase of up to 90% in some cases due to lack of contention of internal CPU resources.

A gamer friend suffered significant performance issues in a certain game until he disabled 50% of the execution units on his Bulldozer. So yes, in most cases I think people are right, the performance penalty for AMD is not too severe (perhaps not even noticeable most of the time), but just be aware it is real and it can happen in some situations.

If you do get AMD then you need Windows 8 or above to properly schedule threads OR two hotfixes for Windows 7, which do not (at least did not earlier this year) come down with Windows Update. These hotfixes alleviate the above architecture limitation inherent in AMD by properly understanding what is an execution unit and what is a module, previously the OS did not understand this and could schedule 2 very active threads in the same module, leading to stalling.

Pahlehvahn

Hey guys i'll prob go to win7 but the cpu idk because the single core performance is much higher on intel than amd right? And doesn't eso use only one core atm?

raglau

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Hey guys i'll prob go to win7 but the cpu idk because the single core performance is much higher on intel than amd right? And doesn't eso use only one core atm?

ESO uses about 34 threads across all cores your CPU has. BUT...only one thread does any real work. And this makes the game behave like a single threaded app using only one CPU core.

This fact makes ESO 'like' Intel's CPUs better than AMD in my view. This is because you can be sure this single-thread that ESO depends on so heavily will not be sharing cache, FPU (doubt it actually uses it TBH) or memory bus with another thread. In the AMD model, the ESO main thread would end up sharing those resources with the other execution unit.

So I would give the game the best chance it has of performing well by giving it the most pure architecture to run on. But I am a perfectionist ;-)

An overclocked Haswell refresh Core i5 is well suited to this game IMO. I run a Core i7 but do not get any benefit in ESO, I use it for some professional stuff that will consume HT cores.

Elf_Boy

crislevin wrote: »

I run the game on one of my machine with windows 8.1, it's fine. I don't understand the hate of it.

I would suggest put in some money and get 3 display for eyefinite, it would be epic.

QTF

All this win 8 hate come from ppl who 'heard' about it and have not used it more then 5 minutes.

Until you actually use a win 8/8.1 computer get over yourselves.

Win 8 is more secure then 7 and has no significant performance delta.

This isnt about what is popular it is about what works. The same can be said for the whole intel/amd thing too.

Just because it is a band name with better advertising doesn mean it works better on a home computer.

Elf_Boy

Sarenia wrote: »

Congratulations on the new build.

I, too, would urge you not to go with Windows 8 and instead choose 7. Windows 8 is already abandoned in lieu of Win 9 develpment, much the same as Vista being an alpha for 7. Myself and many others find it an abhorrent mess to use (unless you're on a touchscreen device).

Have fun, whatever your choice.

Since win 7 was abandoned for win 8, isnt it double abandoned?

I have win 8.1 on this machine and work in IT. I talk to people all day long on win xp -> 8.1 there is no usable difference in any of them and the more recent the more secure against hack/virus/etc.

Thread scheduling is vastly improved in 8/8.1 along with many other under the hood technologies.

I get that people dont like change and get attached to their computer and how it works. It just seems funny to me that every other version of windows gets hated not for any technical reasons but just because of the forced change.

cromica81_ESO

Do the listen to the people hating on windows 8, it is superior to win 7

People don't like win 8 because of the ui well it takes a whole 5 mins to change it to be exactly like win 7 but with the speed of Win 8

raglau

Elf_Boy wrote: »

I get that people dont like change and get attached to their computer and how it works. It just seems funny to me that every other version of windows gets hated not for any technical reasons but just because of the forced change.

This is true. When XP came out people hated and despised the 'fisher price' interface. The press pilloried XP and it took XP 3 years to match Win2000 for sales, now we can't get rid of it.

Same every time MS release a new OS.

Tapio75

squicker wrote: »

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Hey guys i'll prob go to win7 but the cpu idk because the single core performance is much higher on intel than amd right? And doesn't eso use only one core atm?

ESO uses about 34 threads across all cores your CPU has. BUT...only one thread does any real work. And this makes the game behave like a single threaded app using only one CPU core.

This fact makes ESO 'like' Intel's CPUs better than AMD in my view. This is because you can be sure this single-thread that ESO depends on so heavily will not be sharing cache, FPU (doubt it actually uses it TBH) or memory bus with another thread. In the AMD model, the ESO main thread would end up sharing those resources with the other execution unit.

