Confused.com????

[TotalNoob]

good evening, 1st post so hi to all.

Been a console gamer pc gaming has never really interested me until now. I know very little about them but the one thing I keep reading is its a bad time to buy,

I have a budget of around £1200 don't need a monitor as I already have a 1080p one.

Pc will be used for gaming (Fortnite, PUBG, cod, battlefield, tomb raider ect) and also for my son and daughter to do homework on

I have been looking and come up with this, Is it any good? could I change/improve anything? Also looked at a couple of the review models, ENIGMA K7 and ENIGMA X02, would these be better?


Case
CORSAIR SPEC-04 TEMPERED GLASS MID TOWER GAMING CASE - BLACK/RED
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-8600K (3.6 GHz) 9 MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® TUF Z370-PLUS GAMING: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM)
8GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060 - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
1st Hard Disk
1TB WD BLACK 3.5" WD1003FZEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
1st M.2 SSD Drive
256GB SAMSUNG PM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 2800MB/R, 1100MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
CoolerMaster MasterLiquid Lite 120 High Performance Liquid Cooler
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
LED Lighting
50cm RGB LED Strip
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
Windows 10 Multi-Language Recovery Image - Unlimited Downloads from Online Account
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Google Chrome™
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 8 to 10 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,207.00 including VAT and delivery

Unique URL to re-configure : https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-z370-pc/xC8S2quCGu/


Many Thanks

 

[Oussebon]

would these be better?

I'd suggest the Engima X02 as it's near enough the same spec for £200 less. The review builds have a heavy built-in discount which for £1000-£1200 makes them more or less impossible to beat with a manually configured spec

 

[TotalNoob]

Thank you, I was told by a friend that perhaps the cooling wouldn't be good enough on the Engima X02 and the hard drive is a bit slow??? I have no idea tbh!

 

[Oussebon]

I don't think either of those are issues.

An i5 simply doesn't need elaborate cooling, unless you plan to add a beefy overclock (I'm assuming you're not). The Frostflow 100 (also known as ID-Cooling SE-214X) is a 120mm tower cooler and that's more than enough for cooling an i5 at stock speeds even under heavy load. It's in the same kind of class as the extremely popular Cooler Master 212 Evo / 212x.

As for the HDD, the speed is fine. WD Black HDDs command a huge price premium which for gaming isn't worth it at all. In fact for most specs post here these days it's not really worth it. The performance in games will be identical, besides which you'll be putting favourite titles on the SSD anyway for the faster loading speeds. The regular 7200rpm drives are more than fine for general usage, and tbh one is much like the next. I think the only thing you'd notice from a WD Black would be the hole in your bank balance - and maybe the extra noise since WD Blacks can be pretty loud.

There are reviews of the CPU cooler here: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...rdware-Reviews&p=397278&viewfull=1#post397278
And an article on HDDs and gaming here: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1741-wd-blue-vs-black-comparison-best-drive-for-gaming*
(* A WD Blue drive in the article is analogous to any other 7200rpm drive like ones by Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, etc)
If you're particularly interested

 

[TotalNoob]

Ok thanks again.

Sorry to be a pain but my son's been having a look and he tends to think after watching comparison videos that 8gb 3000mhz ram give better fps than 16gb of the 2133mhz, is he right?

He also likes the idea of rgb on the motherboard and the spec 04 tempered glass case, so at the min were leaning towards the top configuration.

Again I would like to say I know next to nothing on pcs and this to me is a fair chunk of money so was looking at the something that's going to last a few years.

Pcs also offer a overclocking service apparently, is this worth doing? Would I need to change the cooker to say the 240 life instead of the 120?

Thanks again and sorry for been a pita

 

[SpyderTracks]

Sorry to be a pain but my son's been having a look and he tends to think after watching comparison videos that 8gb 3000mhz ram give better fps than 16gb of the 2133mhz, is he right?

There's certainly a case to be made for this. Not all titles benefit so much from greater frequencies but there are some that show a massive gain from faster RAM. Plus 8Gb will be ample for now and it's easy to add more yourself should you want to in the future. I'd recommend 1 x 8Gb rather than 2 x 4Gb

He also likes the idea of rgb on the motherboard and the spec 04 tempered glass case, so at the min were leaning towards the top configuration.

