Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is not the Forum you are looking for.

This is a fair system but overkill in some ways. Plus, since you're using a notebook right now you probably don't already have a monitor.

1. If you don't overclock, there's no sense in getting a Z77 chipset motherboard or a "K" series chip. I'd recommend this:

i5 3330 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116781 $190 (saves $20)

ASROCK B75-Pro - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157329 $70 (saves $25)

If you do want to play with overclocking, by all means get the Z77 and 3570K, they're great parts.

2. RAM is relatively cheap but 16GB is overkill right now and you can shave your budget there. EVE can comfortably run on a system with as little as 4GB, and remember, you can always add more RAM later if you need it. Additionally, there is little performance gain going for DDR3 faster than 1600mhz on an Intel chip, especially if you're not using the integrated graphics. I recommend this:

Mushkin Silverline 2x 4GB - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226217 $63 (saves $72)


3. The 660 is a fine card but it's also overkill for EVE. An HD7770 will still be able to max the game out with AA for $100 less. If you play other games it may still be worth going with the 660 (or an HD7870). This one's up for debate.

Asus HD7770 1GB - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121663 $100 (saves $100)


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With all of those savings you can probably fit a 27" IPS panel monitor into your budget, and still have a PC that performs the same for your purposes. My recommendation is this screen:

Viewsonic VX2770 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824116582 $280

^ There are a lot of other great screens out there but I recently picked this one up for my wife and have been very impressed with it. IPS panels have more vibrant and accurate colors and superior viewing angles to cheaper panels.


This is the kind of performance you can expect from the above listed system:

http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/7107/evefps.png

Wrong forum.

But still: http://techreport.com/review/24350/tr-february-2013-system-guide/2

Great starting point for building a system, TR hasn't failed me yet.

CPU: Intel Core i5 3330 $185

M/B: ASRock H77 Pro4/MVP $75

CPU Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper TX3 $20

RAM: Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) KVR1333D3N9K2/8G $65

VGA: GIGABYTE GV-N660OC-2GD (GeForce GTX 660 2GB) $210

HDD: Western Digital WD Blue WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" $65

Case: BitFenix Outlaw Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower $60

Case fans: COOLER MASTER R4-S2S-124K-GP 120mm Case Fan (4 in 1 pack) $12 (x1 or x2, see comments below).

PSU: Antec EarthWatts Platinum Series EA-550 550W $90

Total: $782 / $794

Now some comments:

1. Cpu. Intel offers best performance per core so far, which is the thing you need for gaming. And with four high-end cores your won't find yourself lacking CPU performance anytime soon. Of course, you can save some money and go for previous-gen AMD CPUs which appears to be enough for EVE, but don't forget that you buy this PC for a time and what is enough today may become insufficient tomorrow.

2. Motherboard. ASRock offers best bang-for-buck so far and their boards are most balanced. I recommend you to go for H77 Pro4 instead of more cheap B75 Pro3 since the first one looks more reliable for me as it shares it's PCB layout along with all components with the more expensive overclocking-allowing Z77 Pro4. The key word is "reliability" here since we're not building an ultimately cheap office "typewriter".

3. CPU Heat sink. I've used this one in my practice and it is pretty silent, uses a standard (read: easy replaceable) fan and it's speed is variable. Also, it's relatively easy to install. Performance is far enough for the targeted CPU (even in 30+ C environment).

4. RAM. No point in investing more money into something more fast than DDR3-1333 if you're not going to squeeze all possible from the CPU's built-in graphics core. However, I would go for 16Gb of RAM personally, since it tends to become more expensive once the new generation comes out. And as I've mention before, what is enough today, may become insufficient tomorrow, so, once you'll find yourself needing more memory, it may be not so easy to obtain anymore.

5. VGA. Why not RADEON? The key is once again reliability. ATi's drivers had suck big time before, they do suck today and I don't see anything really changing there. They made me scream and yell at night dozens of times in my practice, so I've decided to stay with NVIDIA (but keep an eye on ATi/AMD waiting any notable changes). If you feel lucky and want to get some more bang for your buck, let me know and I will make a research on AMD/ATi cards within the price range, but at the moment I don't want to spend my time on it, sorry.
Now on the model itself. 660 appears to be an overkill - for solo player running a single client, but you haven't clearly stationed how many clients you want your PC to be able to run simultaneously. I've got the same VGA and it allows me to run 4 EVE clients @Ultra high gfx setup in one time. Also, all MMOs are very delusive in their system reqs - once you find yourself in a huge battle with many players involved, low-end graphic cards can fail hard. I even recommend you to go spare and take a look at 660 with 3Gb once you find it possible to spend extra $35 on your PC.

6. HDD. Just a good performance+capacity / price ratio, more reliable than Seagate and more silent than WD Black models (while performance is very close). Hybrids are still not reliable and don't offer a huge performance difference so far.

7. Case. Solid-looking with plenty of cooler mount points, modern chassis w/ bottom-placed PSU, good review rate.

8. Case fans. And this 4-in-1 pack is a very cool offer since those fans are pretty silent and still have good performance. You can mount 3 of those: one for HDD (behind the front panel, blowing in), one at the back panel exhausting the hot air out from CPU cooler/MB and the third one at the sidewall, also blowing in to cool your graphic card. Also, you can go a bit tricky and add hand-made dust filters: go to a pharmacy, buy some medical face masks. Cut off the boards and you will see they have two layers: take the internal one (which covers the face itself). Take a sticky tape and stick the filters to the fan mount places from inside. Now you have to add something between the filters and the fans to prevent your fans from sucking the filters inside their rotors. A used mouse pad, fiber- or rubber-based would be great: cut it into pieces sized to fit your fan's angles, screw holes in it and stick it with any glue to the mount angles of each fan. Now mount the fans and cover the fissures between a fan and a filter/wall. In this case I recommend you to go for 5-8 fans blowing in since the filters will lower the fan's performance by quite a bit. In this case reverse the one behind the front panel to exhaust. The main idea of this build is raise the air pressure inside your case by blowing it inside out with clean air, leaving no chance for dust to scope in. I've made a lot of PCs using this approach and all of 'em are running cool (the oldest one is 2.5 years old and still hasn't any dust in it).

Gotta' continue in the next msg since I've run out of symbols lol.

Well for just EVE you do not need that kind of power, so i5's etc are a bit overkill for just running EVE with up to 3 accounts. However, for ~800$ you can get pretty decent gaming computer which is good for a lot more than just EVE.

Assuming you already have a display, keyboard and mouse ...

Case ~ 50$
GFX Card ~300$ (a 7950 for example should keep you going for a long while - reasonably good deal and you get good set of games with it)
CPU ~150 $ (i3 or some quadcore AMD, for example)
Mobo ~ 75 $
RAM ~75 $ (8 GB is enough, but you could pull of also 16 GB with that budget)
PSU ~ 75$ (~550W is enough for a single GFX card)
SSD or HDD ~75 $ (can get 64 GB SSD for that price, but installing anything more than windows and EVE on 64 GB is questionable, EVE is a bit under 20 GB altogether)

The central piece of a gaming computer is a GFX card. Everything else you just need good enough to not choke the GFX card. If you are willing to overclock go for AMD, otherwise i3 is decent enough for gaming computer other than few specific titles (Civilization 5, for example) and tends to consume less electricity.