Sure, I guess if money is no issue, then a 1TB SSD is cool, but I was under the assumption that there was a budget and he was looking for good value for money. However, he DID say he already had a 1TB SSD so maybe just port that over to the new build and buy a cheap HDD as a replacement for the old setup?

As far as loading times goes, the most I've noticed is for programs such as Word/Excel/Photoshop. Some games load up a bit quicker, but not as noticeable. How many games suffer from stuttering and won't fit in a 250GB SSD? How often do you really load from the hard drive? My initial SSD purchase was supposed to help me make and test DCS missions --- those would take a while to load up from HDD but even from SSD, well, it shaved a few seconds. CMBN did not seem to be affected at all. My current game that took forever to load was the new Deus Ex, and "taking forever to load" was even from an SSD!

Slightly relevant to the Windows version discussion above. Four of those are in my house (plus those that were not switched on in the last 28 days)

Decided to wait until all of the Christmas shopping was done. Then gave myself a present. Box is built. Thanks to everyone for the help and advice, it was very helpful. In the end, this is what I decided to build.

-- i7 6700K Skylake
-- Asus Z170 mainboard
-- 16 gigs o' RAM
-- EVGA 750w power supply
-- 500 GB Samsung SSD
-- 2TB Seagate mechanical
-- Asus GTX 1070 8GB
-- Win 10


It's been kickin' for about a week now and it runs great. Big upgrade over the previous box. Thanks again to everyone that replied to this thread.

Was going to say, reading the original thread, the balance between SSD and Mechanical drive seemed off. You fixed that nicely in the final. With 500GB you should even be able to fit most of your active games, and in theory it's easy to just swap the ones you are currently playing from the HDD to the SSD and back.

Nice build! What cooler are you using on that 6700K?

Yes, I think it's a good setup too. But do people really do what is quoted? Once a game is installed I won't be moving it back and forth between drives.

So after firing this thing up I decided to install Witcher 3. Love the game and have played through twice. But on the old box it did not run well, and to get through it at all I needed to essentially turn everything off. I played averaging about 18 fps with the minimum graphics. That sucks, but the game was worth it. So I wanted to see it on the new box and it's fantastic. With every setting on and maxxed including v-sync it held 60 fps. Wow, what a difference. Beautiful game that I really missed out on the first runs. So I turned off v-sync to see what it could do and it ran at 66fps standing in the center of White Orchard. But the detail of the textures is stunning. I'm coming from a 4GB GTX 970 and the difference is amazing. You guys with up to date hardware already knew this of course

I went with a Zalman CNPS5X

http://www.zalman.com/contents/products/view.html?no=347

Wow... that looks.... tiny. How is it with cooling your 6700K?

The dimensions are in that link. Seems to do well. I can only seem to check temps in the BIOS, but idles at 29C/84F @ 70F ambient.

Well, you got an overclockable CPU so I'm guessing you'll want to overclock... my 6600K idles at 16-19C... no idea how to tell what my ambient room temperature is. 10-12C? But idle temps are not what CPU coolers are for.

Get HWiNFO64 or MSI Afterburner, get it to run at startup, go play some games. See how high your temp spikes under load and how long it stays for that high. IIRC, you're fine under 80C, some would say 90C but I prefer to err on the side of the un-fried CPU.

Good job man!

The Z-170 board is admittedly short of utilities for that mobo. I THINK there may be additional stuff on the ASUS web site, and also the Intel website for that chipset.

Probably better off with a couple of 3rd party apps like Ice suggests. I just use the built in 15% overclock in BIOS and bumped my card up to the speeds of the next level same chipset.

Nice and stable, not hot and does way more than I have needed yet.

You have a screamer there man.

DBond, curious what held your Witcher3 frames back on the old box. My GTX970, at 1920x1200, maxes out everything at about 45fps or more, but occasionally dips low to 30 or high 20. So I set 30 as limit in game, and it's smooth.

For sure a 1070 is a lot faster but 18FPS on the previous PC sound like another bottleneck.

I guess there are going to be a few more games you will really enjoy on the new system

CPU then I suppose. The game was on an SSD. I'm surprised your frames were so good, or maybe more accurately that mine were so poor in comparison. Anyway, that's all in the past and the new box is a screamer like Nixer said.

When I built the previous box in summer of 2013 it was near the cutting edge, but 3 1/2 years later it was showing it's age. It's nice to be able to crank it up once again.

What's the best looking PC game these days?

Tough question.

I'm going to go with Crysis. Seriously, I would say Witcher 3 is probably one of the best right now.

The issue is so many games are developed cross platform that they don't go as far as the PC can push them. You have to look at PC-only games for the best visuals, and Witcher 3 is probably tops right now.



The Jedi Master

Best looking not always more demanding.

Witcher 3 is a super well optimized game for how well it looks. Same as DOOM, which I run at 144FPS (Not kidding...pegged at 144) on an AMD 390X with everything on Ultra - also looks fantastic.

But if you want to push the limits of the machine, then either GTAV on Ultra settings, or Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or maybe Dishonored 2.

My son has Uncharted 4 on the PS4. That's a really nice looking game. But it's not on PC.

Is Mankind Divided top end graphics? Big fan of the series so I'll have to pick it up. Same with Dishonored. W3 looks amazing. Other games I play haven't seen much improvement, strategy games and RPGs. Those already ran well.

I googled it and Battlefield 4 got a lot of mentions. I'm not interested really in pushing or testing the new machine, more just to see the best looking games in all of their glory before this machine starts to get left behind.

I see.

Those games are good, but have their own particular art style, and they may or may not be your cup of tea. I suggested them because I thought you wanted a performance benchmark.

Now, if we are talking just pure looks, check out Assassins Creed Unity. Not my style of games, and it is infamous for how buggy it was on release - but now it has been fixed, and I have to admit, few other games have that level of graphical detail.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.co...F1A98DBEFB1F36/


I'll add Raise of the Tomb Raider to that. If you can run it at max and >1080p, it looks amazing.

And it's the PC equivalent to Uncharted.

Thanks for the suggestions. I have a couple of the AC games. Not my sort of thing, but the kids like them.

ARMA 3 gets on well with the new box. Like a new game really. Oh, what I've been missing!

I'm liking Win 10 too. It's on my work computers, but this is the first gaming rig I've installed it on and smooth sailing thus far.

I'd probably say BF1. Looks photo-realistic pretty much all the time...multiplayer only though, it's not worth buying for single-player campaign alone.

It runs fairly well, your new rig will certainly run it at max settings with high frame-rates. I've recently moved to a 40" 4K display from a 27" 1440p monitor and the visuals are breathtaking.

BF1 must be what I meant when I typed Battlefield 4. That's the latest, yes?

I'm quite pleased with the load times on the new machine. I've been so SSD fixated, but went with the Seagate Barracuda and am putting games on that. I have only a 4 year old computer as reference, but I cannot tell it isn't SSD aside from the sounds it makes. The load time for Europa Universalis for example has been cut by at least 80%. Down to the CPU and buses I'd imagine, but I'm glad I listened to the advice here and didn't shell out for a big SSD for the main storage drive. It's so fast as it is that any gain from a SSD would be hardly noticable I'm sure. And it saved a chunk of change as well.