IMHO he's a man after my own heart. My view is, go overboard on the case because it's the central cooling factor for the system and therefor important for longevity as well as aesthetics. There are huge cooling gains from tempered glass and steel, as well as ageing better. It may be worth adding an extra fan to draw from the rear as that case only comes with one fan on the front, then you'd have 2 on the roof (from the CPU cooler) and one on the rear, should be good airflow.

Again I would like to say I know next to nothing on pcs and this to me is a fair chunk of money so was looking at the something that's going to last a few years.

Pcs also offer a overclocking service apparently, is this worth doing? Would I need to change the cooker to say the 240 life instead of the 120?

Overclocking is certainly worth it, costs about £10 more, you need to put the build together from this configurator:
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-z370-overclocked/
I would personally suggest the H100i V2 Corsair cooler for an overclock with quiet fans (the stock ones are noisy). If you'd rather have an air cooler, the Noctua is superb.

 

[Oussebon]

Sorry to be a pain but my son's been having a look and he tends to think after watching comparison videos that 8gb 3000mhz ram give better fps than 16gb of the 2133mhz, is he right?

In most games the difference will be 0 or barely measurable - and certainly not perceptible (if you can feel the difference between 71.2 and 71.5fps, you're not human).

He's right, however, that in some games 8gb 3000MHz will give a useful performance boost over 2133MHz RAM.

Although the only 2 games where I've seen it make a difference are Fallout 4 and World of Warcraft. Going from 1600MHz DDR3 to 2400MHz DDR3 gave me upto 16% more FPS in WoW - but that was in one location. In another location it was more like 5-6% more - and in any event I was well above 60fps. In Total War Warhammer, however, it made me get an extra ~0.3 frames per second when I was already well above 60 anyway.

Also, tests for framerates are usually done under somewhat artificial conditions. Tests for benchmarks are usually done with just the game running. But in real life, when playing a game, one might have music/video streaming, a load of browser tabs, some office software, a voice client etc running. In these cases, having more RAM can make a bigger difference to performance than faster RAM (although again, the framerate difference might be barely perceptible anyway). But it does make alt-tabbing between applications much smoother and faster to have more RAM, if you have games and browsers using a lot of it.

NB: You could buy the Engima X02 for £1029, buy 2x8gb 3000MHz RAM for £85, and still be around £100 better off (you could probably ebay the original RAM for more than £85 too...).

If buying a customised spec I'd always advocate going for faster RAM, but I wouldn't advocate paying £200 more for it, which is more or less what buying the above spec over the Engima is doing.

Overclocking is certainly worth it, costs about £10 more, you need to put the build together from this configurator:

I'm going to beg to differ on this occasion - because of the budget level. While the overclocked spec will be only £10 more with the same components, and I'd absolutely recommend it on most occasions.. the OP can't get an overclocked spec with the same components as above. It needs a much more expensive PSU and CPU cooler, and at this budget level I'd be inclined to spend that cash on other things.

The H100i with the quiet fans alone is almost £100 more than the Frostflow 100 air cooler. The TXm PSU is £40 more than the 550W VS. Certainly both have their merits but together they're £140 extra out of a ~£1200 budget. If I were going to advocate spending £140 more on the CPU's performance, I'd suggest getting an i7 over an i5, rather than overclocking an i5.

Although there's hardly any difference between an i5 8400 and an i7 8700k even when paired with a 1080 ti at 1080p resolution(!) so I wouldn't advocate spending more on the CPU at this budget level. It's not going to be the bottleneck in almost all titles after all

(also, I think the OP was asking about the 240mm Cooler Master Lite cooler over the 120mm one. tbh either of those is probably not as good as the Noctua air cooler - though the 240mm one might do for an overclocked i5..)

 

[Oussebon]

Only quite niche gaming builds around ~£1200 should be without a GTX 1070, in my opinion. Spending £1200 or so just to get basically the same spec as the £1029 Enigma would be a shame.

