Just to clarify, The GTX680 is not a bad graphics card. I'm just against paying for the "brand premium" that comes with FTW-labelled products, when the normal GTX680 runs around $500 or so. But we are still in mid-August, and the GTX680 is the top-end, (one of the) newest graphics card around. That means you're also forking out quite a bit for bragging rights: new + top-end stuff is always released at exorbitant prices, before getting heavily slashed once the next new thing comes out.
If that's something you're willing to pay for, go ahead and buy it. Just be aware of where your money's going; not all of it's for pure graphics performance. (I know I tend to overspend on more efficient PSUs and ITX boards myself.)
CPU CoolerHave you picked a CPU cooler yet? If not, may I suggest the humble
Hyper212 Evo for a start. Cooler Master may not be known for making the top-end stuff, but they know what value for money means. The original Hyper212 was quite highly reputed, and the Evo is another evolutionary step in the Hyper212 series. If you're not overclocking, you can't go wrong with this one.
CaseThere's still $1.5k left over, isn't there? It's a pretty tempting sum of money to spend, I know, and I probably can't (and won't) stop you spending it. But before you throw it into a bunch more HDDs/SSDs or SLI, let's talk upmarket.
For starters, the Antec Nine Hundred. It's a good case, has got plenty of good reviews, and it's great value for money. But it's a dated design, and that shows quite clearly when you're trying to build in it. I'm not saying it's bad just because it's out of fashion. I'm saying the newer cases that are released have HDD caddies (hard drive trays) that make installing drives much easier, and they often have more options for cable management as well, in addition to many other little things that make PC assembly much more
enjoyable.
In the below-$200 range, let's start with the
Silverstone Raven RV02. The most interesting thing with the RV series is probably with the way the motherboard is mounted with the ports facing up. While the cooling advantage a bottom-to-top airflow provides is somewhat questionable, the RV02's build quality isn't. Its successor, the
RV03, is slightly cheaper, although
Bit-tech reviews say it has less focus on cooling than the RV02 (still excellent performance though).
Personally, I'm quite biased toward black monolithic designs. Big black tower?
Booooooring for most people I bet; sorry, I'm just not very attracted to bright colours splashed on a case! Give me a sleek, black aluminium tower any time. If you like stealthed designs, the
Fractal Define XL might be right up your alley. The design is focused on silence; you'll find noise-absorbing material on the side panels, and a front door that minimises noise from the intake fans. There is also space for 10 HDDs too, if you'll ever be using that many.
Tickled yet? Try the
Corsair Obsidian 650D then. Really nice cable routing options, tool-free optical drive assembly, SATA hotswap bay at the top, flexible HDD options, and a sleek brushed aluminium front panel.
If the aluminium's to your liking, why not go full aluminium surface then? There's a 30% promo offer going on the
Lian-Li PC-A70, making it a real value buy. Inside, it's a lot more spartan than the other mentioned cases, but one thing it's definitely not lacking is space.
Bitten by the aluminium bug yet? Ready to go further upmarket, to above $200? I must start to sound like a terrible, boring salesperson by now, so I'll just drop a couple more names here.
Lian-Li Z60.
Corsair Obsidian 800D (case body is SECC steel). There're still many more to scratch your aluminium itch; I'd recommend you look up more reviews before putting down the money.
KeyboardChances are, you're probably using a rubber dome keyboard. If you've ever disassembled keyboards, you'll have noticed a moulded silicone sheet or individual rubber domes where the keys are. These domes, when depressed, press two sheets of traces together to create electrical contact. It's a cheap system that works decently for the most part, but better solutions exist.
Cherry G80 keyboard with keycaps removed, showing MX Red switches below.At one point, keyboards were engineered with each key having its own switch. This technology is superior to what we have in the budget market currently; each keypress closes a circuit to register a keypress (vs squeezing two contact sheets by force in rubber dome keyboards), and the switches can provide excellent tactile feedback. The only problem is with cost; unsurprisingly, manufacturing a keyboard with each key having its own switch is expensive.
But recently, mechanical keyboards are becoming trendy again. That means more and more brands are offering mechanical keyboards, which means more competition, which means ... lower prices! If you have the chance, I recommend you try them out in a retail store, if they carry stock. You'll find it hard to go back to rubber domes after that.
Newegg does carry them, if you're ready to jump anyway. The Rosewill RK9000 starts at a cool $100 and comes with a
variety of switch options. If you're a twitch gamer, I'd suggest going with red or black switches—the red switches are lighter than the black ones. If you do more typing than gaming, try the blue/brown switches. The blues have a really crisp tactile response (a.k.a. the "klack-klack" feel and sound); the browns are more muted.
