- Joined
- Apr 2, 2011
- Messages
- 2,660 (0.56/day)
Me thinks that this is not a troll, but someone that genuinely believes what they are saying. Unfortunately, sometimes our reach exceeds our abilities and we need help. It's time we offer a helping hand, rather than scorn.
Qualify the statements, with what you see.
1) The CPU isn't the highest end i7, but it is a k series. Overclocking is viable, but no hyperthreading means limited professional uses.
2) Storage is...odd. Rather than a RAID array, they focused on a huge single drive. Great performance from the SSDs for programs/OS and a single drive for "Blu-rays." Fishy, cost inefficient, but not entirely unreasonable for a completely unaware user. Sometimes, only having one storage drive is worth the huge bump up in cost.
3) 970 GPU is a great budget option. Easily plays 1080p content, which is in line with most users current requirements. I'm assuming this was chosen because there had to be some concession to "budget" in a starter build.
4) RAM is..completely off base. The idea of more is better is interesting, but after about 8 GB nothing currently on the market uses it. This is a rookie misuse of funds, but not entirely unreasonable for the uninitiated.
I'm tending to agree with other posters, so let's talk. There are
1) Go down to either a 16 GB or 8 GB memory kit. Pricing is much lower, and if you actually need it you can easily upgrade in the future. Right now, 32 GB is insanely overkill.
2) You've got SATA ports and RAID, so use it. For the price of that 8 TB drive ($250) you could have three 3 TB drives, and setup a RAID 5 array. Yes, that's 2 less TB now, but you can have a single drive fail without data loss and you can get 7200 RPM spindle speeds. Honestly, the 8 TB drives are largely unproven and at a price premium. If your data means that little to you, go ahead and go with that single point of catastrophic failure system.
3) Why go for the highest end SSDs? You can't form a RAID 0 array with disparate sized drives, so you're looking at an OS, programs, and storage drive. There are much cheaper SSDs, and the performance isn't appreciably worse from a usage standpoint (even if benchmarks say otherwise). If you wanted raw speed a couple of 512 GB drives in RAID 0 would beat out just about anything on the market.
4) Motherboard choice is... interesting. A starter isn't going to overclock, so why spend more on a motherboard than the CPU? Remember, starter builds assume the user isn't trying to set new overclocking records.
5) That GPU, it makes no sense. Cut $300 out of something else, and you'll have enough to go to a 980ti. Why you'd choose to go for a more budget oriented card, while spending gross sums of money on the SSD, is just unfathomable. The GPU would matter more than the milliseconds you save on storage access speeds with and SSD.
6) OS, monitor, and peripherals; where are they? If this is a starter build, with none of these things, then it isn't a starter build. You could fairly suggest it's a middle range tower build (with a high end tower price), but anything beyond that is just inaccurate.
In fairness, this isn't a well thought out build. You've budgeted too much money in some area, while cutting others to maintain a more "reasonable" budget. It just doesn't make sense. For example, let's look at the Blu-ray storage issue. If you were to fill that 8TB (1000*8=8000 GB) with movies, and each movie was 50 GB (dual layer Blu-ray), that's be 160 movies. At $20 a pop, you're looking at $3200 in movies. You're trusting that much data to a $250 drive, without a backup if you should have a crash.
I just don't think you've thought the build through, and it needs another few revisions. Good initial try, but please don't spend this kind of money without someone reviewing the plans. You'll wind up with less performance, at a higher cost, and that's just silly. For $2300 you should be able to build a fairly high end PC, not a starter model.
Qualify the statements, with what you see.
1) The CPU isn't the highest end i7, but it is a k series. Overclocking is viable, but no hyperthreading means limited professional uses.
2) Storage is...odd. Rather than a RAID array, they focused on a huge single drive. Great performance from the SSDs for programs/OS and a single drive for "Blu-rays." Fishy, cost inefficient, but not entirely unreasonable for a completely unaware user. Sometimes, only having one storage drive is worth the huge bump up in cost.
3) 970 GPU is a great budget option. Easily plays 1080p content, which is in line with most users current requirements. I'm assuming this was chosen because there had to be some concession to "budget" in a starter build.
4) RAM is..completely off base. The idea of more is better is interesting, but after about 8 GB nothing currently on the market uses it. This is a rookie misuse of funds, but not entirely unreasonable for the uninitiated.
I'm tending to agree with other posters, so let's talk. There are
1) Go down to either a 16 GB or 8 GB memory kit. Pricing is much lower, and if you actually need it you can easily upgrade in the future. Right now, 32 GB is insanely overkill.
2) You've got SATA ports and RAID, so use it. For the price of that 8 TB drive ($250) you could have three 3 TB drives, and setup a RAID 5 array. Yes, that's 2 less TB now, but you can have a single drive fail without data loss and you can get 7200 RPM spindle speeds. Honestly, the 8 TB drives are largely unproven and at a price premium. If your data means that little to you, go ahead and go with that single point of catastrophic failure system.
3) Why go for the highest end SSDs? You can't form a RAID 0 array with disparate sized drives, so you're looking at an OS, programs, and storage drive. There are much cheaper SSDs, and the performance isn't appreciably worse from a usage standpoint (even if benchmarks say otherwise). If you wanted raw speed a couple of 512 GB drives in RAID 0 would beat out just about anything on the market.
4) Motherboard choice is... interesting. A starter isn't going to overclock, so why spend more on a motherboard than the CPU? Remember, starter builds assume the user isn't trying to set new overclocking records.
5) That GPU, it makes no sense. Cut $300 out of something else, and you'll have enough to go to a 980ti. Why you'd choose to go for a more budget oriented card, while spending gross sums of money on the SSD, is just unfathomable. The GPU would matter more than the milliseconds you save on storage access speeds with and SSD.
6) OS, monitor, and peripherals; where are they? If this is a starter build, with none of these things, then it isn't a starter build. You could fairly suggest it's a middle range tower build (with a high end tower price), but anything beyond that is just inaccurate.
In fairness, this isn't a well thought out build. You've budgeted too much money in some area, while cutting others to maintain a more "reasonable" budget. It just doesn't make sense. For example, let's look at the Blu-ray storage issue. If you were to fill that 8TB (1000*8=8000 GB) with movies, and each movie was 50 GB (dual layer Blu-ray), that's be 160 movies. At $20 a pop, you're looking at $3200 in movies. You're trusting that much data to a $250 drive, without a backup if you should have a crash.
I just don't think you've thought the build through, and it needs another few revisions. Good initial try, but please don't spend this kind of money without someone reviewing the plans. You'll wind up with less performance, at a higher cost, and that's just silly. For $2300 you should be able to build a fairly high end PC, not a starter model.
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