Well, Haswell and the new Nvidia GPUs are out, so it’s time to start putting together a new system. It’s still too early for prebuilt ones to be available, and I wasn’t happy with the ones I looked at before since they all involved compromising on something due to limited choices, so I guess I’m rolling my own again. So far, the parts I’m looking at are:
CPU: Intel i5-4670. Of the new batch of Haswell chips, this seems to hit the sweet spot for price and performance. There are slightly faster ones, but they start to get much more expensive very fast after this point.
Motherboard: Asus Z87M-Plus uATX. There seems to be a lot less differentiation among motherboards nowadays, perhaps due to more stuff being moved right onto the CPU die. It’s mainly about size and number of USB and PCIe slots, and I don’t really need very many of them. I’m not going SLI, so I don’t need more than 1 PCIe 16x slot, so this board satisfies everything even though it’s on the cheaper end.
Case: SilverStone PS07B uATX. I could reuse my current Antec P180, but it’s a behemoth, and I’d like to try something a bit more compact. I don’t need four external 5 1/4″ bays! It’s my first time looking at uATX cases, so I’m slightly worried about things fitting and cooling, but as far as I can tell from measurements and other peoples’ reports, it should all work.
Video: Asus GTX 770 DirectCUII. Not much differentiation among video cards either, but this new generation should last me a good while and this card is supposed to be particularly cool and quiet. I’m slightly concerned that 2GB might not be enough if games ported from next-gen consoles need more and more texture memory, but it’s easy enough to replace the card down the road if that happens.
Storage: SanDisk Extreme 480GB SSD and Seagate Barracuda 3TB. It’s about time I got an SSD, and this one’s been recommended for being reliable and reasonably performant. It won’t be big enough by itself, so there’s ye olde regular hard drive in there too.
Power Supply: SeaSonic X650 Gold. Not a particularly glamorous component, but I’m going for a modular one to cut down on the mess of cables inside, especially with a smaller case.
I’m also trying to choose quieter parts this time. I didn’t really focus on it last time, and the fans are fairly noticeable even at idle.