Advice on CPU Cooler and SSHD opinion

[Victoria K.]

I'm dealing these days with my new build, processor will be i7 4770k and my doubt is about sticking with air cooling or get a closed loop cooler.

 

I'm not going to overclock the cpu myself, it will probably be nothing crazy but I must take into account some.

 

I'm a bit scared about liquid cooling, on the other hand I really would like to try it and from what I gathered haswells get quite hot so it may could be a better choice. High end air coolers are also suitable and could handle the heat adequately, so yes, I can't decide.

 

What would be your choice in this case? Thanks for any suggestion.

 

Don't tell me about custom liquid, I'm not willing to adventure into that! Thanks.

 

 

Another thing, I'm getting a SSHD for storage, I never tried it personally before and I'm eager to do so. If someone is using these hybrid drives already, what do you think about it, and are you happy with it or ever ran into particular problems? Thanks for any comment or insight from personal experience.

[gaggedgirl123]

Well, when I was following my electronics class I got told by a friend who had it that liquid cooling really isn't all that great, but I can't really tell you if that was for ALL liquid cooling installations or just his.

[Victoria K.]

Well, the friend will do the overclock is like: "either will do, either suck, best thing is to go custom", not much of use since he's a custom liquid enthusiast.

After days back and forth on this matter I must decide, I think I'll end up flipping a coin. I'm at that point on this.

 

[ritualclarity]

I have a closed loop cooler the H100 with the fans changed out for ones with better pull. I forget the ones. I like it, I like it alot. I don't think I could go back to air coolers again. It keeps the computer running at a constant temperature regardless of the head around it. Where I have this computer is in the attic and I rarely used air conditioning. Temps at around 90 degrees with heavy humidity and still chugged along with a GTX670 in a regular sized case all while playing demanding games. No muss and no fuss.

 

The standard cooler that comes with the boxed Intel should be good if you desire. I have had no problems with any intellcoolers I have every gotten with the processor. I don't overclock. I wouldn't go with the custom liquid cooling because they can be a pain with maintenance cleaning the solution make sure that mold and other things don't develop in it. Closed loop FTW. Just open up the case as normal and blow/vacuum out the dust regularly . Something you should be doing anyway and you should be good.

 

SSHD. I haven't used. I use SSDs. for OS and games and normal HDs for storage.

[Victoria K.]

I have a closed loop cooler the H100 with the fans changed out for ones with better pull. I forget the ones. I like it, I like it alot. I don't think I could go back to air coolers again. It keeps the computer running at a constant temperature regardless of the head around it. Where I have this computer is in the attic and I rarely used air conditioning. Temps at around 90 degrees with heavy humidity and still chugged along with a GTX670 in a regular sized case all while playing demanding games. No muss and no fuss.

 

The standard cooler that comes with the boxed Intel should be good if you desire. I have had no problems with any intellcoolers I have every gotten with the processor. I don't overclock. I wouldn't go with the custom liquid cooling because they can be a pain with maintenance cleaning the solution make sure that mold and other things don't develop in it. Closed loop FTW. Just open up the case as normal and blow/vacuum out the dust regularly . Something you should be doing anyway and you should be good.

 

SSHD. I haven't used. I use SSDs. for OS and games and normal HDs for storage.

 

Thank you ritualclarity,   I'm very tempted by closed loop indeed and heard a lot of good things about. The thing scares me is leaking but it's also a very rare issue on CLC, so I think I should not worry so much about.

I'm not even considering custom, I know someone into that and that's a lot of trouble and money and time, plus I won't even need something like that. In any case I bought both a closed loop and a high end air cooler and I'm deciding which one to install and which one send back. I got a Cooler Master Seidon 240mm because I know someone who owns it already and it works great, price/quality is also great and it's a very easy to install. About the performance is to compare with your h100 or h100i and I like the zero maintenance warranty which is great for me since I don't want to deal with anything at all. Corsair offers more years, but really I don't think I'll stick with the same cooler for so long. So, yes, you gave me some courage now, I'm even more willing to chose that.

Thanks also for the mention about the SSHD, I'm also getting SSD for the operating system, but for storage I'm going to try something different this time and it's difficult indeed to find someone already using them, so there is no much feedback on this.