So I would give the game the best chance it has of performing well by giving it the most pure architecture to run on. But I am a perfectionist ;-)

An overclocked Haswell refresh Core i5 is well suited to this game IMO. I run a Core i7 but do not get any benefit in ESO, I use it for some professional stuff that will consume HT cores.

I have FX 3.8ghz 6core. It uses about 70% at max on first "core" and about 50 on rest of "cores"

when i use ESOlauncher with 10 min distance and 30 max distance, fog on and extra lightning effects it jumps to about 80% on first and 60 on rest.

First one runs 60fps and the better quality about 50-60 depending of the area i am.

I use 990FX chipset and Radeon R9 270

Memory 8gb

ESO is just fine with this. Planning to get couple of R9 280 tho to get high quality objects enabled at these distances
...If the game utilizes Crossfire...?

I also use Win 7 since it has traditional good interface, i have Ultimate license for it and it lets me tweak itself more than 8.

raglau

Tapio75 wrote: »

I have FX 3.8ghz 6core. It uses about 70% at max on first "core" and about 50 on rest of "cores"

when i use ESOlauncher with 10 min distance and 30 max distance, fog on and extra lightning effects it jumps to about 80% on first and 60 on rest.

First one runs 60fps and the better quality about 50-60 depending of the area i am.

I get about 80% on Core 1 and maximum of 17% right now on Intel Core i7 @ 4.6GHz.

Do you think you could tell me if you have this hotfix installed please? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594/en-gb

This is the one I was talking about earlier which helps Win7 along when it comes to thread scheduling on AMD chips. I don't believe it's an auto install from Win Update. Its native in Win8 onwards.

drkeys143

I have had no probs myself with win8, have been using it for about 6 months, prior to that had win7, both the 64bit pro, to be honest had no probs with 7 either, I find win8 faster, can take a little getting used to, but I wouldn't let people put you off.

I do agree with the @Tapio75‌, get the highest PSU you can afford, 650w may be a little under-spec in the long run

Elf_Boy

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Hey guys i'll prob go to win7 but the cpu idk

ESO is just fine with this. Planning to get couple of R9 280 tho to get high quality objects enabled at these distances
...If the game utilizes Crossfire...?

Handles NV Surround just fine. Presumable the Xfire option also works. (see my sig)

Fleymark

Sarenia wrote: »

Congratulations on the new build.

I, too, would urge you not to go with Windows 8 and instead choose 7. Windows 8 is already abandoned in lieu of Win 9 develpment, much the same as Vista being an alpha for 7. Myself and many others find it an abhorrent mess to use (unless you're on a touchscreen device).

Have fun, whatever your choice.

PS: To those below, I'm not "hating", I stated a personal opinion, and clearly indicated it as such. There's no need to have an aneurism. To say that I don't like 8 because I'm adverse to change, is to generalize me. I've used more operating system distributions in the past year than most people do in a decade.

I've seen this said many times and I have no doubt that it's the case, but doesn't 8 have a bit more under the hood for gpu utilization?

I've been told I would hate 8, too, and to go with 7 when I get around to upgrading but I keep being told 8 is worth a look as a gamer, goofy interface etc notwithstanding.

Tapio75

squicker wrote: »

Tapio75 wrote: »

I have FX 3.8ghz 6core. It uses about 70% at max on first "core" and about 50 on rest of "cores"

when i use ESOlauncher with 10 min distance and 30 max distance, fog on and extra lightning effects it jumps to about 80% on first and 60 on rest.

First one runs 60fps and the better quality about 50-60 depending of the area i am.

I get about 80% on Core 1 and maximum of 17% right now on Intel Core i7 @ 4.6GHz.

Do you think you could tell me if you have this hotfix installed please? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594/en-gb

This is the one I was talking about earlier which helps Win7 along when it comes to thread scheduling on AMD chips. I don't believe it's an auto install from Win Update. Its native in Win8 onwards.

No, i have not manually instaled this and im pretty sure its not installed automatically either. I only have critical updates enabled so it is not evenm loading all the stuff one would normally get.

Something that might do similar is core parking but i have nothing to it either.. I do have manually disabled all powersaving features on bios and windows that affect processor or gpu.

