Gadgetory

maybe it's because I'm a sucker for punishment or maybe it's because your strong objections to my component choices but I am back with another holiday buyer's 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 nine hundred to a thousand and about two thousand dollars I'll be using pricing from Newegg us as guidance since they're sorting features are excellent and their pricing is generally very similar to other sources like Amazon calm 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 future-proof Ness 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 triple-a titles sitting at 185 dollars us over a third of our budget AMD by contrast has a variety of budget multi-core CPU options including the athlon x4 860 k which is 70 bucks for a chip with 4 steamroller cores and a heat sink in the box it supports dual channel ram but because our msi a 68 hm e 33 v2 motherboard only has two RAM slots we for went dual channel operation with a single 8 gig stick of kingston valueram here this gives us the option to upgrade to 16 gigs of ram and 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 they're housings are made of but coolermaster is somewhat of an exception here so we went with their elite 350 case with an included 500 watt power supply it's nothing too sexy but it'll get the job done and it has the appropriate 6 pin PCI Express connector for our gtx 960 2 gig graphics card that one was a tough choice because 2 gigs is about half the frame buffer that am he 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 price is that Nvidia partners like EVGA are clearing to gig cards to make room for the more expensive four 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 DX 0 0 1 1 terabyte hard drive with 8 gigs of mlc SSD cache gets my choice here now compared to last year system we saved $6.00 use the same case got twice as many al biet 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 buyers 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 has well based Core i5 4460 I mean sure you lose out on the better onboard graphics and the lower power consumption and it doesn't have hyper threading but it's still a quad core that boosts to three point 4 gigahertz and we get to save a few bucks on our motherboard and RAM since we're using a last generation 16 gig kit of g.skill ripjaws X ddr3 on an MSI b85 g-41 note that I actually went with MSI's non-gaming branded b85 board in this price range to get something with four dimm 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 B 500 watt a much better not to mention 80 plus bronze unit for only seven dollars more than the CX 430 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 it's three and a half gigabyte head once again coming in at 290 dollars 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 OCC tree on 100 goes for pretty much the same price to the dollar as a 500 gig samsung 850 Evo and a 4 terabyte 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 an ass and the the one to solid state mechanical punch is my best bet a DVD writer also made it into the thousand dollar 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 and well gaming performance actually didn't change more than probably 10 to 15 percent 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 terabytes of hard drive space to 4 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 side 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 59 30k with it six processing cores and forty 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 hyper-threading 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 are knocked to a Nhu 14s CPU cooler and a few minutes of tinkering in the BIOS with the help of this easy overclocking guide will easily take care of 4 ram ddr4 is the only choice on the x99 platform so I went with 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance lpx quad-channel memory at 21 33 megahertz it's not setting any speed records but since we're locking ourselves in to 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 in quad-channel should be enough for the motherboard I opted to pay the $50 Asus tax in this case and got the x99 a 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 3.1 10 gigabit is a nice touch I also like the color scheme and that it goes nicely with our Corsair our MX 750 watt power supply and air 540 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 980ti is going to look absolutely the Sikh tastic 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 980ti 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 2 G's 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 watt power supply versus the 750 in our base config for storage I really think people spending this much on a desktop should also have an ass in their house for redundant network storage and backups so a single one terabyte 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 lb at a lower capacity with that same Seagate 4 terabyte 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 970 s 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 terabytes in size 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 solid-state storage to one terabyte more than most people will need for a while I stepped from 4 non hyper-threaded CPU cores to 6 with hyper-threading 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 v ends in the background maybe something like this on raid setup that we showed a little while ago where Nazz 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's 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 in 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 NCIX links in the video description we don't get any sponsorship money from PC hardware vendors for doing these buyers 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 updesk has got you covered there with a wide range of powered standing desks available on updesk dot-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-programmed three different heights for sit-stand and okay actually don't know what the third one is for but it's there so so whatevs the one that I've been using ever since up desk equipped our office is the large size powerup a fairly standard gently curved on one side affair but the benchmarking room is set up with a couple of there 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 op desk over at my up desk dot-com linked in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you like this video do that thing if you just liked it do the other thing and 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 changing your Amazon bookmarks 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