Building a Gaming PC

Hi folks,

So I'm finally in my new flat which means I won't be looking to move any time soon. What this means is that I can start to look at building myself a decent gaming PC and move away from gaming laptops at last.

While I have a very basic knowledge in terms of how a PC works and what hardware serves what purpose, I don't particularly know the in-depth stuff required to build my own PC or how to know what parts will be compatible with each other.

The purpose of this thread is for people to give me advice, pointers, and hardware recommendations for building a relatively decent gaming PC. I'm going to leave this as an open budget for the time being as I'm not really in a position to start buying any parts right away (buying and furnishing a flat sort of eats up all your money).

Advise away!

To give some perspective on what I am using now:

Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 860M 2GB (Ideally looking to stick with nVidia)
Memory: 16GB (Ideally building with at least 32GB, possibly with expansion potential)
HDD: 1TB Seagate Momentus XT Sata6Gbs 64MB Cache Hybrid Hard Drive w/ 8GB SSD Caching
Processing: 2x Quad Core i7-4810MQ

Games I play:
All Blizzard games like some sort of demented fanboy
BF4 (thanks Windy!), hopefully BF1 when it comes out
Dota2
All the clickers imaginable
Occasional survival MMOs

 

Well I suppose my first question is about motherboards, as far as I understand it, the motherboard is kind of important for deciding what other components are usable. This is where my knowledge goes to hell.

 

Well currently I'm aiming for about £2000 (~3000$) but naturally my current available funds aren't anywhere near that so it won't be a buy parts today and start building next week kind of thing.

I've been gaming on laptops since 2008 and ended up buying a new laptop every two years or so. That was because I've been studying and moving about so much that there's been no practical point in having a desktop. My thinking is that if I build a relatively high-spec PC this year/start of next, then I'll be set for a good few years to come.

When I've been on a new laptop I can never run games on their highest settings so I'm never anywhere near a high-end. My current one is CyberpowerPC custom build which is pretty damn good and set me back £1000 2 years ago in September but running games on high really heats it up, even with cooling pad.

 

GPU I'm looking at going for nVidia GTX 1080 8GB.
CPU thinking i7-6700K @ 4.0Ghz Quad core.

In fact pretty similar to yours but with some silly expensive in there. Been toying with the idea of a double GPU but can't really see how that's going to really give me that much more than the single.

I think the thing that I'm most unsure about is how to choose a mobo and a case. I've read some awful stuff about people finding halfway through a build that their case won't fit the hardware they've got (and some even worse stuff courtesy of PC Gamer). And then of course there's cooling...

 

Well I was thinking a full tower would fit nicely under my desk to the right side. I still need to buy a sofa (waiting on an invoice to be paid for that) which would be to the right of the desk itself but there would be enough space for decent airflow there. As you can see I've got my two laptops set up there. The centre view is my Fangbook, the one on the right being a 5-year-old HP XPS, the last decent laptop range Dell seemed to make (closest now is Inspiron and they're just not able to handle the heat they generate). There is a decent cable tray under the desk behind the drawers which is where the majority of the cables are hiding for this set-up.

Idea would be to go for dual-monitors in a similar layout. Probably start out single to stretch out the cost over a longer time period. Already have a decent keyboard and mouse so that's a tiny fraction of the cost covered!

 

One supplier I'm looking at currently says they should have the GTX 1080 in stock on June 30th which gives people time to pay my invoices. Just under £580 with free delivery which is cheaper than suggested on the nVidia page.

Currently what I'm looking at based on advice thus far:

Case: Haf-X (£150, £11.50 p&p)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (£580)
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K, 4x 4.0 GHz (£282)
MoBo: ASRock X99 Extreme4 LGA 2011v3 (£140)
RAM+Cooling: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB + Airflow (£135)
1TB SSD: Crucial MX200 1TB Sata 6Gb/s 2.5" (£250)
OS: Windows 10 Home 32-bit/64-bit English International (£85)

Total: £1633.50

 

And this is why I don't just go ahead and buy stuff! I didn't even think to check. I've always stuck to Intel i Quads (currently have 2x Quad) and they've run fine and given me no issues. That's the kind of spec I'm looking for, dual Quads being not quite so vital.

I was thinking of getting multiple drives anyway, but initially was thinking a main SSD with a load of space would be good for loading all my games in.

 

Another thing I might want for easy use would be a wifi chip. Running CATV around the whole flat might be a messy and awful job.

 

Of those two mobos I'm leaning towards the Z170 due to number of ports. I like the memory upgrade, though I will want to look at some additional cooling elsewhere as well. Cheers for the Newegg link, hadn't actually thought too much about looking around, just found a link!

Going with the new memory, CPU and mobo ideas, that brings current cost to approximately £1650. Still looking at hard-drives and thinking of going down the route of a 256GB SSD for boot with a 3TB disk drive for general storage. There's always options to expand anyway but it seems like a decent starting point. Looking at the various SSDs on Newegg I'm noticing a variety of different connection types, what should I be looking for? I rather assumes SATA3 but then there are various other connections (PCIE for example).

 

I was kind of thinking of air cooled simply because it's my first build and water cooling sounds mega complicated and risky if you screw it up. Depends, how much more efficient is it?

In terms of HDD I guess then I'll replace it with this one. Extra £40 but it's otherwise more or less the same as the other.