Thanks

[ritualclarity]

 

Thank you ritualclarity,   I'm very tempted by closed loop indeed and heard a lot of good things about. The thing scares me is leaking

There is an issue. Awhile back there was a recall on the H100's because some had leaked. It was a small batch. In general if you get a good Closed loop Cooler you should be good to go for quite some time. The air cooler that you chose looks good as well.

 

I'm going to try something different this time and it's difficult indeed to find someone already using them, so there is no much feedback on this.

Look at the results with Fusion drives from Mac as well. They have a 128gig SSD / mechanical drive if memory serves me correctly. That should give you some ideas on how that might perform for you. However that performance would be related to OS and programs installed on them as well. The hybrid drive might be very useful if you decided to put your games on that drive instead of the OS. Not as fast but could still help and you could have all the games loaded at the same time. I was actually thinking of that so that I can have all my Steam games loaded at once. (mods, tools and such as well) . Let us know how good it worked for you...

[Victoria K.]

There is an issue. Awhile back there was a recall on the H100's because some had leaked. It was a small batch. In general if you get a good Closed loop Cooler you should be good to go for quite some time. The air cooler that you chose looks good as well.

 

Yes, it happened to several people hence my fear. It's still a very low rate but I think I'm going to wake up at night to check it out during the first week at least.

 

Look at the results with Fusion drives from Mac as well. They have a 128gig SSD / mechanical drive if memory serves me correctly. That should give you some ideas on how that might perform for you. However that performance would be related to OS and programs installed on them as well. The hybrid drive might be very useful if you decided to put your games on that drive instead of the OS. Not as fast but could still help and you could have all the games loaded at the same time. I was actually thinking of that so that I can have all my Steam games loaded at once. (mods, tools and such as well) . Let us know how good it worked for you...

 

Yes, I'm going to use it for games and storage in general. I'm not expecting anything exceptional, I have some hope in the cache since I do a lot of load/open the same application and files, though the 8GB of NAND isn't much. So if I understood correctly what I've read about, since my knowledge is pretty basic if not almost zero, it could probably suits me, we'll see. I'll try to check what you mentioned too. Thanks.

[vandals01]

The question is: How do you rate a silent computer?

 

Personally, I would never go for water cooling because:

 

1. I just don't need it - I'm on i5-4570 (84w). Since I'm not over-clocking, Air cooling (Cooler Master GeminII M4) is perfectly sufficient to bring my CPU down to 31C at Idle, 48C at Games and 62C at Burn (with FurMark)

 

2. I rate Silent heavily.  To give you a clue how quiet my system is: At mid-night, if I stood 1.5 meter away from my tower, besides that power LED, I can not tell if my PC was on or off (with the help of fan controller, silent PSU and SSD of course).

 

For water cooling system, unless you go deep into building your own water cooling system, otherwise when you silence everything, the most noisy part will be the water pump. (There are water pump that hardly make any sound, but as far as I know, not the ones in close loop systems).

 

 

So, if you were not fussy about noise or you can accept a certain level of noise, Corsair water cooling series can be good for you.  However, if you want a silent system, I would suggest you go for heat-pipe cooler or build your own water cooling with the most silent water pump in the market.  But problems with water pump is: the build quality is not consistent.  Even one may say certain model is silent (EK DCP 4.0 / MCP655 / MCP355), but you might not be able to get a silent one due to quality controls.

 

 

 

Concerning SSHD, when they first arrived at the market, they were nightmares. (Solid State Storage failed really fast)  Now, they are OK.  They usually had 8Gb NAND where the drive determines what is you most frequently accessed file and just place it in there.  So initially, they are like standard HDD, until they figures out your interest, they will speeds up.  For most people who were using a single hard-disk, the most frequently accessed file will usually be their windows load up files and that can reduce boot time from 120s to 20s.  For other files, they are just like standard hard-disk, unless you open them frequent enough.

 

Personally, I would just go for the SSD + HDD.  Get a 240 to 250Gb SSD to act as your C drive for Windows and Gaming then HDD for D as storage.

[...0...]

Myself i OC avarage my CPU is at 4.2 ghz i7 3770k and use a mugen3 cooling block(use this now for almost 2 years sinds ivy bridge never any trouble) my processor stay in extreme load around 65celsius.