Tapio75

Elf_Boy wrote: »

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Hey guys i'll prob go to win7 but the cpu idk

ESO is just fine with this. Planning to get couple of R9 280 tho to get high quality objects enabled at these distances
...If the game utilizes Crossfire...?

Handles NV Surround just fine. Presumable the Xfire option also works. (see my sig)

I will see how it works, i presume it will work if NV works. Looks like you got same MoBo as i do.

manyrabidrats

as said, win7 > win 8, but i'd use an Nvidia 770 4gb and swap to an i7.
Edit: the main reason i'd choose nvidia is :
-it runs slightly cooler than AMD video cards,
-i use a Nvidia Sheild paired with my gaming PC. and it is awesome.

Zarman

As others have said go for win 7
Get an i7 if its a gaming machine
Get a better mouse and better keyboard, Ducky is great for keyboards, make sure you research them first. A lot of my friends have told me that Razer mouse's suck, and i would have to agree.

Unless you plan to overclock your machine you really dont need liquid cooling.
Saying that, if you really want a cooler pc use a case that has built in fans like this one http://pcpartpicker.com/part/enermax-case-eca1092agbl

I would go a 2x 8g RAM cards instead of 2x4


My build in spoiler tags

ExiledKhallisi

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Alright guys any last comments/changes/tips? Because I'm about to order all this.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/z4f3NG

Nice but....

Plays ESO with 60FPS on high settings using almost 6 yr old laptop....

Wonders why.

The honest truth about computers.... if you buy the top of the line, you're getting swindled and pimped.

david271749

ExiledKhallisi wrote: »

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Alright guys any last comments/changes/tips? Because I'm about to order all this.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/z4f3NG

Nice but....

Plays ESO with 60FPS on high settings using almost 6 yr old laptop....

Wonders why.

The honest truth about computers.... if you buy the top of the line, you're getting swindled and pimped.

That's nice, but can your 6 year old laptop run more demanding games like crysis 2, Battlefield 4, Dark Souls 2, or even modded Skyrim with ultra settings and 60 fps? I have enough faith in humanity to believe that people don't buy gaming PCs for just one game.

@Pahlehvahn

Looks nice, but I wouldn't get a Seagate HD. They have a high failure rate compared to other brands. I went through two in the course of 3 years. I'll probably never get one again. Western Digital Black or Blue edition would be a better choice, but might cost you $10 more. This link might help.

raglau

Tapio75 wrote: »

squicker wrote: »

Tapio75 wrote: »

I have FX 3.8ghz 6core. It uses about 70% at max on first "core" and about 50 on rest of "cores"

when i use ESOlauncher with 10 min distance and 30 max distance, fog on and extra lightning effects it jumps to about 80% on first and 60 on rest.

First one runs 60fps and the better quality about 50-60 depending of the area i am.

I get about 80% on Core 1 and maximum of 17% right now on Intel Core i7 @ 4.6GHz.

Do you think you could tell me if you have this hotfix installed please? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594/en-gb

This is the one I was talking about earlier which helps Win7 along when it comes to thread scheduling on AMD chips. I don't believe it's an auto install from Win Update. Its native in Win8 onwards.

No, i have not manually instaled this and im pretty sure its not installed automatically either. I only have critical updates enabled so it is not evenm loading all the stuff one would normally get.

Something that might do similar is core parking but i have nothing to it either.. I do have manually disabled all powersaving features on bios and windows that affect processor or gpu.

Yes, there are two crucial hotfixes for getting the best from AMD on Win7 - the one I posted for the scheduler and the core parking one. In theory core parking is disabled when you set Power Management to 'Max Performance', but you must install hotfix 2646060, to allow the scheduler hotfix to do its job properly. Otherwise the OS may park one of the modules that the scheduler wishes to use an execution unit from.

A big wall of text follows and I am sorry, the high level point I am making if you don't want to read the below, is that these two hotfixes properly explain to Windows 7 the AMD architecture, otherwise the OS just assumes they are Intel style architecture and it makes bad decisions about thread scheduling. In Win8, this support is native BTW.

Long version:

I can say without a shadow of doubt that the scheduler hotfix does give more performance from the AMD CPUs in a variety of server based scenarios. The client aspects of it I have one example of. The friend I mentioned earlier had really poor performance in Rift using AMD Bulldozer and I suggested turning off 50% of the cores, as I was aware of AMD's exection unit\module approach. This radically improved performance. Shortly after this, MS released the hotfix above and I asked he install it and re-enable the cores. When he did this, performance was the same with cores enabled + hotfix as previously with cores disabled, i.e. good performance.

