Recommendations for building a new PC

25 thoughts on “Recommendations for building a new PC”

1. I recommend a Dell Precision Workstation from the Dell Outlet. The prices are amazing and with the money you save you can buy your own 1TB SSD.

   The T5810 supports up to 128GB RAM, and on the UK outlet right now there is one (with only 8GB RAM) for £600 (USD$900).

   The biggest disadvantage of building your own, is that it’s difficult to get them anywhere near as silent as the professional workstations. And the warranty on a whole system can’t be beat, vs having to troubleshoot and swap out individual components if you build your own.

2. Almost sounds like you want a “workstation” class PC, one with Xeon processors and Quadro/FirePro video cards, but probably don’t want to pay for one. These sorts of machines will give you > 32GB memory support (with ECC to boot) and graphics cards that can drive multiple 4k displays without necessarily having the heavy duty GPU horsepower that necessitates the 707 fans.

   1TB SSDs are coming down in price, to under $400.

   This is actually a good time to build a PC, Intel seems to be having trouble getting their next generation out and they won’t appear until next year.

3. A couple of thoughts:

   1. Microcenter is pretty good to deal with if you prefer to be able to touch and feel (and hear – some of the gaming cases have more fans than the Beatles) the stuff before you buy it and talk to actual human sales help who has at least a little knowledge. There’s one in Cambridge on Memorial Drive. They are pretty good about matching prices with Newegg but you will have to pay sales tax.

   2. Another idea is to buy a pre-built machine such as the Alienware and then swap out the few components that don’t meet your spec (or, for example in the case of the SSD, add a 2nd SSD).

   3. They make card readers that take up an unused drive bay and are easy to install (if you have an unused bay) so I wouldn’t worry about whether you can get that as a standard feature. Ditto for USB hubs, plus this puts the extra USBs on the front where you can get to them. You can use the back ports for things that are permanently plugged in (printers, scanners) and the front ones for things that come and go (phones).

   Or for a whole $30, BOTH in one drive bay:

   http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820223120

   plus they throw in eSATA.

4. It’s probably not worth the hassle or expense to build your own, but if you do decide to go that route, Eric Raymond recently built a high-performance workstation:

   https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricRaymond/posts/i6i5BFctMo7

   Also:

   http://esr.ibiblio.org/?page_id=6408

   I include this for interest only and was too lazy to audit your design parameters against his.

5. The HP Z series workstation or the late 2013 (black cylinder) Mac Pro meet all but your last 2 requirements. You’d probably be happier with the HP (cases designed by BMW, by the way). I had older Z200 and Z400 machines as my home servers, currently a Z230 SFF, and they’ve all been workhorses.

6. Look for a workstation class computer. Several vendors make them, including hp and dell.

7. Hi Phil,

   Love reading your blog.

   I’ve bought and built computers over the years. Most recent was purchased from http://www.pugetsystems.com. They give good advice and support.

   Cheers

8. I was in a similar situation about 6 months ago. I was pretty shocked to learn that desktop PCs aren’t really being sold anymore.. or, not in the way I’m used to seeing them.

   Laptops, all-in-ones, tablets with keyboards.. that’s all I could seem to find. “Gaming machines” were available, but were far outside my budget and are overkill for my needs.

   I just wanted something like my 4 year Dell Studio XPS 7100… but at least 30% faster.

   The marketing got to me and I ended up buying a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, which I’m happy with. It has far more ram and processing power than my desktop (but a less powerful video card).. so, I’m still left with my nearly 5 year old desktop to edit and store pictures.

   I hope the towers will come back into style in 1-2 years. Technology is cyclical, right?

9. It has been a while since I built my own PC (over 10 years), but this local company http://www.pcsforeveryone.com/ was my geek shop for anything to do with PCs.

   I use to joke and call the place fast-food for your PC: you walk in and hand-pick very much any part and for a small fee, they will put the parts together for you (I don’t know if they still do so).

10. Intel is releasing new 14nm server processors, but the 22nm (currently sold) should meet your needs. I find It is hard to beat Lenovo ThinkServers and ThinkStation workstations. ThinkStation P500 Workstation has a card reader, and it can accomodate up to 96GB which should be enough for the next couple of months, at least. I always buy the minimum amount of memory and add third party memory and the SSD/HDs myself. Look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ to get a rough comparison between i series and E5s. Why don’t you run Linux or FreeBSD under virtualization instead of Cygwin?

11. I would suggest having a place build you a machine such as http://www.pcsforeveryone.com/ or http://pc.ncix.com/pcbuilder/
    If you contact them directly and tell them the stuff that you are planning to use the machine for they will help you build a machine that is perfect for what you want and they will also provide a warranty which is very nice when things go wrong. Also you won’t have to worry about putting the thing together.

