New Build - Need Assistance

[DeaanL]

I've been planning to buy a new PC for months now and have decided to buy all the parts individually and a family friend is going to build it for me. I've used pcpartpicker to list all the parts and have done a reasonable amount of research into each part in order to try fit under my £1000 budget, so far I've got this:

CPU - Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor

CPU Cooler - Be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 67.8 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler

Motherboard - Asus MAXIMUS VII Ranger ATX LGA1150 

Memory - Kingston HyperX Fury White (2x8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory

Storage - Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB SSD and Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD

Video Card - MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Twin Frozr 

Case - Corsair Graphite Series 230T Black

Power Supply - EVGA SuperNOVA 650W 80+ Gold

I'm not sure how important the size of a case is, if I should be getting a mid tower case or a full tower case. The Dark Rock Pro 3 looks massive to me and I'm worried about it all not fitting into the case I've chosen.

Is a 650W PSU good enough or should I go for one with a 750/800W?

Any advice towards this would be great as I'm not the best with computer hardware and don't want to mess it up.

Cheers

 

[Rossss]

I'm no expert but I can tell you a few things. 

I'm not sure how important the size of a case is, if I should be getting a mid tower case or a full tower case. 

• Make sure you have at least 3 HDD/SSD slots in your case. It may come in handy later if you want to add a third.
  

 The Dark Rock Pro 3 looks massive to me and I'm worried about it all not fitting into the case I've chosen.

• All good brands of pc parts will provide specs and sizes on their website (CPU Cooler HERE and case HERE, both also shown below respectively). Take your CPU Cooler sizes and compare them to case sizes. Again, no expert but allow room for expansion and airflow. 
  

From these your CPU cooler is below the limit by 2mm. 

Storage - Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB SSD and Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD

1TB approx £35 (Scan.co.uk)

2TB approx £53 (Scan.co.uk)

3TB approx £75 (Scan.co.uk)

• I have a 1TB and would honestly advise a 2 or 3 TB as I am pretty much full. Again, allows room for expansion. 
  
• Lastly, looking at case drive bays you are all good for disk space
  

 

[DeaanL]

• I have a 1TB and would honestly advise a 2 or 3 TB as I am pretty much full. Again, allows room for expansion. 
  
• Lastly, looking at case drive bays you are all good for disk space
  

Thanks for the help Ross, i'll definitely go for a 2TB drive then instead. I didn't even think to look at the dimensions it never crossed my mind, thanks a lot mate.

 

[Rossss]

Thanks for the help Ross, i'll definitely go for a 2TB drive then instead. I didn't even think to look at the dimensions it never crossed my mind, thanks a lot mate.

No problem! It's good because it's easily expandable later on (provided you have the ports/place to put it). I never expected mine to ever be full  

 

[Zeito]

Sorry dean i'd skipped over the 1TB drive (in work, need to provide the illusion i'm working) but yeah a 2TB drive isnt much more expensive and gives you more storage.

The DRP3 cooler will fit - i just fitted one in a NZXT 410 - it's a close fit, but by god does it look imposing in the 410 case. Silent as the night too!

 

[RonniePickering]

If you ask me even the i7 4790k is overkill for these reasons: 
Only go for the "K" if you are planning on overclocking however it is nice to have due to better cooling abilities
Most games including Arma don't take advantage of the i7's hyper threading.
I would personally go for the i5 4670k or the new i5 6600k. 
P.S the 970 might not be as good as the AMD's 390  which is £2 less but that does not matter so much.

 

[Zeito]

@RonniePickering

Overkill is exactly what you want in a pc as you want it to last a good few years. What's overkill today might not be overkill in 1 or 2 years.

Wouldnt you rather have an unlocked CPU now, rather than wish you had it later on?

Arma is a CPU intensive game - the more power you can throw at it the better. There is also an Enable HT option on the launcher splash i believe. 

I wouldn't recommend an AMD card as the tend to run quite hot, and i've seen numerous cards have driver failure issues.

 

[RonniePickering]

@RonniePickering

Overkill is exactly what you want in a pc as you want it to last a good few years. What's overkill today might not be overkill in 1 or 2 years.

Wouldnt you rather have an unlocked CPU now, rather than wish you had it later on?

Arma is a CPU intensive game - the more power you can throw at it the better. There is also an Enable HT option on the launcher splash i believe. 

I wouldn't recommend an AMD card as the tend to run quite hot, and i've seen numerous cards have driver failure issues.

Whilst i'd agree with you about overkill not being a bad thing, the HT which is one of the reasons for it costing so much is useless to games and actually in some cases has been proven to lower fps i doubt they'll actually try to improve fps with it but I might be wrong.
Also Amd cards do run hot however at the moment they are winning the budget card market with Nvidia's drivers being complete garbage recently.

 

[Zeito]

Whilst i'd agree with you about overkill not being a bad thing, the HT which is one of the reasons for it costing so much is useless to games and actually in some cases has been proven to lower fps i doubt they'll actually try to improve fps with it but I might be wrong.
Also Amd cards do run hot however at the moment they are winning the budget card market with Nvidia's drivers being complete garbage recently.

The good thing about hyyper threading though is having those extra logical CPUs. A lot of applications arent written for 4 cores, let alone 8 logical cores and will run on the first 2, with the OS doing somefettling behind the scenes to spread the load, but you can have OTHER apps say TS or whatever you want run on the other under-used cores, freeing up more clock cycle time for arma on the primary cores. You do this in task manager with 'Set Affinity'.

NVidia has had some driver problems recently, but when you're building a gaming pc with high-end components, you dont skimp and buy a budget graphics card. It's like buying a ferrari and then having part-worn tyres put on it or filling it up with cheap supermarket petrol.

 

[DeaanL]

Sorry dean i'd skipped over the 1TB drive (in work, need to provide the illusion i'm working) but yeah a 2TB drive isnt much more expensive and gives you more storage.

The DRP3 cooler will fit - i just fitted one in a NZXT 410 - it's a close fit, but by god does it look imposing in the 410 case. Silent as the night too!

Switched out the case to a Fractal Design S and i'm hoping it will be a less tighter fit as ive opted to just go for the regular DR3, going to up to a 2TB drive also. Cheers for the help