 

Got a friend who have watercooling also satisfied.

 

For me big blocks in my rig (like huge engine of car) i like most thats why mugen 3.

 

SSHD seems nice but im 100% SSD i will never go back to lesser speed.

 

Vertex 4 OCZ SSD 2x 256GB use them now for 1.5 year and there awesome!

 

[ritualclarity]

The question is: How do you rate a silent computer?

 

Personally, I would never go for water cooling because:

 

1. I just don't need it - I'm on i5-4570 (84w). Since I'm not over-clocking, Air cooling (Cooler Master GeminII M4) is perfectly sufficient to bring my CPU down to 31C at Idle, 48C at Games and 62C at Burn (with FurMark)

 

2. I rate Silent heavily.  To give you a clue how quiet my system is: At mid-night, if I stood 1.5 meter away from my tower, besides that power LED, I can not tell if my PC was on or off (with the help of fan controller, silent PSU and SSD of course).

 

For water cooling system, unless you go deep into building your own water cooling system, otherwise when you silence everything, the most noisy part will be the water pump. (There are water pump that hardly make any sound, but as far as I know, not the ones in close loop systems).

I don't overclock. I agree standard fans on the closed loop coolers are more noisy than aftermarket and not as efficient. However I advise to change those to I believe are these  I choose the low noise slower moving fans over the higher performance and have dam near silent use regardless of load to the processor. I also have the fan controller set to the lowest setting as well and still keep the processor ice cold even if gaming for hours on end in normal temps. Only in the middle of summer with temps in the room at around 90 degrees do I have to raise the fan speed. Still quite but can be heard in a slient room if you stand or sit next to the computer and concentrate on it. Not a bad noise. very low noise. Far quieter than any standard supplied heat sink provided on the many processors I have had from both Intel and AMD.

 

The noise rating on these are 23 dBA about what leaves rusling sounds like. Very quiet. I can live with that level of noise. Now if the rest of the house can be that quiet. Dam clock on the wall I can hear you 15 feet away .. tick, tock, tick, tock.. you can be very annoying.

 

What the OP has chosen is great either way. Air or liquid cooling I doubt there will be any trouble at all during the life expectancy/ use of the computer.

[Victoria K.]

The question is: How do you rate a silent computer?

 

Personally, I would never go for water cooling because:

 

1. I just don't need it - I'm on i5-4570 (84w). Since I'm not over-clocking, Air cooling (Cooler Master GeminII M4) is perfectly sufficient to bring my CPU down to 31C at Idle, 48C at Games and 62C at Burn (with FurMark)

 

2. I rate Silent heavily.  To give you a clue how quiet my system is: At mid-night, if I stood 1.5 meter away from my tower, besides that power LED, I can not tell if my PC was on or off (with the help of fan controller, silent PSU and SSD of course).

 

For water cooling system, unless you go deep into building your own water cooling system, otherwise when you silence everything, the most noisy part will be the water pump. (There are water pump that hardly make any sound, but as far as I know, not the ones in close loop systems).

 

So, if you were not fussy about noise or you can accept a certain level of noise, Corsair water cooling series can be good for you.  However, if you want a silent system, I would suggest you go for heat-pipe cooler or build your own water cooling with the most silent water pump in the market.  But problems with water pump is: the build quality is not consistent.  Even one may say certain model is silent (EK DCP 4.0 / MCP655 / MCP355), but you might not be able to get a silent one due to quality controls.

The noise could definitely be for many something to consider, for me it's not really important, I was even thinking to get a x60 which is quite a nightmare on this matter.

About custom, no really, as stated in the previous posts, I have no interest in that. I have not the proper knowledge, nor the slightest interested to acquire some in order to adventure into that. It really requires much dedication, and it's quite expensive.

 

Concerning SSHD, when they first arrived at the market, they were nightmares.

Don't know about that, but sure they were overpriced!

 

They usually had 8Gb NAND where the drive determines what is you most frequently accessed file and just place it in there.  So initially, they are like standard HDD, until they figures out your interest, they will speeds up.  For most people who were using a single hard-disk, the most frequently accessed file will usually be their windows load up files and that can reduce boot time from 120s to 20s.  For other files, they are just like standard hard-disk, unless you open them frequent enough.

