Gadgetory

last year's holiday buyer's guide was a big success for us and between Black Friday and the holiday shopping season rolling around the release of hot games like Assassin's Creed unity our performance guide for which is coming soon so make sure you're subscribed and the requests for me to do another one well all that added up to I guess it's time to drop another holiday buyers guide on y'all Corsair gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for sixteen point eight million color / key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more just like last year I'll be addressing three different price points under 500 around a thousand and around two thousand before the cost of Windows with three different sets of recommendations and rationale for the parts that I chose pricing is pulled from a combination of newegg.com and amazon.com with a sanity check at NCI XCOM to make sure that it's not wildly more expensive at you know who knows some other place so we'll start with just game this system isn't powerful enough for heavy use outside of you know day-to-day general use and 1080p gaming and doesn't try to sell itself based on future-proof news the cpu was the toughest decision here because AMD 750k quad core and intel's g 32:58 dual core are both similarly priced overclockable and can run on cheap motherboards so it came down to the design philosophy for the system the best performance right now and even the Liam DS quad core design might give it the edge in future games the Intel chip gets the nod today thanks to its better single-threaded performance and lower heat output when overclocked which will allow us to turn it speed up a fair bit even with the basic included cooler the motherboard only had to meet a couple of key needs it had to support overclocking on the G 32 58 which it does with the latest bios and it needed a PCI Express 16x expansion slot bingo my RAM choice of a single stick of the cheapest ddr3 that I could find probably looks a little funny since this CPU will benefit from a dual channel configuration with two sticks but while 16 gigs may be useful in the future we don't really need it today and my choice of a single 8 gig stick allows me to upgrade to 16 gigs later without scrapping my existing memory since my board only has 2 Ram expansion slots the case and power supply choice was dictated by the available options really at this price point a case in power supply bundles tend to be available at lower prices but mostly junk so I went with the only aggressively priced bundle skew from a brand that I trust that I could find the video card is where this rig can be a bit flexible based on regular prices in our target cost for the total system the r7 260x is the clear winner given its similar performance to the 750 Ti at 1080p in titles that we've tested recently and it's much lower price storage is where just gain gets the biggest upgrade since last year thanks to the plummeting prices of SSDs in the last year and we went with a 120 gig kingston v300 SSD and that thing is cheap and a wd 1 terabyte Green Drive for mass storage and games so in summary just game is very similar to last year's model with a couple of key differences it's got similar gaming performance but now it gets USB 3 I'll be it not in the front and a much better storage solution which I'd really recommend keeping in or even bumping up to a 2 terabyte drive if you have a big game library but you also have the option to take out the hard drive or go just hard drive rather than having an SSD as well and then dumping that money back into a graphics card where an r9 270 would be a worthy upgrade our second system is game now similarly to just game we didn't worry ourselves about performance tomorrow but unlike just game we've really avoided skimping in areas where we felt like we were losing 20 percent of the potential performance to save 10% of the cost this one is all about bang for the buck the CPU was another tough call here I wish Intel had something all lot more competitive in this price range because between the Pentium chip for 70 bucks and their entry-level K Series i5 for 240 bucks they have nothing that over clocks so for an enthusiast oriented buyer's guide like this one AMD wins at this price point for sure with their six core FX 6300 now my initial plan was to go with a motherboard that supported SLI but I scrapped that when I did my philosophy checked and realized that I was spending about another forty dollars on a feature that I wasn't using today and so we went with the m5 a 97 a very well proven product for a ram I went with 16 gigs of HyperX fury 1866 megahertz ddr3 but I could easily swap that out with a comparable product from another trusted brand like Corsair orgy skill I added the extra capacity though because while strictly speaking games might not need more than eight gigs today web browsers also need to run well on gaming machines and if you're a tab fiend like me you might enjoy the extra breathing room that a bit more system memory affords you the power supply was another component where I picked out something much more expensive than cut it down dramatically when I realized that I was spending too much this power supply might not really look like anything special but it will handle our CPU and GPU just fine as long as we don't plan to upgrade them and aftermarket cooler to give us more overclocking Headroom is a must on this chip thanks to its six processing cores and decidedly last gen efficiency but thankfully there are great choices for around 30 bucks and this one will take care of our chip nicely for the case we went with the same one that we used for our Kaveri build guide about six months ago it looks okay to my eyes it has ventilation over the graphics card area and it's reasonably easy to build an in-game to manage so there you go the graphics card is where we blew most of our money on this machine but the GTX 970 is just a remarkable graphics card that single-handedly takes this from a budget box to a very competent gaming machine and thanks to its power efficiency