fatcat theorizes his next gaming PC
I love doing this, and it is fast approaching two years since I built my current PC (with upgrades here and there). So, to the point of what I'm thinking/looking at.
Case: Fractal Design Arc Mini
Not the prettiest case ever, but it can hold two water cooling kits (more on this coming) and is Micro-ATX. I don't want an 70lb case anymore. I want compact/sleek/quiet.
Motherboard: Intel Z77. Still debating. Gigabyte |ASUS| you know the drill. Micro-ATX of course. 4x SATAIII will be a must with one PCIE 3.0 16x and minimum PCIE 2.0 x4 slot (see Revo Drive below)
CPU: Intel i7. Either the 2600k, 2700k, or 3770k. Microcenter has sales on these all the time and I'll get whatever my budget feels like at the time. 4 cores with hyperthreading for total AMD pwnage.
CPU HEATSINK: I love my Noctua, but this bad boy is gonna be water cooled for lowest noise making machine, so will be going Corsair H100 which mounts perfectly in the Arc Mini with a complete push/pull setup.
RAM: I have 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3-1600 now. Since RAM is cheaper than gas I'll probably get some faster DDR3, or maybe I won't. Open to suggestions there.
VIDEO: I have a nVidia Geforce GTX 670 now. It's fast, it overclocks, runs cool, it gets the job done. No need to change. A year from now we can see what the market has.
VIDEO HEATSINK: But, the fan on my GTX 670 can get whiny loud, TIME TO WATER COOL! Looking at this: Arctic DCACO-V750001-GB Accelero Hybrid Air/Liquid GPU Cooler First, it fits perfectly in the front of the Arc Mini case. Comes with heatsinks for the RAM. It does look ugly as sin. May have to modify and am completely open to suggestions on a 120mm GPU water cooling kit solution if you have one
OS DRIVE: 128GB SSD. Cheap, fast, enough room for the future or any program I forget to install on another SSD.
GAMING SSD: 2x256GB SSD Raid 0. Can you say 1000MB/s? "Don't go Raid 0 fatcat, what if the drive fails?" 1: SSD's don't go click click boom. 2: Cloud gaming. You have heard of Steam right? I can just re-download the game. I think 500Gb will be plenty of room for games. Yes this is total epeen. Deal with it.
Program SSD: I have a Revo Drive 120GB PCIEx4 card. It was a gift. It does 500+MB/s. I'll put anything not gaming here.
DUMP HDD: Fine, I'll put a mechanical drive in here for all the crap I download and play around with. 2TB SATAIII. This is will probably be the last thing I do, see next item.
BACKUP: I have a Raid5 server in another room and will get a cloud backup program.
POWER SUPPLY: I have a Corsair 850w now. I 'think' it will be enough?
5.25" DRIVE: hahahahahahaha, not even going there. I don't own any Blu-ray discs and have a 10ft. home theater setup.
OS: Windows 7, cause 8 sucks.
So, there's what I'm theorizing right now. What ya got for me Icrontic?
Case: Fractal Design Arc Mini
Not the prettiest case ever, but it can hold two water cooling kits (more on this coming) and is Micro-ATX. I don't want an 70lb case anymore. I want compact/sleek/quiet.
Motherboard: Intel Z77. Still debating. Gigabyte |ASUS| you know the drill. Micro-ATX of course. 4x SATAIII will be a must with one PCIE 3.0 16x and minimum PCIE 2.0 x4 slot (see Revo Drive below)
CPU: Intel i7. Either the 2600k, 2700k, or 3770k. Microcenter has sales on these all the time and I'll get whatever my budget feels like at the time. 4 cores with hyperthreading for total AMD pwnage.
CPU HEATSINK: I love my Noctua, but this bad boy is gonna be water cooled for lowest noise making machine, so will be going Corsair H100 which mounts perfectly in the Arc Mini with a complete push/pull setup.
RAM: I have 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3-1600 now. Since RAM is cheaper than gas I'll probably get some faster DDR3, or maybe I won't. Open to suggestions there.
VIDEO: I have a nVidia Geforce GTX 670 now. It's fast, it overclocks, runs cool, it gets the job done. No need to change. A year from now we can see what the market has.
VIDEO HEATSINK: But, the fan on my GTX 670 can get whiny loud, TIME TO WATER COOL! Looking at this: Arctic DCACO-V750001-GB Accelero Hybrid Air/Liquid GPU Cooler First, it fits perfectly in the front of the Arc Mini case. Comes with heatsinks for the RAM. It does look ugly as sin. May have to modify and am completely open to suggestions on a 120mm GPU water cooling kit solution if you have one
OS DRIVE: 128GB SSD. Cheap, fast, enough room for the future or any program I forget to install on another SSD.
GAMING SSD: 2x256GB SSD Raid 0. Can you say 1000MB/s? "Don't go Raid 0 fatcat, what if the drive fails?" 1: SSD's don't go click click boom. 2: Cloud gaming. You have heard of Steam right? I can just re-download the game. I think 500Gb will be plenty of room for games. Yes this is total epeen. Deal with it.
Program SSD: I have a Revo Drive 120GB PCIEx4 card. It was a gift. It does 500+MB/s. I'll put anything not gaming here.
DUMP HDD: Fine, I'll put a mechanical drive in here for all the crap I download and play around with. 2TB SATAIII. This is will probably be the last thing I do, see next item.
BACKUP: I have a Raid5 server in another room and will get a cloud backup program.
POWER SUPPLY: I have a Corsair 850w now. I 'think' it will be enough?
5.25" DRIVE: hahahahahahaha, not even going there. I don't own any Blu-ray discs and have a 10ft. home theater setup.
OS: Windows 7, cause 8 sucks.
So, there's what I'm theorizing right now. What ya got for me Icrontic?
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Comments
Beyond SSDs dying, occasionally RAID cards (or software RAID for that matter) will drop a perfectly good disk for various reasons (firmware/software bugs being the most common), when this happens on a RAID0 array, there is a not-insignificant chance that at least some of the data on the array will go tits-up for various reasons. So, as shwaip said, RAID0 can be fine... just make sure to back up any data on it that you don't want to lose (or redownload, cuz even with a decent Internet connection, downloading a huge Steam library is a pain in the ass, also, bandwidth caps).
I've been using Raid 0 since the KT7-Raid with WD200BB hard drives. And I'm well aware of the risks, which is why I mentioned my backup plans within my post.