Yes, that sum it up in short what I gathered about, and should be fine for me considering I could benefit of the cache as intended. We'll see.

 

Myself i OC avarage my CPU is at 4.2 ghz i7 3770k and use a mugen3 cooling block(use this now for almost 2 years sinds ivy bridge never any trouble) my processor stay in extreme load around 65celsius.

Good to hear that, haswells gets perhaps a little hotter than ivy bridge and I'm not going to overclock myself, I hope. Would be good to get 4.2GHZ for me too, I'm not looking for something crazy, but let's see how goes for me the lottery with haswells they talk a lot about. On your same cpu I saw with my eyes some pretty impressive achievements, stable, 24/7, I don't remember both the guys' motherboards, one of them had a maximus v extreme iirc.

 

SSHD seems nice but im 100% SSD i will never go back to lesser speed.

 

Vertex 4 OCZ SSD 2x 256GB use them now for 1.5 year and there awesome!

 

I wish I could use 512GB total and be set. I would fill it to capacity in no time.

I'm getting a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB for OS, but I need a minimum 2TB for storage, external I have in total 8TB for additional storage and multiple backups and I need them all.

About OCZ, I have a OCZ 120GB for the OS in this old pc, it's a 2.5, vertex 2 series. I bought it back in 2010 or 2011, it served me well for 3 years. I even full format once because I didn't know, poor drive.

 

 

Thanks to you too guys for the info and suggestions.

[Victoria K.]

 

I agree standard fans on the closed loop coolers are more noisy than aftermarket and not as efficient. However I advise to change those to I believe are these  I choose the low noise slower moving fans over the higher performance and have dam near silent use regardless of load to the processor. I also have the fan controller set to the lowest setting as well and still keep the processor ice cold even if gaming for hours on end in normal temps. Only in the middle of summer with temps in the room at around 90 degrees do I have to raise the fan speed. Still quite but can be heard in a slient room if you stand or sit next to the computer and concentrate on it. Not a bad noise. very low noise. Far quieter than any standard supplied heat sink provided on the many processors I have had from both Intel and AMD.

 

The noise rating on these are 23 dBA about what leaves rusling sounds like. Very quiet. I can live with that level of noise. Now if the rest of the house can be that quiet. Dam clock on the wall I can hear you 15 feet away .. tick, tock, tick, tock.. you can be very annoying.

 

What the OP has chosen is great either way. Air or liquid cooling I doubt there will be any trouble at all during the life expectancy/ use of the computer.

 

Thanks a lot, I'll see how the stock fans will manage and in case I'll change them to gain something in performance, the noise isn't for me a concern. Tomorrow, I hope no much delay, I'll get it assembled. You have been very helpful. Thanks again!

[Hitom]

bought a NZXT kraken liquid cooling for my CPU after my CPU fan said "fuck it". Really pleased with it, my computer's processor is running under room temperatur when I'm doing small task like playing cabal or browsing

[Guest carywinton]

Liquid Coolers can be a real pain to set up and most of these systems do not come with the liquid refrigerant or coolant, so take this into consideration, also all the air must be purged out of these systems before the pump or fan will even start, this time frame can cause a quick burnout of a CPU. We tried on a commercial grade system a few years ago, a quite pricey liquid cooled system from a company called ECO, and the pump would never start, we then discovered this supposedly "closed loop" system had no coolant in it. Not exactly my idea of a closed system. Perhaps now this has changed, but I still steer clear, I use a Cooler Master V8, a bit of a beast to install, but one hell of a good fan and cooler system, never even got close to over heating when running full out at 1920x1080 in nearly any game. Using the manufacturers software and firmware for CPU Overclocking has also never presented any temperature issues. The SSD drives are best used for a lean OS install, this will give you the greatest performance boost. I do not currently own one due to the price per GB being too high for what I feel the performance gain will be. My concerns are with TB of storage, not GB of storage, my systems here store over 20TB of data, so storage size currently wins over performance. I did see where Newegg has a Presidents Day sale on SSD drives and this particular price point per GB was getting close to what I would pay. I believe it was like $125 for a 250GB drive.

[...0...]

 

The question is: How do you rate a silent computer?