it saves us a couple bucks on the PSU to boot for storage I feel like 250 gigs is the sweet spot for SSD capacity where you can install programs and pictures but not necessarily lots of games videos on your boot drive without worrying about it too much and this drive is well-known to be reliable and is at a great price right now we also added the best bang for the buck capacity of WD green for secondary storage to go with it the 3 terabyte model costs twice as much as the one terabyte and stores three times as much stuff ok and then finally we checked in an optical drive because it's only 20 bucks and like Yolo right all in all gain now actually has less raw CPU performance than last year's model so if you had a few more bucks to spend power supply with some more room for upgrades or a better CPU might not be a terrible bet but given the size of modern games I stand behind the upgraded storage and I felt like the better GPU was also a worthwhile trade-off for gamers - and that's where that extra money went which leads us to game on our 4k capable gaming machine where we stressed less about saving a few bucks and focus more on having the best possible experience well but without completely losing track of the value proposition of the parts we were using CPU was an easy choice this time the Intel 4690k quad-core overclocks like a bat out of hell and unless you tortured on purpose features enough processing cores for any game and even medium intensity content creation for the motherboard we went with a z87 a because z97 doesn't actually offer a tangible performance benefit and the only thing we were really after here was support for CPU overclocking and support for SLI stepping up to a pro model will give you more creature comforts like Wi-Fi but we decided to allocate our budget a little bit differently this year for RAM I didn't change anything from game now 16 gigs is still enough for most people today and you can check another kid in tomorrow if you feel like you need 32 at said time and then for our power supply we actually decided to splurge a little bit here since we went with two graphics cards and a windowed but fairly small case so we grabbed a fully modular power supply which provides the benefit of helping things look tidy since its windowed and even though it's not all about the bling-bling um gallon doesn't hurt to have an expensive gadget look expensive rather than shoddy speaking of expensive I blew over a hundred bucks on the cooler this time around and there are a couple of reasons for that one this is an excellent cooler will keep our CPU safe while overclocking and two is that in spite of its power this is shaping up to be a pretty quiet machine so I wanted something that wouldn't ramp up too hard even when gaming it would stay quite quiet the case was an easy one the fantex enthu Pro has the features and build quality of cases that cost much more and it's compatible with all the hardware we need with ample cooling and I think it looks fantastic and then where we spent again all the budget the dual GTX 970 graphics cards that I squeezed into our 2000 ish price point now I know what you're going to say - you always say single better GPU versus sli lesser GPUs and that's actually not what I always say I always add except sometimes the 970 is one of those sometimes it's so similar in performance to its bigger brother the 980 and so much less expensive that two of them costs only about 20% more than a single 980 but will absolutely wreck the single card solution in any games that scaled basically at all in SLI for storage we basically yolo'd out and doubled the capacity of our previous choices even though a 730 series SSDs performance benefit over the older 520 isn't that huge in the real world and the six terabyte green cost more than twice as much as the 3 terabyte green I mean you have somebody got somewhere to store your stuff though right you know storage is very flexible you could decide how you wanted to spend that money but there you go and then finally more Yolo I'm get threw in a DVD burner again just in case you want one which makes our game on machine not only by far the fastest gaming rig in our buyer's guide which of course I would hope it would be since it's the most expensive but also the most versatile there are a couple things you could add like stepping up to a core i7 and doubling up on ran if you really need the extra multi-threading and multitasking performance but other than that this is about as much as I'd recommend ending on a mostly for gaming tower that will deliver a great user experience across the board for a very long time speaking of great user experiences for years to come five for club is giving our viewers that's you guys a chance to participate in one of their most epic giveaways ever they're offering 60 months 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being by answering a pretty basic question and then you can also get three more entries for each friend you refer through social media so pile up those entries and get yourself a bunch of free clothes and I head to the link in video description that's bit dot lead slash FFC giveaway to enter and even if you don't win the contest you should check out five four anyway it's a great service deliver styles close to your door on a monthly basis is everything I just described except you actually have to pay for it alright guys thank you for checking out our holiday PC buyer's guide 2014 I hope you enjoyed it like it and share it with your friends if you thought it was helpful leave a comment if you have any feedback on our Hardware choices would love to hear from you guys and as always check out the link in the video description if you want to help us out by contributing monthly or buying a cool t-shirt like the one I have or the five for one either of those is okay they both helped us and then what was the other thing right we're changing your Amazon marked one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy say for example PC components thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe