Looking for a nice custom PC exclusively for SC2. Building a computer is no problem for me I just need help finding the parts that work well together. No need for a monitor, keyboard, or mouse; just the case and all parts inside the pc. I am located in Toronto, Canada and I am looking for something in the price range of $700+. Thanks for the help people.

Edit - Current suggested build:


Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Sep 28 2010, 1:38 am by poiuy_qwert.

Okay, this is a very basic build here, pardon me if I forgot anything. A word of warning: I did not research these parts very well, but based on my general knowledge, I believe it to be a decent buy. Canadian prices are generally much more than US prices, and tariffs don't help at all. However, some of these canadian prices are actually better than their US counterparts. I'm not putting a lot of effort into this, since it's canadian, but should you buy it, you shouldn't be disappointed.

I overpowered your GPU and underpowered your CPU, since the CPU can be overclocked or replaced EASILY later on. In fact, I highly recommend it.


$225 MSI GeForce GTX 460 Fermi Cyclone - It's the 768 MB version, 1 GB is a bit better due to memory bandwidth, but still rocks. $20 USD MIR too.
$100 Patriot Sector 5 DDR3 2X2GB DDR3-1333 CL 9-9-9-24 - Not awe inspiring ram, but it's 4 GB patriot ram. $20 USD MIR.
$115 MSI 870A-G54 ATX AM3 870 - It's a new chipset from a good motherboard company. $20 USD MIR.
$120 AMD Phenom II x2 560 - I'm disappointed in this price, you can shop around for a better CPU if you want. Newegg might have something.
$50 NZXT Gamma - Epitome of cheap mid tier cases. It comes ex recommended, but you might be able to find a cheap cheap one in some thrift store, or get a cheap cheap one somewhere else. Either way, it's only $50, which IMO is a good deal in canada.
$95 Antec Truepower New 650W Modular Power Supply - Talk about overpowered. I wouldn't recommend it if it weren't a good PSU and $25 USD MIR after a serious instant rebate. Add this to cart before the hard drive.
$60 Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB - Used to be the king of hard drives, now usurped by the samsung spinpoints and newer caviar blacks. Still a good drive, though. Add this to cart after the power supply.

Totals: I'm getting $762.13 with free shipping to K1A0B1. Note that this is over your budget, but you have $85 USD in mail in rebates. If you don't have $62 saved up which you KNOW you should be getting back (and then some), you shouldn't be buying a computer. If you get screwed on the rebates, complain/boycott/whatever. It's only $85.

Also note that what I think is a "good deal" in canada might be horribly wrong. I'm only really up to date on good US prices.

I also assume you will be getting a free OS somehow.

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Sep 22 2010, 7:12 pm by rockz.

Well... thx for the speedy reply. I should have made it more clear. It was $700 plus. I am looking to buy in a price range of $700-$1000. Not too worried about an extra $80.

Will this build play sc2 in Ultra settings?

Easily. I don't know why people are always so concerned about SC2 performance. Like all Blizzard games you don't need a high end machine to run it properly. You can assume any new computer with a dedicated graphics card can run SC2 on Ultra. Of course there will be exceptions but those are few.

Oh yes. A dual core with such a decent gfx would easily do it. I have a quad core LGA 775 socket, and an older GFX of Nvidia 9600 GS. I run SCII on medium-high settings at 60-80 FPS.

You need 1gb of video ram to run the textures at Ultra, so no. I run on Very High or whatever the next down is and it looks fine to me. Generally my experience with "ultra" quality textures is that there's very little difference over the high quality ones, just slightly sharper details which you are unlikely to notice in the sort of game that SC2 is (small models from afar).

In that case, think of my build as a base.

Grab the cheapest 460 1 GB you can find (contrary to popular belief, the difference in 768 MB and 1 GB is pretty small. The benefit in the GTX460 is the memory bandwidth increasing from 192 to 256. I have 256 MB, and I can still run most games on mediocre settings. There's some reviews which detail exactly how much vram your games actually use and how much you need, but suffice it to say that even maxing out your used RAM doesn't cause much of a performance hit, unless you're woefully unprepared.)
Get a quad core phenom II. If you're into overclocking the 955 is king. If you're not, the brand new 970 is the best you can get.
Drop a bit into a better case. What's a better case? you can search around for recommended cases in this forum (any lian li, most cooler masters).

this is /g/'s generic guide:
http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/af150/The_FalconO6/CurrentLogicalPCBuyingGuide/Guide.png
it's an amalgamation of the best buys in the US (rebates not included) and probably the best in canada too. As you can see, I put you in the "modest" range at around $600, plus $100 canada surcharge for a $700 computer. If you try to read the huge wall of text it will tell you multiple times to do your own research, so I encourage you to do so.

Why'd you overpower his GPU that much? I'd go with a nice 5770. It'll handle any game on good settings, easily rape SCII on ultra, and it's almost half the price. I'd go with a 5770 and put whatever else into a better CPU or maybe a small SSD. An SSD is really fantastic for making a computer seem more responsive. It's painful going back to my desky after working on my SSD-powered lappy.

Funny. My laptop's SSD is horrendously slow. I suppose that's the atom in it.

there's only a few cards to buy right now, and the GTX 460 is by far and away the best deal. It's fermi done right, and adequately priced too. While I suppose 2 5770s would outperform it they would be more expensive too. It's what the 5830 should have been. The 5850 is theoretically a better card, but honestly, you're paying a boatload for very little performance gain. IMO these are all good cards to buy: 5770, 460, 5850, 470, 5870, 480. The problem is that the gap between the 5770 and the 460 is much larger than the gaps between any of the other cards, but the price difference is about the same ($70-$100). It also doesn't help that 2 460s outperform a single 480 or 5870. The only single card which can beat SLI 460s is a 5970, for obvious reasons. The 460 is affordable and powerful, and definitely the best buy in terms of weighted price vs performance.

GTX 460 won't quite max out SC2, but it gets closer than anyone could ever want. Not to mention, double the performance of the 5770.
http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page10.html

I'm a bit worried though after seeing that because it seems that the cpu (i7 920 overclocked) is the limiting factor.

My 2.5GHz Intel quad core with a 5770 and 6GB DDRIII ram desky runs SCII on ultra at 30+ FPS (I don't actually measure it, but it's smooth). There may be a large performance leap after 5770, but a 5770 will do everything he wants it to anyway. That extra power/money won't be used for anything except squeezing out some more performance from more advanced games, adding very little to his computing experience. Oh, yay, my Crysis now has nicer shadows. Whuppee. In my experience with the 5770, those extra $100 will be adding nothing to his playing SCII. I had one single problem with it, which was odd blurring on certain maps when post-processing is set to the highest level, but I just set that to a lower level.

Using that $100 and some more on a 60 or at least 32GB SSD would result in faster... well, many things. Startup, program loading, etc. It's just more bang for your buck in a general computing sense. A significantly faster computer vs better shadows in high-end games.

I just want to reinforce this. Actual memory size on graphics cards is not that important. Any card that is worth buying will have at least 512mb on it. Presently games are topping out at around 1gb for maximum quality textures, this will gradually go up over time. What is most important is memory bandwidth, and in the case of the nVidia 460, the 1gb card has a much larger memory bandwidth than the 768mb card, so the 1gb card has much higher performance.

I wonder if this was really a calculated move on nVidia's part - with lots of websites having benchmarks that show the 1gb is substantially faster than the 768mb, less informed people will, in the future, be more likely to buy a card with more ram on it, even if there is actually 0 or very negligible performance difference between the two options they're looking at.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 23 2010, 8:38 am by Lanthanide.

You've still got tons of room for improvement on your desktop Cent. AA/AF, Temporal AA, vsync, etc... The performance leap is almost linear from a 5770 to a 460. If he wanted bang for the buck he'd get a GTS 250, which is currently waaay higher than the 5770 or the 460 in price/performance. However, since the 460 is about the same in price/performance to the 5770, and he has the money, there's no reason not to get a 460, which will last him much longer (and is almost twice as good in SC2, but only 20% better on average.).

I guess it all comes down to how literally we are to take the statement "exclusively for SC2". If he just wants to play SC2 well and will never play any newer games, not even in 3 years then you're right Cent, but rockz' build is meant to be future proof which is a good investment if you can afford it imo.

Also don't forget the custom map scene. It's likely that we'll be seeing maps for SC2 that are much more demanding than melee games.

I play a lot of melee, a lot of custom games, and of course make custom games. Therefore the build should be nice enough to handle the most chaotic custom games. Thx.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 24 2010, 10:34 pm by poiuy_qwert.

There may be more to go (though I may actually have Vsync and the rest on SCII too - no idea, I only have my lappy with me), but for his current needs, a 5770 will do everything and more. And it'll do well for the next two years. Not fantastic, but he'll be able to play all modern games at respectable settings.

Pretty pointless arguing about it if he's just looking for an easy build, though. If he doesn't want to interject to decide whether he wants an SSD on there, he probably doesn't need it.

I would love to have SSD, though I don't know much about them. Of course they have super fast access times, but some people say they are not for the average person? I'd consider myself to know a lot more about computers then the average person, but what is so tough about having a SSD?

SC2 is CPU limited. Get the best CPU you can get. Tri or quad core is a must. Scratch the callisto I recommended. An i5 750 and phenom II 970 are about equal, but the i5 will outperform when OCed. It's your choice if you want an AMD build or intel build. Intel will be better, more expensive, and less open to upgrades. If you go LGA 1366 route and an i7, you can expect to spend ~$250 more than the i5 or 970.

Also of note, the 955, 965, and 970 are all different qualities of the exact same processor, with slightly different programming (makes the 970 easier to overclock). The default core differences also help in OCing, since you'll have to OC that much less.

I'm still running fine on a raid 0 system which is slower than a spinpoint f3. The difference between having stuff load up in 20 seconds vs having stuff load up in 12 seconds is negligible when you're waiting that long anyway. The only way to get higher than a 5.9 WEI is to have a SSD or a raptor.

A question cent: does your desktop ever lag when opening the "start menu" or "all programs" menu, and does the laptop not? This is one thing that's been bugging me on both my computers (one has SSD and atom processor, the other has old HDD and mediocre dual core). I think the HDD is just due to OS install age and cluttered with junk, whereas the SSD/atom is just so slow that it doesn't matter how fast the SSD is.

I encourage you to read all of that image I posted, and note the section about SSDs.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 24 2010, 11:06 pm by rockz.

I don't know about my desktop, but my lappy has no lag on start menu or all programs. It's very fast at running any program - Word 2010 loads in one second, Photoshop CS5 loaded in four, OneNote loads instantly. It starts up significantly faster than my desktop, and is usually very responsive with everything. The loading time after logging in on my desktop used to be 20 seconds (I may have shortened it when I defragged/devirused/cleaned it last week, but I don't use it so I dont' know), but I can click chrome on the taskbar as soon as I log in and get browsin' almost instantly. And I still have plenty of on-start programs, like Pidgin and Skype. It comes with Windows foibles and software screwups, but it's for the most part a very clean experience. Though that's also because I keep my lappy completely crap-free (I use or plan to use every bit of software on this thing, except for stuff hidden in system32)

I don't know what image with SSD's on them you showed, but the link with GPUs - I believe, if I'm reading it right, the 5770 managed SCII at max settings at a minimum of 26 FPS at 2560x1600. If that's what that graphic says... well, yes, again, it's waaaay more than enough. I really don't notice more than 26 or so anyway. I actually got WoW to work pretty nicely on an integrated GPU (my lappy has a 330M and integrated for battery life), and got it to manage around 26 FPS in WotLK zones, and it was very smooth (though the graphics were very simple and unappealing). At 1680x1050 (his probable resolution), minimum FPS would go up to 37. At max settings.

Also, I don't make builds, because I'm not really good at it. Rockz is probably your best bet. But my personal recommendation (and I'm no expert, my evidence is mostly anecdotal) would be to grab a 5770 instead of that expensive GPU, get a decent processor (I don't know much more than that), and a smallish SSD to stick your OS (32GB minimum, maybe 60GB+ if you want to stick huge games like WoW and SCII on the SSD) and most programs on while keeping another, regular hard drive for your media. It might be more complicated to make a PC with an SSD; I wouldn't know.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 25 2010, 3:37 am by Centreri.

Honestly I have no idea why people are recommending against SSDs as if they are some sort of voodoo magic that is hard to understand. It's just like any other SATA2 hard drive, you plug it in and it goes, that's all there is to it. Older SSDs had shitty controllers in them that caused massive stuttering (probably what rockz has) because they designed the controller to have really high sustained throughput, but as a result the random read latency was worse than a regular mechanical hard drive. But that was about 18 months ago now. About 12 months ago the newer generation of drives that came out didn't support Windows 7 TRIM out of the box and you had to flash the firmware to get it, but again most drives these days have it.

Read this review article to get an idea of where the current technology is at: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3812/the-ssd-diaries-crucials-realssd-c300/1

Intel should be releasing their next generation SSDs in the next 6-9 months, and are reported to be at 160, 300 and 600gb sizes and should be a lot cheaper than the previous generation (for the size) as well as higher performance. You might want to do further research around that and decide whether you might want to wait and save up to buy one of them when they come out, and just go with mechanical disks for now.