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Gaming Builds @ $700 & $1200 - May 2015

2015-05-01
excellent hey everyone and welcome to today's video this is my monthly builds video I'm going to start doing this every single month or at least that is the plan so these are my may 2015 gaming builds and i went with gaming builds because those are kind of the most popular builds when it comes to like builds and stuff so just a couple notes to kind of kick things off here first is that I'm doing this monthly second is that i'm going to be using pc part picker in order to actually pick my parts out you guys if you're not familiar with vc part picker you you should be if you're into building your own computers so i'm going to post links to pc part Picard down in this description not only that though but i also wanted this video to have a bit of interaction with you guys and i want you guys to be able to provide your feedback and also have some influence on the builds that i do each month so what I'm also going to have going on here is a straw poll I'm going to post that only live chat right now and the idea is that you guys can choose kind of the parameters for the build going on next month so that would be June but there's some weird things since this is the first episode of next month is June and I'm going to be actually a computex at the beginning of the month up next month so I can't have you guys vote because it's going to be a weird one for next month because it'll be comput x time so the straw poll that i just posted in chat and that will also be in the video's description that you guys can vote if you're watching this in the future you can just choose which of the two builds i go over today you actually want me to put together spoiler alert it doesn't matter i wanted to do that but it really doesn't matter i already have the parts for one of these builds and I guess it's instead of you guys actually voting it's more just guessing but this is what I'm going to be doing in the future so you'll have more influence but I'm I guess that kind of summarizes what this is all about let's just let's just press on ahead with our first build which is actually an AMD build so let's jump over to PC part picker I'm logged in and I have some saved parts lists over here so you can see I've got some of the older ones I'd originally did this back for the holiday builds right right around black friday in 2014 so let me jump to the first one here which is a AMD base build seven hundred dollar price point and these are both gaming PC's another theme that I went for with this particular with today's builds was that they're both micro ATX and micro-atx is a form factor that I kind of like because it's a little bit smaller but it's not like as limiting as mini ITX and if you're building a simple gaming PC and all you really need is like you know a basic video card in there not a ton of expansion I think micro ATX is a great option so let's just run down this i went with an AMD FX 6300 for the processor which is less than 100 bucks depending where you buy it of course six core am3+ I didn't want to go with FM socket on this time around just because I wanted the full fledged not integrated graphics part three point five gigahertz and I think it turbo is also up to like 4.1 or 4.1 like that as well you know it's got got your cash on there and all that good stuff and it's a true six core processor so this is the foundation for lots of builds out there to go along with it I picked out this asrock motherboard this is a 970 em pro 3 micro ATX board and I believe there's some pictures of it over on newegg yes there are which is a pretty nice looking bored here as you can maybe see it's all black it's got four dimm slots which I really wanted to have it's got your full complement of six SATA ports as well say to rev 36 gigabits per second port so you can attach a bunch of SSDs to this if you wanted to other than that you also have these your expansion slots for which are laid out a little bit differently you actually have a buy one slot at the top which i think is okay because you can't drop a card on their the second slot here is going to be our graphics card goes that also leaves you a fourth slot down at the bottom if you wanted to do another expansion card in the future or something like that but only 65 bucks for this on newegg right now so I think that's a pretty good deal and one of the nice thing about PC park pickers it will warn you if you have a possible compatibility issues so this is saying that AMD 970 chipset motherboards might not be complete a bios update but you should be okay with this one because the 970 empro 3 only came out like literally a month or two ago so they should all be updated and they should all be compatible to FX 6300 remember I just went with a basic eight gig kit from g.skill nothing special or fancy about this as you can tell from the very small picture that I pulled up this is just a really simple eight gig kit ddr3 1600 which is all the speed you'll need you're not gonna be running integrated graphics off this or you find you don't have any heat spreaders or anything like that but it's black PCB so it's not going to look okay for this build since I was going more for the budget I did not really spend too much time that's that's the other build I didn't spend too much time like focusing on like make sure everything looks pretty for this for the other build I did a little bit more of that but for solid-state for storage drive for storage we have a crucial be x 100 this is a newer SSD look at that rating well it's only two ratings but five stars and this one is just a really good bang for the buck so again you got a sub $100 this load come on newegg load supposed to have fast loading times so yeah you get you get what sub hundred dollars what is the actual price point on this yeah less than 100 bucks depending where you buy it of course 250 gig SSD seder rip three nice and fast and even though this is a budget drive it's going to be going just as fast as many of the other SSDs that can get out there that are at three so I like having an SSD I didn't go with a with mechanical storage for this one and that was specifically because this was a budget build and when you go in for a budget build and you're looking at storage I think