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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

> The price for a i7 6700K 4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and nVidia GTX 1070: €1515 EUR (case and CPU cooler included).

That's not a gaming pc. That looks more like a gaming-capable Workstation. Absolutely overkill CPU (games are seldom cpu bound), and too much RAM (games don't care).

I suggest a glance at Logical Increments [0], which is definitely biased towards gaming, to see what you can do at a given price point. Note that just because of the gsync fiasco and the cloud-connected drivers nonsense, I'd gravitate towards an AMD GPU if I had to buy now.

[0] http://www.logicalincrements.com/

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If I may, Logical Increments is nice, but sometimes leads astray. I develop a hardware recommender, and this is in my eyes a good gaming PC for 1440p: https://www.pc-kombo.de/share/OqqYoLX. i5-6600K with 16GB DDR4-3000 on a Z170 board, good psu and good cooler. When playing on a lower resolution like the usual 1080p, AMD with a RX 480 would be a good choice, otherwise there is no alternative to the GTX 1070.

Intel just released the Kaby Lake processors which are tiny bit faster (because they are clocked higher), currently integrating this. But does not change much.

Agree with the config you recommend except the storage.

Both HDD and SSD are IMO too small.

For HDD, the 1TB is inefficient: €51 for 1TB, €98 for 3TB — that is more than 50% difference in cost/TB (both for WD blue desktop series as listed on computeruniverse.net).

For the SSD, the 256 GB is just too small. Sure that’s enough to boot Windows, but not enough to fit more than a couple of modern games, they easily take 50GB/each. I’d rather recommend 480GB these days.

You are right. The 1TB HDD is inefficient as price-per-gigabyte is a lot higher than 2 or 3 TB. On the other hand, almost always when I recommend bigger drives I get the feedback that 1TB is more than enough… Depends on the usage.

Regarding the SSD, for Windows a 120GB or even a 60GB SSD would be enough (but those are also slower). 250GB is already a lot of additional space for games – again, it depends on the usage. A couple of games is what is the usual way of thinking for what a SSD should be used, and for that 250GB is just right. But if one wants multiple modern AAA games on it at the same time 480GB sure is more useful.

There's another factor, though, which you missed entirely: larger SSDs have muchz much faster write speeds, and also read speeds. The parallel NAND chips provide a sort of intra-device RAID

But I did mention that, for the smaller SSDs? It's also true for 250GB vs 512GB, but the main appeal of having an SSD does not get lost by getting a smaller one – latency and faster load times than with a HDD.

> Logical Increments is nice, but sometimes leads astray.

I'm not a fan of their brackets and they also seem to favor nvidia over amd, but it's serves the purpose of, without actually having to put a machine together in pcpartpicker [0], seeing what can be done at a price point with current pieces.

[0] https://pcpartpicker.com/

Yes. It serves its purpose and is a good idea, but I saw multiple builds based on it that were off (things like: when do you need an aftermarket cooler, when a mainboard with a Z-chipset, …). My https://www.pc-kombo.de/ is an alternative approach which I think is more accurate, and also less work than pcpartpicker, that is why I took the liberty to mention it here.

That looks pretty cool!

Too bad about the language barrier, but I'm guessing more languages (such as spanish or english) are in the roadmap somewhere.

Thanks. Yes, they are :) Currently working on making the hardware selection both broader, customizable and more reliable, and then I'll try (again, turned out to be hard so far) to get into some US-american APIs.

I'm missing an option to disable HDD altogether. I have one hefty NAS, and the other systems only have SSDs (128 GB in the notebook, 256 GB on the desktop).

If you have JS enabled, all boxes (apart from processor and mainboard) have a small black circle with a minus sign at the top right. Clicking on it will disable the category, and that carries over when searching again.

I think at 1080p gaming, CPU power is more important nowadays. Overwatch benefits greatly from the i7 6700k over the i5 6600k, going from 240-260fps to 300fps (the cap imposed by the engine, hitting this cap is useful for reducing input lag). As a result I've seen many gaming builds rocking the 6700k (and even 3000Mhz RAM!)

This just isn't true. Upping the resolution doesn't make the game more CPU intensive by much. Upping the resolution pushes the GPU.

In this context, going to 1080p means lowering the resolution, allowing to use more money for the processor exactly because it means pushing the gpu less. I don't agree that a normal gaming PC needs a i7-6700K (reducing input lag in one game is something for pro gamers playing it as a job), but the logic is sound.

When today's cards are being designed to push 1440p/4k/2x1080p(VR) resolutions, I consider 1080p to be a "lower" resolution.

Depends on your monitor, if you decide on 144fps/hz, that can take a serious chunk out of your CPU. Lets say a game runs easy at 75FPS on the cpu, and lets assume it's 60% used. If you want to crank out 144fps, you have a problem. i7 6700K might be enough though, nut sure on the absolute required specs.

The "games don't use CPU" line is only really true for multiplatform games that must also run on the low performance PS4/XBox One AMD Jaguar CPUs.

If we look at PC exclusives [1] then we can see that these are extremely CPU-hungry games. This hunger only goes up if we want to achieve a framerate higher than 60, say going for 144.

I personally have an i7 @ 3.8 GHz with GTX 1060 and none of these games can hold a stable 1080p @ 144 Hz.

[1] For example Dota 2, H1Z1, DayZ, Civilization 6, Guild Wars 2

Fallout 4, Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft and many more popular games are heavily CPU bound. Also, considering this is hacker news I think we can assume the gp doesn't need "just" a gaming PC

Visual Studio, or any kind of VM will easily chew through the high end CPU and RAM.

Maybe it's by design but that site runs horribly on my phone. (Nexus 6)

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