So, if spending £1200 (or a bit more) on a system with RGB LEDs and 3000MHz RAM, maybe:

Case
GAME MAX FALCON BLACK GAMING CASE (RGB LED)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-8400 (2.8GHz) 9MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® TUF Z370-PLUS GAMING: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM)
8GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 4GB)
Graphics Card
8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1070 - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready! ()
1[SUP]st[/SUP] Hard Disk
250GB WD Blue™ 3D NAND 2.5" SSD, (upto 550MB/sR | 525MB/sW)
2[SUP]nd[/SUP] Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Super Quiet Titan DragonFly Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
LED Lighting
50cm RGB LED Strip
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
Windows 10 Multi-Language Recovery Image - Unlimited Downloads from Online Account
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365
Anti-Virus
BullGuard™ Internet Security - Free 90 Day License inc. Gamer Mode
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Warranty
3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 8 to 10 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,244.00 including VAT and delivery

Unique URL to re-configure : https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-z370-pc/C76zkKP9Bc/

The i5 8400 is all-but as good as the i5 8600k and costs £60 less, helping pay for a GTX 1070.

I suggested the Falcon case as it's a very good case, especially for the price, and has 2 RGB LED fans built in. If going with the Spec-04 tempered glass version, I'd suggest buying a couple extra case fans.

 

[SpyderTracks]

In most games the difference will be 0 or barely measurable - and certainly not perceptible (if you can feel the difference between 71.2 and 71.5fps, you're not human).

He's right, however, that in some games 8gb 3000MHz will give a useful performance boost over 2133MHz RAM.

Although the only 2 games where I've seen it make a difference are Fallout 4 and World of Warcraft. Going from 1600MHz DDR3 to 2400MHz DDR3 gave me upto 16% more FPS in WoW - but that was in one location. In another location it was more like 5-6% more - and in any event I was well above 60fps. In Total War Warhammer, however, it made me get an extra ~0.3 frames per second when I was already well above 60 anyway.

Also, tests for framerates are usually done under somewhat artificial conditions. Tests for benchmarks are usually done with just the game running. But in real life, when playing a game, one might have music/video streaming, a load of browser tabs, some office software, a voice client etc running. In these cases, having more RAM can make a bigger difference to performance than faster RAM (although again, the framerate difference might be barely perceptible anyway). But it does make alt-tabbing between applications much smoother and faster to have more RAM, if you have games and browsers using a lot of it.

NB: You could buy the Engima X02 for £1029, buy 2x8gb 3000MHz RAM for £85, and still be around £100 better off (you could probably ebay the original RAM for more than £85 too...).

If buying a customised spec I'd always advocate going for faster RAM, but I wouldn't advocate paying £200 more for it, which is more or less what buying the above spec over the Engima is doing.

I'm going to beg to differ on this occasion - because of the budget level. While the overclocked spec will be only £10 more with the same components, and I'd absolutely recommend it on most occasions.. the OP can't get an overclocked spec with the same components as above. It needs a much more expensive PSU and CPU cooler, and at this budget level I'd be inclined to spend that cash on other things.

The H100i with the quiet fans alone is almost £100 more than the Frostflow 100 air cooler. The TXm PSU is £40 more than the 550W VS. Certainly both have their merits but together they're £140 extra out of a ~£1200 budget. If I were going to advocate spending £140 more on the CPU's performance, I'd suggest getting an i7 over an i5, rather than overclocking an i5.

Although there's hardly any difference between an i5 8400 and an i7 8700k even when paired with a 1080 ti at 1080p resolution(!) so I wouldn't advocate spending more on the CPU at this budget level. It's not going to be the bottleneck in almost all titles after all

(also, I think the OP was asking about the 240mm Cooler Master Lite cooler over the 120mm one. tbh either of those is probably not as good as the Noctua air cooler - though the 240mm one might do for an overclocked i5..)

I assumed the upgrades would be an additional cost, not sticking to budget, yeah, if you wanna stick to the budget, then don't sacrifice the core components (CPU and graphics) for aesthetic niceties, not worth it.

 

[Oussebon]

Ah yeah, I hadn't read it that way but now you mention it, it's a good point.

If the budget is being substantially increased, the COOLERMASTER MASTERCASE H500P case is worth a look as it has tempered glass and the RGB fans work with Asus Aurasync I believe. Personally I prefer the aesthetics of the Corsair Crystal 460x (at least going by photos) but it uses a separate controller for the fan RGB LEDs. Some people might prefer to do it all via Aurasync.