 

Personally, I would never go for water cooling because:

 

1. I just don't need it - I'm on i5-4570 (84w). Since I'm not over-clocking, Air cooling (Cooler Master GeminII M4) is perfectly sufficient to bring my CPU down to 31C at Idle, 48C at Games and 62C at Burn (with FurMark)

 

2. I rate Silent heavily.  To give you a clue how quiet my system is: At mid-night, if I stood 1.5 meter away from my tower, besides that power LED, I can not tell if my PC was on or off (with the help of fan controller, silent PSU and SSD of course).

 

For water cooling system, unless you go deep into building your own water cooling system, otherwise when you silence everything, the most noisy part will be the water pump. (There are water pump that hardly make any sound, but as far as I know, not the ones in close loop systems).

 

So, if you were not fussy about noise or you can accept a certain level of noise, Corsair water cooling series can be good for you.  However, if you want a silent system, I would suggest you go for heat-pipe cooler or build your own water cooling with the most silent water pump in the market.  But problems with water pump is: the build quality is not consistent.  Even one may say certain model is silent (EK DCP 4.0 / MCP655 / MCP355), but you might not be able to get a silent one due to quality controls.

The noise could definitely be for many something to consider, for me it's not really important, I was even thinking to get a x60 which is quite a nightmare on this matter.

About custom, no really, as stated in the previous posts, I have no interest in that. I have not the proper knowledge, nor the slightest interested to acquire some in order to adventure into that. It really requires much dedication, and it's quite expensive.

 

Concerning SSHD, when they first arrived at the market, they were nightmares.

Don't know about that, but sure they were overpriced!

 

They usually had 8Gb NAND where the drive determines what is you most frequently accessed file and just place it in there.  So initially, they are like standard HDD, until they figures out your interest, they will speeds up.  For most people who were using a single hard-disk, the most frequently accessed file will usually be their windows load up files and that can reduce boot time from 120s to 20s.  For other files, they are just like standard hard-disk, unless you open them frequent enough.

Yes, that sum it up in short what I gathered about, and should be fine for me considering I could benefit of the cache as intended. We'll see.

 

Myself i OC avarage my CPU is at 4.2 ghz i7 3770k and use a mugen3 cooling block(use this now for almost 2 years sinds ivy bridge never any trouble) my processor stay in extreme load around 65celsius.

Good to hear that, haswells gets perhaps a little hotter than ivy bridge and I'm not going to overclock myself, I hope. Would be good to get 4.2GHZ for me too, I'm not looking for something crazy, but let's see how goes for me the lottery with haswells they talk a lot about. On your same cpu I saw with my eyes some pretty impressive achievements, stable, 24/7, I don't remember both the guys' motherboards, one of them had a maximus v extreme iirc.

 

SSHD seems nice but im 100% SSD i will never go back to lesser speed.

 

Vertex 4 OCZ SSD 2x 256GB use them now for 1.5 year and there awesome!

 

I wish I could use 512GB total and be set. I would fill it to capacity in no time.

I'm getting a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB for OS, but I need a minimum 2TB for storage, external I have in total 8TB for additional storage and multiple backups and I need them all.

About OCZ, I have a OCZ 120GB for the OS in this old pc, it's a 2.5, vertex 2 series. I bought it back in 2010 or 2011, it served me well for 3 years. I even full format once because I didn't know, poor drive.

 

 

Thanks to you too guys for the info and suggestions.

 

 

I run this OC 4.2ghz for almost 2 years(1year and 9 months to be precise) and it's not only stable my cooler on full load stays always at 68celcius-72celcius this max avarage is around 50c. My mother board is ASUS p8z77 v deluxe ivy bridge. Never had any problems.

 

[MrPervy]

My choice would be a Corsair H100 or H100i. With 2  Noctua NF-p12 fans for ultra quiet cpu cooling.

[Victoria K.]

Some days now the pc is assembled and chosen to go with the closed loop. I'm happy with it overall.

It keeps the cpu perfectly cooled at idle and full load; what I got is pretty decent and reliable but not one of the very best so I'm even more impressed. Installation was incredibly easy and fast.

Also, it's not even that noisy running at full speed (at least for me), otherwise it's very silent.

