PC Gamers Unite: PC Setups and Specs (Large Photos Warning).

How are the insane CPUs holding up in modern titles?

 

I once read that a Hollywood director, when asked what their best film was, might say "My next one!".

In that spirit I'll say my next PC is going to be ... amazing.

Currently I have an i7 6700 (non k), ASUS H170 Pro mobo, 32 GB ram, a GTX 1070 FE, Two Mushkin Stryker 480 GB SSDs, two HGST 3 TB drives (used, from Amazon), one internal, one external, an external 3 TB Seagate (ran hot, had to take it out of its plastic case and it now sits in an open aluminum external drive bay with an HGST drive) and Windows 10 Pro installed on a 480 GB MyDigitalSSD BPX NVMe SSD. A 4 TB external WD, and a flash drive for recovery. PrimoCache set to cache my OS and game drives reads and writes to around 14 GB of memory, out of my 32, dedicated to that.

I have a bottom mounted 550 watt, gold rated, Rosewill Photon PSU. A total of four case fans (three of which I added), and a stock Intel fan on the PSU. And a CyberPower 390 watt UPS. I really like its monitoring feature, and automatic voltage regulation. Running all of that (including the external drives), and a modem and router, plugged into it and I'm only using 66 watts as I'm typing this. I keep the monitor plugged into the "surge protection only" connection of the UPS. If I lose power I can plug it in so as to perform a shut down. Gaming is usually less than 250 watts, even with the 1070 overclocked.

I have a 43" Sony X800D that is pretty ideal for gaming, considering its price class.

My last PC suddenly died, and my backup PC decided to temporarily throw a fit, so I bought this one last year on sale at a good price from Best Buy. It's an iBUYPOWER. I added in the drives from the old one.

 

Dupe!

 

pretty cool setup you have there.. The UPS is something I might need for the next PC I build, although I am into laptops, for personal reasons like moving around a bit too much, the wanderer life.. My future PC hopefully is more powerful than the one I currently have, and in face I have a desktop PC allegedly more powerful than my laptop, which to me is the best PC I've ever had -along with the first, back in the late 90s, which was quite powerful at the time, but this one is better.

I have a MSI GS63 7RE-048XES Stealth Pro with Intel Core i7-7700HQ/16GB/1TB+256SSD/GTX1050Ti/15.6" FullHD IPS screen, which has a slightly less powerful CPU than my desktop computer -which has a Ryzen 1500X- and a vastly less powerful GPU -my desktop computer has a RX 570, 5.2 teraflops vs 2 something teraflops of the 1050Ti-, plus I have a 4k screen that I use with my desktop computer.

However, my laptop feels a lot faster because it has a SSD and it features 2 GPUs which frees up resources in the secondary GPU -the 1050Ti- and you can play games, go to the main desktop interface, etc etc without impacting performance, and it produces a better image quality, because the panel is much better, given the fact that it is a IPS screen. Love my laptop very much.

 

There's a tweak I needed to apply to my MyDigitalSSD BPX NVMe SSD in order to enable full write performance. Some people were saying to use Toshiba's NVMe drivers as they enable the tweak. It basically enables a setting in Device Manager which when enabled runs a risk of bricking your drive/losing data if you lose power. I probably wouldn't notice if the tweak was off but I benchmarked the drive when I bought it. Lol, and PrimoCache is just silly for what it does to benching ones drive. Though it's totally limited by the memory one allocates to it. It's sort of a beefed up version of Samsung's utility.

I'd post the tweak, but it's easy to find, and it has an inherent risk, imo, even with a UPS. Presumably professional level SSDs have enough capacitors so that a UPS is just redundant for the safety of data integrity in case of power loss. Crucial had one, and AnandTech noted when they neglected to keep those extra capacitors for the consumer variant.

Anyway, between write caching on the drives, write caching with PrimoCache, and also saying "why the heck not, it's on sale, buy one and be done with it.", I bought this one on sale at Amazon. Nice to have if there's a power outage, for recharging phones.

 

This is my awesome setup. Tremble before it's powah!

i5 6500 3.2GHz. Stock fan! Not too much point in a custom since it's not overclockable. It's quiet enough.
h110 mATX motherboard. It has a nice amber power light.
16 RAM of some sort. Can't quite remember what I went for.
250 SSD
2 TB HD
GTX 1060 6GB
24" Monitor which is about 8 yrs old. It actually has quite nice black levels and response time.
Fractal 1100 Case - This a really nice bargain case. It's only 175cm wide so shoves under the desk nicely. Card length is limited to about 285mm but I only ever buy mid range anyway. I still have an optical drive in it, but could use the mount for another HD. Only using the front case fan that was included. It doesn't need more cooling.
Mug - Not over keen on the pattern, but holds a good amount of tea and has pleasantly thin walls.
Desk. £20 Ikea model that is 10 years old. Fits nicely as the back of the dinning room.I do want to replace it but I've struggle to fine something as practical. A good sized keyboard shelf makes all the difference.

This all works well. Runs most modern games at pretty high setting at 60fps or maxed out at 30fps.

Will probably upgrade a year or two after the next gen lands.






Behold! My awesome powers of cable management!

 

All I want is a 1070/1070Ti but that costs not too much less than TitanXP MSRP if you can manage to find one in stock

The 970 is turning out to be one of the best GPU purchases I ever made.

 

Why not Titan V?

 

Looks fantastic! I myself wasn't sure about RGB lighting, but when done tactfully it ain't so bad