it's better to invest in an SSD up front because you'll get that speed out of it and chances are if you're building your own system that you can find a 500 gig 3.5 inch drive somewhere like lying around like get one of those from your old system or something reformat it repurpose it and you'll be good to go that or you know you can always add on a you can add on a mechanical drive to this if you want to up the storage because you will want something besides that 250 gig SSD here's the big daddy of the bunch though which is this sapphire radeon r9 290 and oh my gosh this is two hundred forty bucks right now at newegg and even you can add another ten dollar promo code to it and there's a twenty-dollar mail-in rebate now originally I turned off the mail-in rebates which is another cool feature you can do see part picker if you don't think you'll ever turn them in so there's actual list price is 270 for this but then you get a twenty-dollar min rebate card and then another ten dollars off with a promo code that's going on right now but r9 290 custom design cooler from from sapphire which i think is very important for a 290 or 290x I like the aftermarket ones a lot better 3 fans this is going to be a beast and when you compare it to the other cards in the range right now from AMD are from nvidia i should say like a a butch you're basically looking at a 960 or 9 64 gig I would definitely go with an R 92 94 this price especially the aftermarket one from sapphire it's overclocked it's either overclocked out of the boxer you can't overclock it core clock is a thousand but you should be able to overclock this one very nicely as well but uh I like that card I think that's the bit that's the most pricey item in this bill and that's pretty normal for a gaming build is to spend a lot more on the graphics card than you might other things lastly for the case I went with the cooler master silencio 352 I loved this one because I have some experience with it and I know it's a good case here's somewhere where I spent a little bit more money this is seventy bucks you can actually get it for like 60 bucks I think it's some of the other online retailers but it's a silent case so it's going to keep everything clad it's got sound dampening it's got a couple fans that are included the extra flow fans which are nice and quiet so this is going to get the job done it's not going to be like flamboyantly stand out like like over-the-top crazy looking or anything like that and yes you could save a little bit of money you could get a 50 or 40 dollar case that will do the job just fine but I like some of the little added benefits you get with the Silencio of 352 mainly that it will give you a much quieter experience overall than some of the bare-bones cases finally we need a power supply of course and for that i have this thermaltake smart 650 watt but with a little bit higher wattage I was originally gonna go with like a 550 for this one but I with a little bit more because it is in our 9290 in there which does draw a bit more power this one 650 watt it's 80 plus bronze certified so it's going to stay nice and efficient and you can get it for as little as 48 bucks at microcenter granite that's what the mail in rebate but an amazon you can actually get it for 55 right now plus five bucks shipping and handling so nice solid power supply again 80 plus bronze it's from thermaltake which is a reputable company so you know it's going to have good into your build quality and all that good stuff and all that stuff right now seven hundred dollars actually it was less than seven hundred dollars when I originally put all this together but that is just kind of goes along with building your own system is that these prices are going to fluctuate so this build should be about in the seven hundred dollar range going forward and again you can click on the link in the description to check out the PC park picker build and I think anyone going with the system like this you're going to have a really good experience for only 700 bucks now a couple other things about these builds I'm not including the peripherals monitor keyboard and mouse so you will need that sort of thing preferably you can carry that over from an old system and I'm not including an operating system as well if you need to get up and running and off the ground you can go with Windows 10 the preview edition right now which you can install for free however you will need an operating system at some point in the future as well that's kind of kind of be the theme for all of these builds are just going to be the hardware but so be it that's that's build one which is seven hundred dollar a and B build and at this point before we move on to build two I do have a sponsor for today's video so i would like to pause briefly to recognize them that is Linda calm and if you guys didn't already know Linda calm is an online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business technology and creative skills via this sponsorship promotion you guys can get a ten day free trial you can go to Linda calm / Paul I have already been using some of their tutorials to learn new tips and tricks for video editing but you could even like go and learn an entirely new field if you wanted to like CAD for example computer-aided design Linda sorts the available courses based on topic or by author or by software or skill level so even if you're a beginner at something like CAD and you've never done it before you can locate videos that you can still jump into and understand easily as always though you can try out any of the courses that are available on lynda.com by clicking the sponsor link in this video's description or visiting Linda calm / Paul that is always also a great way to say thank you to lynda.com for supporting Paul's hardware as well as other YouTube channels out there because they do do a lot of support for us and they keep us running and able to do videos like the one I'm doing right now okay enough the sponsor spot let's move on to the second build which is a little bit more expensive it's also an intel and nvidia build and let's just jump right over oh wait i'm still in the may build let's go with this one all right here's the may twelve hundred dollar bills this is a 46 90 k which is kind of like your III wanna say bang for the buck because