Maybe it's cuz I'm a sucker for punishment. Or maybe it's because your
strong objections to my component choices fear me. But I'm back with
another holiday buyer guide for the gamer in your life who's been really,
really nice this year. Whether that's your child, brother, sister, or just
yourself.
FreshBooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized,
save time, and get paid faster. Click now in the video description to learn
more. As usual, we'll be targeting three different price points in US dollars
before operating system under $500, $900
to $1,000, and about $2,000. I'll be
using pricing from Neweggus US as guidance since their sorting features
are excellent and their pricing is generally very similar to other sources
like Amazon.com and NCIX. And I will
have a link in the video description to all of the products mentioned. So, let's
start with Just Game, a high quality, capable 1080p gaming box that doesn't
sweat small stuff like upgradability or
futureproofness. If it doesn't make the FPS number go up, it does not go in this
rig. So, for our CPU choice here, Intel
has priced themselves completely out of the race with their least expensive quad
core, a must for some modern AAA titles,
sitting at $185 US, over a third of our budget.
AMD, by contrast, has a variety of budget multi-core CPU options, including
the Athlon X4860K, which is 70 bucks for a chip
with four steamroller cores and a heat sink in the box. It supports dual
channel RAM, but because our MSI A68HM
E33 V2 motherboard only has two RAM slots, we forwent dual channel operation
with a single 8 gig stick of Kingston value RAM here. This gives us the option
to upgrade to 16 gigs of RAM in dual channel in the future if we buy a
similar stick and have a little bit of luck. For the case and power supply, I
generally don't really recommend combo bundles because the power supplies
included in them are frankly usually barely worth the metal that their
housings are made of. But Cooler Master is somewhat of an exception here. So, we
went with their Elite 350 case with an included 500 W power supply. It's
nothing too sexy, but it'll get the job done, and it has the appropriate six pin
PCI Express connector for our GTX 9602
gig graphics card. That one was a tough choice because 2 gigs is about half the
frame buffer that AMD offers on competing cards like the R9 370. But at
a price like this, we're likely sticking with 1080p gaming for the foreseeable
future. And at the prices that NVIDIA partners like EVGA are clearing two gig
cards to make room for the more expensive 4 gig models, I think I have
to go with the 20% better RAW GPU performance versus AMD's offering. For
storage, I am one of and apparently one of the only ones on the planet, but I'm
one of the people who leans towards a hybrid or SSHD drive on an entry-level
system. Seagate's ST-1000 DX001 TBTE
hard drive with 8 gigs of MLC SSD cache
gets my choice here. Now, compared to last year's system, we saved $6, used
the same case, got twice as many, albeit
slower CPU cores, opted to save a bit on
storage by skipping the boot SSD, but we turned that savings and our RAM savings
into nearly double the graphics horsepower by reallocating that budget
to the GPU. So, I'm confident that in modern games, this year's model is
anywhere from 70 to 80% faster than the
one from last year's buyer guide. For our next system, future expandability,
features, and usability beyond gaming are much bigger considerations. It's for
this reason that we decided to kick things up a notch with an Intel quad
core. Not one of those fancy Skylake ones that are so hard to get your hands
on, but a last generation Haswellbased
Core i54460. I mean, sure, you lose out on
the better onboard graphics and the lower power consumption, and it doesn't
have hyperthreading, but it's still a quad core that boosts to 3.4 GHz, and we
get to save a few bucks on our motherboard and RAM since we're using a
last generation 16 gig kit of GSkill Rip Jaws XDR3 on an MSI B85 G41. Note that I
actually went with MSI's non-gaming branded B85 board in this price range to
get something with four DIM slots and dedicated ports for all audio channels
and to avoid a killer network card. My
personal experience with them is that the extra features they offer are a
trade-off against just plain working all the time. So, I don't want to pay extra
for one of those. For our power supply, we ended up with an EVGA B500 watt, a
much better, not to mention 80 plus bronze unit for only $7 more than the
CX430 we went with last year. Thanks EVGA for that. Our case choice, once
again, didn't change much, and we went with the NZXT Source 210. It really is a
great value case. There's not really much else to say about it. And the GTX
970 rears its 3 12 GB head once again
coming in at $290. So about 10% cheaper than last
year for the same performance. Although it should be noted that an R9 390 is a
slightly faster option at a higher price
if you bat for the red team. Storage was a bit of a toss up for me for this one.
A 960 gig value SSD like an OCZ Trion
100 goes for pretty much the same price to the dollar as a 500 gig Samsung 850
EVO and a 4 TB Seagate hard drive. And while both are valid options, I
eventually decided that because this is a desktop, it's more likely to act as a
file repository for other devices in the household if you don't have a NAS. And
the the one two solid state mechanical punch is my best bet. A DVD writer also
made it into the thousand machine just in case you need one. So, compared to
last year's model, then we spent the same amount almost to the dollar. And h
well, gaming performance actually didn't change more than probably 10 to 15% in
CPU limited titles. What we did get though for our money was a much faster
CPU for multi-threaded workloads like light content creation, a much better
power supply, and twice the solid state storage on our boot drive, meaning that
fewer games will need to be relegated to living on the hard drive. Not to mention
that we also jumped from 3 TB of hard drive space to four. For our last
system, we are assuming that the buyer is one who cares about getting a longer
life out of his or her system, is one that wants the utmost in performance and
is willing to pay a bit more for it, and is potentially a computer performance
enthusiast outside of gaming, whether that's content creation or some other
demanding workload. So, the CPU choice was a fairly obvious one. I didn't want
to pay as much for a CPU as I did for our entire entry-level gaming machine.
So, the 5930K with its six processing
cores and 40 PCI Express lanes was out of the question. But fortunately, this
generation, the step down 5820K is still
unlocked for easy overclocking and has the same six physical cores with
hyperthreading technology. So, the only thing missing is 12 of those PCI Express
lanes, which won't matter much unless you're trying to run more than a few
high bandwidth PCIe devices, and some
CPU clock speed, which our Noctua NHU14S
CPU cooler, and a few minutes of tinkering in the BIOS with the help of
this easy overclocking guide will easily take care of. For RAM, DDR4 is the only
choice on the X99 platform, so I went with 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance LPX
quad channel memory. At 2133 MHz, it's
not setting any speed records, but since we're locking ourselves into up to 64
gigs of RAM in the future, unless we want to pull that out and replace it, I
don't think we'll be running a crap ton of virtual machines on this PC in the
future anyway, and that speed, especially running on quad channel,
should be enough. For the motherboard, I opted to pay the $50 ASUS tax in this
case and got the X99A USB 3.1. It lacks
some of the bells and whistles of the deluxe model that we use here at the
office, like high-speed AC wireless, but it's got the same overclocking
capabilities. SLI and Crossfire support for multiple graphics cards and USB
3.110 GB is a nice touch. I also like
the color scheme and that it goes nicely with our Corsair RMX 750 W power supply
and Air540 White Edition case. I know it's shallow and I just
spent a little more than I had to on those components, but past a certain
point, case selection in particular is less about fitting the hardware inside
it and more about personal taste. And if we're going to be spending this much, it
doesn't hurt to have a rocking black and white theme going to the build that
especially combined with our MSI GTX 980 Ti is going to look absolutely sick. So,
on that subject then, I opted for a single graphics card this year because I
realized that while my dual 970 setup
last year would perform very well, likely better in many cases than a
single 980 Ti where SLI scaling and the smaller video frame buffer aren't
issues. It still meant occasional SLI
compatibility woes, and it completely lacked a sensible upgrade path,
something that I can see folks spending 2gs on their PCs wanting. So that single
more powerful graphics card provides that upgrade path and that hassle-free
operation with the option to go SLI down the road if you really feel like it.
Although if you see that in your future, I would recommend an 850 W power supply
versus the 750 in our base config. For storage, I really think people spending
this much on a desktop should also have a NAS in their house for redundant
network storage and backups. So a single 1 TB class SSD should be plenty. But
just in case, I put together two options here. A 960 gig OCZ Vector 180 or a
Samsung 850 Pro, albeit at a lower capacity with that same Seagate 4 TBTE
drive from the last config. This machine also, by the way, gets an optical
drive. So although it could be easily
remedied by going dual 970s, again, our top tier config is the only one that
actually gets slightly degraded gaming performance for 2015. I also stepped
down the hard drive from 6 TB since I believe again anyone keeping that much
data on a single drive in their computer needs to re-evaluate his or her
strategy. But the machine also got a few very significant upgrades. It'll look
awesome, be nearly silent, and I doubled my solidstate storage to 1 TBTE, more
than most people will need for a while. I stepped from four non-hyperthreaded
CPU cores to six with hyperthreading. And I doubled my system memory. That's
going to make this machine a freaking beast capable of performing better in
content creation tasks if using all of its horses or just as well as last
year's model in general tasks if its resources are being split by running VMs
in the background. Maybe something like this unrade setup that we showed a
little while ago where a NAS operating system and a gaming machine running
Windows are both running off of the same hardware. So, that then concludes this
year's holiday PC buyer guide. I hope you guys enjoyed it. And remember that
these selections are not hard and fast rules. They're just guidelines. This
year, for example, I didn't assume, except at the very high end, that the
user would be overclocking. So, your best cooling and motherboard choices
might be a little different if you plan to do that. And this is really important
for commodity items like RAM and video cards. My component choices are not set
in stone, and my shopping methodology is pretty much as simple as sorting by
lowest price and scrolling until I find a brand that I trust. So, feel free to
mix and match these things to get the best deals from wherever you end up
buying your new system. Although, on that note, if you decide to use this
guide, I'd love it if you shopped using the Amazon or NCX links in the video
description. We don't get any sponsorship money from PC hardware
vendors for doing these buyer guides because that would be a huge conflict of
interest. But using our affiliate links is a way that you guys can support us
directly regardless of whose parts you end up buying. Speaking of regardless of
what parts you end up buying, you'll probably need a place to put them all.
And Upesk has got you covered there with a wide range of powered standing desks
available on updesk.com. What almost all of them have in common
is the high quality dual motor electronically controlled height adjust
system that lets you either manually raise or lower the desktop surface or
pre-program three different heights for sit, stand, and okay, I actually don't
know what the third one is for, but it's there. So, so what the one that I've
been using ever since Upesk equipped our office is the large size power up. a
fairly standard gently curved on one side affair. But the benchmarking room
is set up with a couple of their squared up L-shaped corner desks to allow Luke
and John to work on a couple of things at once. And they've got some other
really cool options as well, like the upright that has a dry erase board for
the surface on the top. So whether you're just trying to get in the habit
of shifting positions periodically throughout the day or you want to get
some real health benefits out of your new desk by putting a treadmill under
it, check out Upesk over at myupesk.com linked in the video
description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you like this video, do that
thing. If you disliked it, do the other thing. And uh wait, if you liked it,
back to liking it again. Get subscribed. Maybe even consider supporting us by
buying a cool shirt like this one. uh changing your Amazon bookmark, one with
our affiliate code. Instructions for how to do that are up there, or even by
supporting us directly through our community forum and getting a cool little badge next to your name. Now that
you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering, well, what should I watch next? Maybe you could check out
our video where we, let's see, ah, yes,
right, review the Xperia Z5 Compact from
Sony, also linked up there.