    As far as parts for your build are concerned I would suggest going with a supermicro motherboard since they are known to last a long time and I have had a lot of good experience with them. When I talked to you this motherboard seemed like the best option: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x10srl-f.cfm
    This motherboard meets your ram requirement and ecc ram is not that much more money. There is a mushkin kit that is 4x16gb that leaves room for upgrading to 128gb down the road.

    Along with that you could get an Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 cpu (http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-19-117-479&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleBiz-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleBiz-PC-_-pla-_-Processors+-+Servers-_-9B-19-117-479&gclid=Cj0KEQjw6OOoBRDP9uG4oqzUv7kBEiQA0sRYBGqPrTilXBhsuq4T67CU80otlmFcT2goB7PYJido3GgaAlXy8P8HAQ) This cpu will give you plenty of power and does not use as much power as your current one!

    On to the graphics! Since you are planning to run two 4k monitors I would suggest getting a consumer card with lots of outputs. The Nvidia gtx 980 seems like the best card given your plans, it has 3 display port outs, hdmi and a dvi port so it has you covered. In the future you can also add another card without much hassle (I have done it). I think that the Asus cooler is the best because it’s cooling design works really well and shuts the fans off when it is less than 20% load. My friend’s fans never turned on when he was gaming with it on a resolution of 5760x1080p. It also does not use much power at idle. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121905&cm_re=gtx_980-_-14-121-905-_-Product

    As far as case, psu, cpu cooling and storage those are pretty flexible and you can pick out things that you like the most. It seems like you have your storage set. For case and power supply, I love corsair and have only had good experiences with their psu’s. This psu gives you room to upgrade graphics cards and add more disk drives without having to worry. It also has the nice feature of the fan shutting off when the system is not drawing much power. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139041&cm_re=axi_860-_-17-139-041-_-Product
    cpu cooling really depends on what you plan to do with the cpu. Corsair has a all in one liquid cooling loop that works very well with the psu. It uses Corsair Link which I find useful. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181032&cm_re=h100i-_-35-181-032-_-Product

    The case is totally up to you! Find something that you think looks nice and has the proper amount of sound proofing foam. I have a corsair 750D that is extremely quiet, but you can also check out things like the corsair 550D, fractal design r5 and nzxt h440. Pretty much any atx case will work! It should not be very hard to have a machine that will be capable of everything that you want and run whisper quiet.

    For a cheap computer that will power your old monitor you could get something like an Intel NUC (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102096) it is small and can mount to the VESA mount on the back of your current monitor. It uses ultrabook components so it is very small and has all the new intel power management stuff. It is also fan less. The only thing you would need is ram and an M.2 SSD.

12. >I hope the towers will come back into style in 1-2 years. Technology is cyclical, right?

    Sometimes it is cyclical and sometime it goes in a certain direction. Running boards and 8 track players on cars are not going to make a comeback, ever.

    The direction in PC’s is generally smaller. The Intel NUC style computers, which fit in the palm of your hand, is the future for most desktops, to the extent that they have a future at all (most people just get laptops nowadays). The old style desktops were mostly empty space anyway. But Phil is looking for a very high spec computer. Workstations such as what he wants will still be sold, but they are a niche product and their volume will probably decline, not increase.

13. This may be out of your comfort zone, but you may also want to at least consider the Mac Pro. Pretty sure it’d also be decent at running Windows if you’re so inclined.

14. Dirkjan: I would be happy to use a MacPro but the Apple site implies that it supports just 64 GB of RAM. And it also talks about DDR3 RAM. If I am buying a computer today with the hope of using it four or five years from now, wouldn’t it be good to start with a motherboard that supports DDR4 RAM? It seems as though the Mac Pro was built around an older generation of motherboard.

    [And now that Tim Cook is crusading against discrimination I can say that I paid a few $thousand extra for a MacPro to help Tim Cook protect the oppressed of Indiana!]

15. Agree with Mike and John. The HP Z workstations are very quiet and the build is well thought out. A Xeon single socket machine holds much more ECC memory than you seem to need. They are expensive – the outlet is a good suggestion. I still build my own, but it is hard to justify.

    (I certainly have a ready home for your ZR30w next to my previous generation 3065 if you are replacing it.)

16. Much as jay c said, Skylake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture) looks good but doesn’t seem worth delaying for. What may be worth waiting for is DisplayPort 1.3 (or I suppose HDMI 2.0) which should make 4K more pleasant (and 5K possible). Though apparently 4K@60Hz does work reasonably smoothly with DisplayPort 1.2 on Windows now (it was Wild West territory for most of 2014). (You’ll surely be wanting a GPU with two DP 1.2 outputs. Apparently recent cards’ claimed HDMI 2.0 support isn’t all it seems http://www.anandtech.com/show/8191/nvidia-kepler-cards-get-hdmi-4k60hz-support-kind-of )

    I wouldn’t be too adverse to getting a relatively high-end GPU. Adobe Premiere can apparently make use of one, and of course a big fan and heatsink should run quieter for a given load all else being equal. (As Andrew Sabot said, look for one that idles the fans at low load and so on.) The bigger menace is probably less GPUs with fans that are noisy out of the box than GPUs with fans that start to age relatively quickly (looking at you Sapphire).