 

[TotalNoob]

No wonder I stick to consoles so much to take in ��

I'm liking the 1070 spec but it says the 1070 is pre order only, is this just out of stock at the min?

 

[Oussebon]

is this just out of stock at the min?

Yes, it was released in June 2016 and hasn't been replaced with a newer model yet. So they're available, PCS must just be out of stock right now as you say

Note that you can buy the PC without a graphics card and fit your own. The GTX 1070 PCS sell is £482. It won't take you long to find one at a similar price elsewhere if you want to order the PC without a GPU and add one yourself.

 

[TotalNoob]

Think I will drop them a message tomorrow see if they know when it's likly to be I stock

 

[TotalNoob]

Just had a thought, would a ryzen system be more beneficial I'm as my son will also be using it for his computer science homework as well as all his gsce work or will it make no difference

 

[Oussebon]

No difference. If you needed a 6C/12t CPU to do GCSE homework, not many people would have GCSEs

Leaving facetiousness to one side, a Ryzen CPU has advantages in very highly multithreaded tasks of course, but even tasks that benefit from additional cores/threads can sometimes still prefer the slightly higher frequencies/IPC of Intel CPUs. There are multiple benchmarks that show Intel Coffee Lake i5s outperforming an R5 1600 in Adobe Premiere Pro encoding for example. I don't think your son will be doing nearly enough of what Ryzen clearly wins out on to make going for it the better option. Otherwise you'd have said his main uses will be rendering in Blender and compiling code extensively, rather than gaming and some relatively trivial coursework demands. (I mean the hardware demands are trivial, not the work)

If he intends to stream his gameplay on Twitch/Youtube etc, that could be different. Since you're asking the PC to run a game and encode video at the same time.

 

[TotalNoob]

He will be streaming to you tube and recording his gameplay from Xbox and ps4 on a capture card to apparently

 

[Oussebon]

Streaming especially from consoles isn't something I'm overly familiar with. As far as I know, the demands on the CPU of streaming/recording with a video capture card from console aren't particularly high as the capture card's doing a lot of the work itself.

However, streaming PC games to youtube with something like OBS can be quite demanding, and a Ryzen CPU is arguably a better choice here as the extra threads of an R5 over an i5 help the CPU with the load of encoding the video while running the game.

There's also an argument for dropping the GPU down to a GTX 1060 and spending what you save on an i7 or R7 CPU. Since a 1060 is more than enough for a very good 1080p gaming experience anyway.

There's an article on the i5 8400 and streaming here: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/...amd-r5-1500x-game-streaming-benchmarks/page-3

i5 8400 GTX 1070 gaming build (£1244) (from earlier post)
i7 8700 GTX 1060 gaming/streaming build (£1183): https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-z370-pc/nSdpWfX5w7/

R5 1600x GTX 1070 gaming/streaming (1224): https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/amd-am4-pc/kvg6JjcFkh/
R7 1800x GTX 1060 (£1179): https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/amd-am4-pc/wvY4RHrVuU/

Though if buying AMD Ryzen I would suggest buying 16gb RAM even if it meant dropping the SSD to balance the budget, as you might have issues going from 2x4gb to 4x4gb and getting it to still run at the higher frequencies.

Both the 8700 and R7 1800x are capable streaming CPUs. From articles like:
http://www.jeuxvideo.com/dossier/74...es-6-coeurs-a-mettre-sous-le-sapin/746717.htm
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwrevie...ryzen-streaming-gaming-overclocking?showall=1
they seem quite evenly matched and it depends a lot on what you're streaming and at what settings etc as to which offers better performance.

 

[TotalNoob]

Want to say thanks for all the advice, specially from Oussebon really helped.

Placed my order last week so now the waiting game begins

Thanks again

 

[Oussebon]

Glad it helped - keep us posted with how it all goes

 

[TotalNoob]

Well pc arrived today but all was not well. After speaking to pcs and running some tests seems like the gpu didn't make the trip and died in transit. They posted me a new one but won't be here till Monday.

Currently running without a gpu but the display is to big for the screen but the resolution option is greyed out for some reason so can't change it.

Bloody Friday the 13th