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Review: PC Build for a student/MOBA Gamer

Lyfer

Lyfer

Diamond Member
Building nefew a rig, he plays mainly WoW/Sc2/Hots and Dota 2. Budget <$700 (less is more better).

Case - Corsair Barbide SPEC03 - $50 (has two fan's and dust filters)
PSU - Antec EA-450 - $50 ($20 mir) - (this will be enough juice right?)
Memory - Corsair LP DDR 1600 8gb - $47
MB - Asrock H97 Pro $74 (9 series chipset and Intel LAN vs saving $20 on an 8 series)
CPU - i5 4590 (i5 or go home?)
SSD - Crucial BX100 256gb - $90
HDD - Reuse - He has some external Toshiba 500gb for this
GPU - Evga GTX 960 SSC $190 ($10 MIR)

OS - He's a student so he'll be getting that from school.
Display/KB/mice - Donation of my old stuff (gives me a reason to get a mechanical KB). He will be using an Asus 24" TN 1080p display.

Total with taxes/shipping and promo codes - $698.40 ($668 after MIR's)

I was considering an R9 280 for $170 ($150 after MIR) but after looking at the Wow/sc2 benchmarks blizzard games do not just slightly favor but insanely favor Nvidia card's as the GTX 960 surpasses even the R9 290. For Dota 2 the 960 seem's to be even with an R9 285 at 1080p.
 
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Looks good to me. The 2GB of VRAM in the GTX 960 will be the limiting factor going forward. However, it should be good enough for a while given that your nephew is running at 1080p and mostly plays "eSports" titles and MMOs.
 
I was considering an R9 280 for $170 ($150 after MIR) but after looking at the Wow/sc2 benchmarks blizzard games do not just slightly favor but insanely favor Nvidia card's as the GTX 960 surpasses even the R9 290. For Dota 2 the 960 seem's to be even with an R9 285 at 1080p.
Click to expand...

I think the R9-280 should be fine if you want to save a few bucks. I'm hitting 60+ FPS with everyone on maximum at 1920x1200 with a stock clocked 7870 XT which is the equivalent of the 280. Dota, SC2, WoW, HotS, aren't that demanding at 1920x1080.

The 960 is nice though, and if they like to stream, shadow play is pretty sweet.
 
Yeah, I think you're correct Anandtech's review of SP w/ the 780 Ti showed overhead of ~5%. That's pretty nice. My understanding is that the overhead is largely due to trying to pull frames from DirectX's asynchronous rendering pipeline, rather than from additionally taxing GPU resources, so there may even be improvement in the future.

It's certainly worth considering if the nephew is a streamer. There are lots of ways to set up recording your games, but SP is particularly easy.
 
Murloc said:
not sure it's worth the additional expense, considering that most people can't tell the difference and we don't even know what kind of audio interface he'll be using.
Click to expand...

Its an all rounder. For the price may as well get a better codec.
 
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