    I can’t give you any assurances, but I’d be surprised if the Chromebox had any problem with a slightly unusual resolution over DP.

17. Fair point about the current Mac Pro. The MacRumors Buyer’s Guide seems to think it will get an update soon, though.

18. http://www.ibuypower.com will build you a PC based on branded, off-the-shelf components you select.

19. Hi Philip,

    My name is Richard I work for ASUS as Technical Marketing – we got a ping-back from your blog on our Republic of Gamers website.

    We partner with virtually all professional system builders in the US; Pudget mentioned above, Cyberpower, Newegg (to name a few for example) who provide many system customizations to suit your needs and excellent service.

    You are clearly a heavy workstation user and I would certainly recommend an Intel X99 system with ASUS X99 series or TUF Sabertooth X99 motherboard. This has only just recently launched and will have a shelf life of another 2-3 years. Paired with an Intel i7 5280K for 6 cores, or 5960X (which is admittedly a lot more expensive) for 8 cores. These motherboards currently support 64GB of DDR4, and we will quality future support for 128GB when 16GB DIMMs become available later this year.

    Paired with an ASUS Strix GTX 980 – which will run silent and fanless when not under heavy load – you’ll be able to run up to 3x 4K displays over DP1.2. Unfortunately it’s the top-end model with a price, but it’s the only model with more than 1 DisplayPort required to run your multiple displays.

    Or, consider a lower-end GPU and keep your Dell 30″ LCD for the time being – add a single 4K display (again, ASUS actually lead the 4K revolution on PCs with the PQ321Q in 2012!, followed others like the by PB287Q and recently PA328Q more recently).

    There are 960GB SSDs out there for reasonable price, or, you can go very high end with some 1.2TB Intel SSDs. Or, alternatively, you can ‘merge’ multiple smaller (512GB) drives together in ‘JBOD’ or ‘RAID0’ modes – both of which the motherboard supports. A call to the system builder of choice should be able to set this up for you.

    Hope that helps!

20. Phil: if you need more than 32GB RAM you need a Xeon processor, which is always one generation behind the desktop processors. Hence DDR3 with all Xeon chipsets.

21. You should step up to an iMac Retina with 27″ 5K screen and support for 2x 4k external screens. It’s the sweet spot today for quality and performance, though limited to 32/64 GB RAM.

    The Haswell desktop chips are delayed one year so Moore’s Law has been on hold in CPUs and memory for a full generation now. Probably it’s the end of Moore’s Law as we know it but Haswell will be a big improvement in the summer or fall. Still the iMac Retina will be worth considering.

    The Mac Pro is two to three years behind because of longer update times and Xeon chips. The Xeon chips are always slower but have more cores and support very expensive ECC RAM which will further limit you RAM capacity. Xeon is not good for desktop use. Don’t buy a Mac Pro unless you’re building a render farm or something.

    The fusion drive in iMacs is a small high performance SSD with a big spinning rust drive behind it; it’s better than a slower 1GB SSD and much more affordable than $1k+ fast 1TB SSDs. Fusion works, unlike Windows based versions of this idea.

    And don’t you want to switch back to a Unix like Mac OS/X anyway? Windows is unnecessary misery in your life.

22. These sub-reddits are quite useful for PC making :-

    http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme

    http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc

23. Right now Intel’s Broadwell chipset is planned to be released Q2 of this year but even if they were to release tomorrow the chipset probably will just bring better energy efficiency and almost no performance gains. Intel’s Skyfall is not going to be around till 2016. AMD is planning to release their new graphics card architecture Figi in the summer of this year, but considering that you want a very silent and quiet card, that’s also more optimized for productivity applications. Then you’re probably going to want Nvidia anyway.

    I see that any pre-built computer would not be good enough. Here are some parts that I think would be good for your needs;

    To start off with the CPU, I would recommend a 5280K or a 5920k. I would stay away from Xeons. Xeons are really designed for server rooms with their ECC ram compatibility, which is useless to you. They do have better energy savings and better reliability. Because Xeons have more threads they are better at massive data related applications. If you were going to be using Adobe After Effects, then the Xeon would be preferable. Primer Pro is more GPU bound than After Effects and Primer in general does not require as many resources as After Effects. Generally i7’s win in benchmarks of Adobe Premiere Pro. Also in more applications i7s are better because they have better performance per core and not every application is yet optimized for the additional threads & cores that Xeons have.