he like it's still somewhat expensive or going to pay over two hundred bucks for a 46 90 k but you can't overclock it and i think that's one of the biggest benefits and if you're considering anything and the likes a hundred fifty to two hundred dollar range when you're looking at intel processors i would say just save a little bit more get that case Q because then you can jump into overclocking you can get a lot more performance out of the processor so anyway that that's what we're starting with cpu eyes is at 46 90 k and it's available microcenter if you live near microcenter go pick one up in store 190 bucks there but you can see price range here is all in the kind of low to 225 to 230 dollar range for a let's do motherboard NEX actually for motherboard since this is a micro ATX build again I'm going with dual micro ATX builds today we have this msi z97 mdash g43 LGA 1150 of course the 97 chipset and a cool board from msi here I like this board black and blue color scheme overall and that is important which shall come back to when we get to the case Madea micro ATX it's got integrated graphics of course thanks to the igpu on the Intel processor you got a couple expansion slots here for PCI Express so you can drop in of course your graphics card or if not you can you can also get a bit of expansion there you got your full complement of 6 SATA ports as well and just a nice solid little bored they have a gaming series version of this as well which is a bit more expensive and it does also red and black this one's only 111 dollars at newegg though right now so you're going to save a little bit of money there by not going with the gaming series and it still does everything you want and it's still going to overclock just as good as a gaming series board so there's that one the z97 mg 43 and then I also wanted to do an aftermarket cooler on this one now the default for an aftermarket cooler if you want bang for your buck is almost always going to be your your cooler master hyper 212 plus or hyper 212 evo is what they've upgraded to now that's about 30 bucks for another ten dollars this is kind of going along with the theme of this build which is like I wanted bang for your buck I wanted a lot of performance in there but I'm willing to spend a little bit more on this bill to give you something like like a nicer looking system because I do have a windowed side panel case so for that reason and with this enermax cooler which is the ETS t40 BK which comes with a blue LED fan but also a nice black finish overall it's only about 10 bucks more than a hyper 212 and these are very good coolers too so I think it looks a lot nicer you don't get that kind of unfinished copper and aluminum you get a much cleaner look overall and and I've worked these easy to a great job cooling this 50 bucks at newegg but I think yeah NCIX US has it for 40 bucks good deal there and it's in stock that's very important ok let's get rid of those and let's move on to memory and storage alright so for memory again I wanted to give you a little bit more with this build so instead of eight gigs we went up to 16 gigs now you'll see builds sometimes especially on PC Park picker for some reason that that go with a single stick like so they would have a single 16 gig stick of memory instead of two eight gig sticks or a single eight gig stick instead of 24 gig sticks if I thought that was kind of weird like you got dual channel you're you're really hurting your memory bandwidth by going with a single state granted you leave yourself more upgrade room in the future so maybe something to consider there but the matter the motherboard I've chosen here has four dimm slots so no problem with going with a two by eight gig kick that'll give you 16 gigs and you can even upgrade it in the future you got two empty slots so you're not going to be hurrying I went with the HyperX fury memory here from Kingston or Kingston HyperX line it's ddr3 1866 again with memory like 1600 you're fine but I'll often also search in the 1600 1866 even 2133 range because you'll find faster memory sometimes discounted and if it's available and that's roughly the same price go for a little bit faster memory but the HyperX fury line I really like to look like they got black PCBs they got nice low-profile black heat spreaders and they look really cool so again go on go a little bit more towards looks with this build all right for storage again I gotta have me an SSD in there so probably all the builds that you'll see me doing are going to have at least an SSD at minimum and for this one I want the kingston hyperx tonight Rex fury 240 gig SSD can you know keep it with a Kingston theme here this one's a pretty basic black and white color scheme on it 240 gigs say 23 i believe it's got a fuzz on controller oh no this one has an SF 2281 actually this is the wrong this is the wrong SSD they have two furious fury SSDs and since I know I'm going to be building this one I think the one I'm getting is actually the newer one that has some red on there it's okay though this is a good one too this one's only 95 bucks for a 240 gig it uses a sandforce controller which does a good job you'll find some faster SSDs out there and then new version of the HyperX fury one is a little bit faster so I think for the final thing I'm probably going to go with that one but this one does a good job too and i'll see if i can update this this link here actually maybe pc part picker didn't have the new fury on there because it is a very new release i believe all right but there's your SSD milian down i wanted to also include some storage here some mass storage so we got a WD black series two terabyte 3.5 inch drive you can get this as little as 115 bucks and if you're using a mass storage mechanical drive like this you'll often see the blue driver drives the green drives that people will go for and like again that's cool enough that if you're loading games you'll find a 7200 RPM Black Series drive does give you a noticeable appreciable bump in speed as load times and that sort of thing compared to the green drives or the blue drives which use a lower spindle speed and the Black Series drives also generally speaking are slated to have longer life span and I've always I've always liked the black series so that's why with that one and it's a two terabyte