The reason this helped him is that prior to the hotfix, the OS was distributing threads in a round-robin way across execution units (which until the hotfix, were exposed to the OS as actual discreet cores, which in all honesty they are not because they are not truly independent), but once the hotfix was installed it distributed threads on a per module (a module contains two execution units, or 'cores' as AMD like to call them) basis where it could. So the OS then preferred under-worked modules to under-worked execution units. This prevented a scenario where a module could contain two hard-working threads which then competed for bus, cache and FPU, because the OS thought it was doing a good thing by separating those threads across (what it thought were) 'cores'. Once the hotfix was installed, the OS preferred to split them across under-loaded modules, preventing this contention for cache, FPU etc. Basically, instead of loading up execution unit 0 & 1 and tying up a whole first module while perhaps the other modules were doing nothing, the OS with the hotfix would load up execution units 0 & 2, equating to module 0 & 1, a far better way of assuring that resources had their own cache, FPU etc.

Now, this scenario may not arise a lot, but when it does you get stalling and you cannot guaruntee your desired app (ESO in this case) will be the one to win the 'race' to get the resource, because from the OS perspective, it merely has standard priority. So IMO, that hotfix is well worth it.

Fleymark wrote: »

Sarenia wrote: »

Congratulations on the new build.

I, too, would urge you not to go with Windows 8 and instead choose 7. Windows 8 is already abandoned in lieu of Win 9 develpment, much the same as Vista being an alpha for 7. Myself and many others find it an abhorrent mess to use (unless you're on a touchscreen device).

Have fun, whatever your choice.

PS: To those below, I'm not "hating", I stated a personal opinion, and clearly indicated it as such. There's no need to have an aneurism. To say that I don't like 8 because I'm adverse to change, is to generalize me. I've used more operating system distributions in the past year than most people do in a decade.

I've seen this said many times and I have no doubt that it's the case, but doesn't 8 have a bit more under the hood for gpu utilization?

I have noticed no performance benefit in Win8 over 7, although there are some decent extras with Win8 such as the excellent HyperV virtualisation engine, which I do use.

I think the thing to remember is that Windows 7 is outside of mainstream support in January 2015.

Do you really want to be putting an OS on your PC that is out of key support in 3 months? Yes you will get security patches until 2020 but vendor support from apps you run will start to disappear and more and more you'll see "Requires Windows 8.x" on things you buy etc.

I personally don't think it's a good idea to spending MORE than Win8 to buy a product that is retired in 3 months.

After Jan 2015 hardware and app vendors will be well within their rights to drop forward support for Windows 7. You could suddenly find your favourite peripheral no longer gets new drivers and features for Win7 etc.

It's simply not a great investment, whether you like Win8 or not.

SFBryan18

ExiledKhallisi wrote: »

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Alright guys any last comments/changes/tips? Because I'm about to order all this.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/z4f3NG

Nice but....

Plays ESO with 60FPS on high settings using almost 6 yr old laptop....

Wonders why.

The honest truth about computers.... if you buy the top of the line, you're getting swindled and pimped.

What kind of video card does your laptop have because I find your claims hard to believe?

raglau

SFBryan18 wrote: »

ExiledKhallisi wrote: »

Pahlehvahn wrote: »

Alright guys any last comments/changes/tips? Because I'm about to order all this.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/z4f3NG

Nice but....

Plays ESO with 60FPS on high settings using almost 6 yr old laptop....

Wonders why.

The honest truth about computers.... if you buy the top of the line, you're getting swindled and pimped.

What kind of video card does your laptop have because I find your claims hard to believe?

Indeed, I have a two year old Core i7 laptop here with an NVidia GPU inside and it cannot match my desktop...

However, it's fair for the other poster to say that if you buy absolute top of the line you are paying over the odds in a pure performance:price ratio, because of the laws of diminishing returns. That said, top of the line in CPU pricing terms is really not so much nowadays. £170 for a Haswell refresh Core i5 capable of running at 4.5GHz or more, that's not a lot of money. And being as that's the pinch point for ESO, that's money well spent in this case IMO.

But for GPU, yes, it's often better in bang for buck terms, to get one or two cards behind the top of the line.