    Also if you’re going to be getting these grade of components, I would probably recommend the extra $25-70 for an after market cooling solution like the Hyper 212 evo or corsair h60. I also recommend overclocking with any CPU you get, especially if the Intel CPU is a k or x product. The Xeons you can’t really overclock. But overclocking is very safe and doesn’t take much time especially with these workstation grade motherboards which are designed for overclocking. If you plan to be doing overclocking I think you should aim for the $70-100 range of CPU coolers.

    motherboard: The problem with motherboards is that a better more pricey one gives almost no performance gain. This is especially true with the x99 chipset where the motherboards start at $200. For the x99 i7 5000 CPUS some more budget options that don’t come with as many bells and whistles would be the Msi x99s(128gb ram support) — despite it being the very cheapest x99 motherboard out there it still comes with 128gb support. But it doesn’t yield quite as high results when overclocked and uses a bit more power. A motherboard with more features would be the Asrock x99 extreme6(128gb). Right now there is a $40 mail in rebate on Newegg. If you want to go extreme then the Asus x99-Deluxe is an option. It is great for overclocking and has better sound and LAN capabilities than some of the other motherboards, although it only has 64 GBs of ram support. Asus and other companies also have even higher cost motherboards getting into the $250-500 range with 128gb support.

    Graphics card: The GTX 980 would be a good option. Their are tons of gtx 980 models. The Zotact gtx 980 is one of the cheapest options but will do just fine. The Asus option is more pricey but also good. You could also run a 970. They are one of the best price to performance cards and a 970 I think would be still fine for your workload. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 4GB WINDFORCE 3X is a great 970 with 3 display ports. Most 970s have only 1. A 970 will save about $200 versus the 980. Especially if you’re going to want to upgrade some components in this new computer in 3 or 4 years, going with the cheaper option now and waiting till later can often yield better value.

    Ram: Ram speeds don’t matter at all. You can just get the amount you want of the cheapest ddr4 there is. I recommend getting the bare minimum of ram you need now because ram is the easiest thing to upgrade and ram prices are always dropping.

    Case: does not matter, but if you want a really silent workstation, then I recommend the Fractal Design Define R5. Also the NZXT H630 is a good choice. It’s also silent, but a bit more workstation class with tons of drive bays.

    SSD/Hard Drive: The Mushikan reactor is a more budget 1TB SSD. It’s not as fast as the more performance based SanDisk Extreme Pro 1tb SSD but the Mushikan costs less. You could go with an insanely fast 120gb or 256 gb boot drive SSD for the OS and some key applications and then 1tb of a hybrid drive or a not so fast SSD for not-as-used data/applications.

    Power Supply: Doesn’t matter which PSU you choose. The wattage with the components underneath this paragraph consumes 393 watts at load. so going with a Corsair cx500 watt power supply would be good. It’s 80+bronze which is the second lowest tier of the 80 plus energy efficiency rating and if you spend more you could get a better energy efficient PSU. 500 watts is good because you always want more watts than what you consume. You could go with a 450 watt PSU which would be cheaper but especially if you plan to upgrade this PC in the future the extra 50 watts would be good.

    Parts I personally recommend
    CPU:i7 5820K it’s great for the job
    GPU: gtx 970 Gigabyte WINDFORCE 3X, A lot of people have recommended the 980 which is a great card but a 980 costs about $200 more than the 970. Benchmarks for the GPUs show the 980 getting only about a 5-10% performance increase over the 970.
    ram: Crucially ballistic sport right now has the cheapest DDR4 at least at the 32GB range
    PSU:500 or 450 watts
    Case: Only thing that matters is how many drive bays the case has for extra Hard Drives/SSDs and support for atx motherboard. You should pick a case that looks nice to you
    Motherboard: Msi x99s If you plan to overclock you might want a better one.

    Here is a Pcpartpicker link into which I put these components. Pcpartpicker is great. It keeps track of the cheapest place where the parts are available, checks for compatibility issues, sorts products, and judges wattage.
    http://pcpartpicker.com/p/jGdh8d

24. Thanks, Jonah. That is one crazy MSI motherboard for $180! It says that it has 18 USB ports! Some of them are USB 2.0, though. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t make them all USB 3.0. Does it truly save money to have some USB 2.0 circuitry in there? The advertised support for 128 GB with no firmware upgrade is attractive! Is MSI as good as ASUS?

25. Phil, I have not had very good experiences with Asus, in fact I have had 2 dead Asus boards. My MSI one has been running for 5+ years no problem. As far as having USB 2.0 ports, I like it because sometimes there are incompatibility with USB 3.0. One example is Windows 7 will not talk to USB 3.0 devices until you have drivers installed. This can be a real pain when you have only USB 3.0 ports and windows won’t talk to the keyboard to install drivers!

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