If someone is in doubt as I were I would totally suggest it. Just don't buy a cheap one, the difference in price from average/good and best is nothing awful concerning CLC, I will change mine when the warranty will expire.

I used AS5 as thermal compound, though the bundled one should be okay for what I know.

About the SSHD I can't say yet, I'm not really doing anything at the moment other than cleaning and sorting out data on the external HDDs.

Here the specs, for who enjoy taking a look at new rigs.

Intel Core i7-4770k

Gigabyte G1. Sniper 5

EVGA GTX 780 Ti Classified

16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro Black 2133MHz----> will probably be 32GB in September from another pc

Samsung 840 Pro 256GB

Seagate SSHD Desktop 2TB

Asus DVD+/-RW

Cooler Master Seidon 240mm

3x140mm fans+stock---> I'm keeping positive pressure, 3 intake, 1 exhaust - trying various brands (to be honest I chose them just for the look, I'll keep in check the temps and get some better ones with high CFM as soon as I see it needed, for now, with no overclocking and so little stress in general except testing a bit, is more than enough). Got now aerocool, bitfenix, xigmatek. Bitfenix Spectre Pro is the best of the bunch, the Xigmatek Crystal is noisy even for me and low quality build, it has the best looking leds but that's it.

Cooler Master V1000 1000 W

 

New component I'm more excited about: motherboard

New component I'm less excited about (aside from the optical drive): ram

Most expensive component: graphic card

Best looking component: motherboard and case

Thing I was most scared to install: cooler because never did before, and the graphic card at some point, this one is a huge beast, also very heavy, I had to force a lot the case retentions to lock it in place but I think it's totally okay since the gpu fits perfectly and the retentions are equally aligned as intended. I must say this case is alright, I thought about spending something extra for another one, but I'm happy with the XPredator, it has everything needed and the materials and quality build are very good.

 

Wtf moment : nothing about the new rig, but when I took a close look at the old hardware I saw one of the Asus (GTX 550Ti SLI) was broken, the plastic was detached from the rest and half hanging on the other card. I didn't notice before due to the old case location and having a fan just at that level. Poor pc has been tortured, psu is done, but even after that, it's not bad for an old rig, changing the power supply and fixing the gpu (it works properly, it's just the plastic to get readjusted) I will keep it as a secondary pc in case of need or for experimenting something.

 

@ Hitom

I really like the x60, that's a nice beast, it would have been my first choice along the SilverStone Tundra td02. Enjoy your cpu.

@carywinton

Yes my friend, I believe you, in the past should have probably been very risky with the first CLC on the market, but there is been so much improvement in the industry and closed loop cooling at present is a very good alternative, a very common one as well. Let's see how they'll manage to improve further. About the drives, I understand you, me too I need lot of storage, not as much as you , trying now SSHD, a kind of hybrid (SSD/HDD), they are essentially common HDD but with a little SSD part you could nicely take advantage of depending on your usage of the drive. When they first comes out were pretty expensive, but the price is now very reasonable, worth a try.

 

So it seems I've solved, thanks to you all guys for info and suggestion provided in the thread.

[ritualclarity]

Love that you followed up and gave the complete spec sheet of all the parts and particular thoughts during this process. It can help others that have similar questions to yours. Some might even decide to follow your hardware list as a base and build accordingly.

 

Glad everything worked out to your satisfaction. I agree on saving and using the old computer as a spare. Perhaps if you start working on mods you can use it as your development machine. Keeping your new pride and joy safe for daily work and games. Can't forget the games.

 

Love the color and how you got the motherboard, case and equipment to match.

LOL. Love that Vault boy managed to show himself in one of the pictures. Did he help with the build?

 

FO3 FTW!!!!!

[Victoria K.]

Did he help with the build?

LoL, yes, you totally got it! I kept him around as advisor and overseer!

 

Glad everything worked out to your satisfaction. I agree on saving and using the old computer as a spare.

Thanks, you helped. About secondary rigs, it would be interesting a thread about them. Specs could be hilarious and also tales about "funny" moments.

 

FO3 FTW!!!!!

 

 

[Rayblue]

Why overclock if you're happy with the framerate? But then I agree that you bolt in liquid cooling to extend your processor's life.

 

BTW, if you're using an SSD or SSHD, make sure you have AHCI on so that the drive can use TRIM to keep itself healthy.