AudioWhat about sound? Perhaps you might find that onboard sound is more than sufficient for you, but while you're on a sizeable budget, who not take the chance to explore something a little higher-end?
The
Asus Xonar DGX is going for $40 on Newegg, and is a worthy budget buy for a gaming build. If you have semi-decent headphones, you'll definitely hear the difference. And if you have good headphones, what are you still doing using onboard sound?!
All right, maybe you don't have headphones. Maybe you have a 5.1 setup you're already really happy with. Spend that $40 anyway and see if it makes an audible difference to you, and if it doesn't, you can always sell it to someone else. Budget sound cards don't depreciate in price very much, unlike brand-new premium graphics cards.
MonitorTell anyone in the know that you spent more than $2k on your PC build but don't have an IPS panel LCD, and they'll think you're really dumb. What's wrong with your run-of-the-mill cheap
twisted-nematic (TN) LCD, you ask? Position your eyes about 45 degrees above your current monitor. Then 45 degrees below. Do you notice the colours 'washing out' or darkening? Or worse, even 'inverting', like photographic negatives? That, demonstrated graphically, is what's wrong with TN panels. Some may argue that, oh, they sit with proper posture
all the time, so off-angle viewing isn't an issue for them. I don't know about you, but I like slouching in my chair every so often, and I don't see why I should get inferior display quality just because of that.
Better viewing angles aren't the only thing IPS monitors are good for. Desktop monitor IPS panels often have a much greater colour gamut, close to 100% sRGB. What does this mean for us consumers? sRGB (standard RGB) is the working colour space for just about 99.99% of things on the Internet*: video, images, PDFs, etc. This means that or instance, HD videos, not knowing anything about the monitors we use, assume that they are able to produce sRGB colours accurately. If an RGB colour of (255,0,0) is specified, it expects your monitor to produce a certain shade of red. And so on for all 16 million colours.
HDTV/HD video format actually follows BT.709. But the differences are minor enough that they're not worthwhile mentioning here.The sad reality is that pretty much all bottom-budget LCD panels are TN, and cheap TN panels have abysmal gamut. Even the better TN panels have a gamut that is
significantly less than 100% sRGB. So while the video is supposed to show this shade of red, or fuschia, or violet, or aquamarine, what actually comes out of your TN panel is something less saturated. If you've ever wondered why videos sometimes seem washed out on a cheap PC monitor, it could be the monitor's fault, not the video's. IPS monitors, on the other hand, typically have >95% sRGB gamut. If you ever get the chance to compare an IPS panel and TN panel side-by-side, you'll readily see the difference.
But don't IPS panels cost, like, more than twice their TN equivalents? Welcome to 2012, where that's no longer the case. 23" 1080p IPS monitors on Newegg
start from around $205. Frequently recommended models, such as the
Ultrasharp U2312HM, start somewhat higher at $260. The extra money buys you screen adjustability (rotate/tilt/height adjustment), more connection options, more even backlighting, and often better colour accuracy over lower-budget IPS offerings. Or for a little more, you can snatch a
U2412M for $290, giving you 120px more vertical pixel space.
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Despite the wall of text, I've really only given a cursory overview of the options in each area, and I've done quite a poor job of explaining things clearly for the sake of brevity. Feel free to ask (me and/or Google) if you have questions about the above info. I'm on
the IRC channel pretty often if you need quicker replies. (And if you need a faster response than that, I'm on Google Talk, kureshii[at]gmail[dot]com).
A better case may not be at the top of your priorities. But if this isn't just a one-time thing (and by the look of things it isn't), you're probably going to be poking inside your case pretty often. And if you do, you are going to want to get a really nice case that makes you smile at the thought of opening it up to adjust stuff, instead of one that you picked because it seems to be priced decently but is a pain to work around in.
The keyboard, sound card and monitor though, are really non-negotiable IMO. Just about everyone I've recommended these "new"* technologies to, have come back saying that it's eye-opening, life-changing and they will be compulsory components in future builds. Switching to them is like using a good screwdriver that doesn't keep slipping off the screw, is like taking out earplugs, is like wearing glasses for your myopia. Even if you end up not sticking with them (there are some valid reasons to do so), at least
know these options exist and
enjoy the experience of having used them. Because these are also purchases that will last you years down the road, probably even beyond your i5+Z77.
* Premium sound cards and IPS monitors have been around a long time now, and mechanical keyboards actually predate rubber domes! What's changed in recent years is their affordability.