drive for a little over a hundred bucks not too shabby at all okay moving right along here we went over storage oh wait I'm back to the I'm back to the AMD build how did that happen getting confused that's okay alright uh we went over storage now we're going to talk about the graphics card for this one since we were going within an Intel processor I'm lip and Nvidia graphics card also it's a GTX 970 the three point five gigabytes issue memory issue aside the 970 is still fantastic excellent card it tears up games like GTA 5 and all the newest games so I think that is a great option and here again rather than going with the gaming series i went with the this non-gaming series from msi it still has an aftermarket cooler it's a little bit simpler design but it is black and blue and again I'm going with the color scheme for this build so that's kind of island with this it's also a bit cheaper it's it's a good twenty thirty bucks cheaper than the gaming series ones and I think it looks perfectly fine it's still it doesn't have a back plate but it has a black PCB on the back if I can pull that image up here yeah black PCB on the back nice looking card and after Mark coolers going to keep it quiet and I like the gtx 970 so that's why I threw that one in there and you how much is that right now goodness as cheapest 305 right now you can get it on Amazon who was prime cool very nice and then lastly we have case and power supplies so here's where actually this bill kind of started off with with the case which is the BitFenix Aegis 88 aegis Aegeus whatever it's called you know what I didn't do is I didn't switch back to showing you guys what the heck I'm talking about that's important alright so let me show you the MSI graphics card since I don't think I actually showed you any of that all right there's the MSI graphics card closer look again black and blue and since I mentioned the PCB let's go back to that too there's the PCB nice looking PCB alright cool beautiful moving right along though to the BitFenix ages which isn't available on newegg yet so I can't look at their pretty pictures but here's the BitFenix Aegis and it's available in a bunch of different colors I have this case i'm doing a bill I'm doing this build more or less in this case and it's pretty cool looking this is the blue one and color schemes I think it's available in red yellow blue white and black maybe another 12 in there but it's got a big old side panel window it's got a bunch of stuff in there for like water cooling and select some of these pictures they have water cooling setups going on in there but a pretty cool looking case over at all it's got glossy plastic on the front which which some people are into more or some some people are into less but it's got this cool bitfenix logo on the front which is actually like a little mini LED display and you can put your own pictures in there and that sort of thing so that's kind of cool so that's the case I'm going with it's a little bit on the pricier side so this is one hundred and twenty dollars right now right out of the gate and there are there's a lot of competition in this area especially if you're going full size 80 X so this is kind of one of my more like choices due to aesthetics then else elsewise I suppose so yes there are other cases are available out there in this price range that are comparable or even have some better features depending on what case you're looking at but I still like this one and its new and it's got that nice window and I'm going to do a build in it so yeah color is also by the way red white yellow black and blue and I got the blue one because I was like I haven't done a blue build in quite a while to go along with that though Aegis and and when I do the actual build I'm going to be talking a lot about the case in my experience with the building in it and all that good stuff but let's go back to power supply which just to kind of go right along with that Aegis case OOP there we go I went with the BitFenix fury 550 watts which again there's no good pictures as apparently except for on em wave has em waves pictures though they pull up over here stupid alright so la that there's some pictures J actually has a video on the 650 watt version of this so you guys can check that over on Jays two cents the cool thing about this power supply is that it's semi modular but it's also got sleeved cables like all the way down the line so that's pretty cool actually nicely sleeved cables like with no heat shrink showing or anything like that so I thought that was cool and that's again a little bit more of an aesthetic decision going on with this build then otherwise but the overall price which you guys can't see cuz it's blocked off right now is 1200 nine dollars according to PC part picker but that's of course subject to change over time and those are my builds what do you guys think I got the seven hundred dollar AMD build I got twelve hundred dollar Intel bills you guys are food can feel free to vote on my pc part picker everyone on my pc perfect or my straw poll thingy down there and vote but it doesn't matter because i'm going to do the Intel build anyway I've actually already got parts on their way for that and everything but also let us say a big shadow before I go to all the people who have jumped into twitch chat to watch me doing this live this is really a spur-of-the-moment decision this morning to actually do this live so thanks to all y'all who have jumped in there and hope you guys have enjoyed these builds feel free to post your own ideas for builds in the video's description feel free to give me some suggestions on how i might enhance this particular series because again i do want to do this every single month and next month will be the beginning of june i'll be at computex but i'm still going to do something something in this range I don't forget to like the video of course don't forget to share it with all your friends because all of your friends probably you're interested in builds to what else oh you can buy shirts off of my store which is a store all hardware net if you're interested they look just like this one and I have some new ones in the works as well coming out soon thanks for watching this video guys and we'll see you all next time
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