[XunAmarox]

Noctua NH-D14 is the best air cooler, has been for years. If you don't intend to move the case once you build it then go for that. If you intend to travel with the tower to LAN parties or something then you'd have to uninstall the cooler or risk snapping your motherboard so for that case I'd recommend a closed loop cooler. Something like a Corsair H100i perhaps.

 

I don't know anything about SSHD's. The best SSD right now is probably the Samsung 840 EVO -- it's available in 1TB. With Rapid Mode on it goes at around 1,000MB/s, double pretty much everything else. Hefty price tag though. To be honest, it won't affect your performance in these kinds of games very much at all to begin with.

 

The biggest most important thing with these games though is the GPU. Even with something like an old i7 (probably even something much older than that even) you could run all these games heavily modded as long as you have a good GPU. I'd want something with at least 3GB of VRAM nowadays (and keep in mind that VRAM doesn't stack so a 3GB card + a 3GB card is only 3GB total, if you intend to SLI/Crossfire). The most cost effective solution right now is probably a GTX 780 or a R9 290 - the latter running much hotter but having an extra GB of VRAM. I've never been a fan of Radeon personally.

 

There's a rumored Titan Black Edition supposed to come out sometime this month with the same stats as the 780 Ti models but with 6GB of VRAM and better stuff for professional rendering. The 6GB is the biggest selling point for gamers that play heavily modded games like we do. More importantly, since it'll take the Titan's $999 price point that means the price of the Titan itself will likely drop at which point if you were wanting something cheaper you could probably just go for the original Titan - which I imagine will drop at least $150-200 when the Black Edition comes out. Certainly something to consider.

[Hitom]

Noctua NH-D14 is the best air cooler, has been for years. If you don't intend to move the case once you build it then go for that. If you intend to travel with the tower to LAN parties or something then you'd have to uninstall the cooler or risk snapping your motherboard so for that case I'd recommend a closed loop cooler. Something like a Corsair H100i perhaps.

 

I don't know anything about SSHD's. The best SSD right now is probably the Samsung 840 EVO -- it's available in 1TB. With Rapid Mode on it goes at around 1,000MB/s, double pretty much everything else. Hefty price tag though. To be honest, it won't affect your performance in these kinds of games very much at all to begin with.

 

The biggest most important thing with these games though is the GPU. Even with something like an old i7 (probably even something much older than that even) you could run all these games heavily modded as long as you have a good GPU. I'd want something with at least 3GB of VRAM nowadays (and keep in mind that VRAM doesn't stack so a 3GB card + a 3GB card is only 3GB total, if you intend to SLI/Crossfire). The most cost effective solution right now is probably a GTX 780 or a R9 290 - the latter running much hotter but having an extra GB of VRAM. I've never been a fan of Radeon personally.

 

There's a rumored Titan Black Edition supposed to come out sometime this month with the same stats as the 780 Ti models but with 6GB of VRAM and better stuff for professional rendering. The 6GB is the biggest selling point for gamers that play heavily modded games like we do. More importantly, since it'll take the Titan's $999 price point that means the price of the Titan itself will likely drop at which point if you were wanting something cheaper you could probably just go for the original Titan - which I imagine will drop at least $150-200 when the Black Edition comes out. Certainly something to consider.

 

From what I heard Skyrim don't support SLI at all?

 

Few games do actually...

 

I'm thinking about selling my GTX680 to my brother for a couple hundreds and investing in a GTX titan. Because I agree with you, more vram is most likely king.

[Endiness]

From what I heard Skyrim don't support SLI at all?

 

Few games do actually...

 

False.

[Hitom]

 

From what I heard Skyrim don't support SLI at all?

 

Few games do actually...

 

False.

 

 

False on both? Elaborate?

[Endiness]

I haven't run into any games that don't support SLI. I think the only games I've bought and played on release day were Super Street Fighter 4 and Borderlands 2. That being said, both games worked fine on my 2 580s since day 1. I would expect most modern games now to work with SLI straight at release without need of a patch.

 

I don't know how "old" games would need to be for it not to work. I don't have my unreal tournament (for which one), Dues EX, or Quake II discs anymore so I don't have the experience. List of games with official support of SLI