I want a new gaming rig

[Tonitrus]

Around the new year, I got a new big-screen LCD TV, and decided to move my "gaming area" from a desk and monitor, and consolidate it to the living room.  Naturally, this set-up makes a wireless mouse/keyboard a much more logical choice for input devices.

However, in my naiveté, I'd have thought that for gaming, wireless devices would have improved.  But in fact, they still seem to be pretty much  completely useless for games were lots of mouse-clicking/button pressing is involved with high precision.   

[Alcibiades]

Been using the Logitech MX Master with my surface pro and it does pretty well, never used a wireless keyboard though.   

[viper37]

Around the new year, I got a new big-screen LCD TV, and decided to move my "gaming area" from a desk and monitor, and consolidate it to the living room.  Naturally, this set-up makes a wireless mouse/keyboard a much more logical choice for input devices.

However, in my naiveté, I'd have thought that for gaming, wireless devices would have improved.  But in fact, they still seem to be pretty much  completely useless for games were lots of mouse-clicking/button pressing is involved with high precision.   

Keyboard, I don't know. I'm searching for a good replacement to my Microsoft Natural Wireless Ergonomic Keyboard 7000, but i haven't found any.

I had to replace my mouse with a wireless Logitech G602, with progammable buttons and this is a wonderful product.
I wish their keyboards were just as good.

[Tamas]

Any reason I would not want to go with a mini case like this one:

[Tamas]

More importantly: how much of a degraded lifetime am I looking at if I overclock?

[viper37]

Re: case.
There's a lot of subjectives.  Technically speaking, you should look for good airflow (places to put fans in&out) and space to work in it with your hands if you need to change a video card or ram or something else.

The main reason to avoid a very small case for a gaming computer is the size of your video card, which often exceeds the size of the ATX motherboard.  So double check the interior measurements of your case to make sure that new GTX 1080, or the 3 of them for your triple-sli* system will fit.

Re: overclock.
It depends on how much your overclock and how you do it.  Overclocking in itself does not degrade your material.  What will degrade it is the excess heat it generates.  If you have a stock ventilator on your CPU, I wouldn't even dream of overclocking.  On the other end, if you have a liquid cooling system you could overclock much, much higher without damaging your hardware.

With a good cpu air cooling, you could likely overclock by 10%, maybe more, but that becomes tricky, because everything needs to follow: RAM, GPU, motherboard.  Liquid cooling for everything will help you gain much more.  But you'll also need to adjust ram&CPU voltage.   There are some utilities that deal with it for you, to avoid going too far.



*SLI & Crossfire: personally, I do not recommend getting 2 cheaper video cards for SLI instead of an higher end cards.  Many games have issues and drivers are often buggy when it comes to SLI and Crossfire, in rare cases, it can even lead to degraded performances for a new game, until it is patched properly and there are driver updates.  But it's a personal choice.  Many people swear by it.

[Tamas]

Thanks!

[viper37]

Re: overclock.
It depends on how much your overclock and how you do it.  Overclocking in itself does not degrade your material.  What will degrade it is the excess heat it generates. 

I forgot.  With overclocking, you often need to adjust the voltage of CPU & RAM, and that can lead to problems if you don't know what you're doing.  Many motherboards tend to be "overclocker" friendly, have included utilities in their BIOS (UEFI) and software (in the case of Asus, at least) to help you do it safely; if you put too much voltage, the computer simply won't boot and revert back to safe settings instead of frying your parts.  If you intend to be very serious about overclocking, you should look for such boards, something like the Asus Sabertooth or Maximus lines (I just don't know the model names about the other brands, but Gigabyte has some too).

[Tamas]

Thanks, I have dropped the ideas of overclocking and the mini house.

I have also dropped the brief idea of assembling the thing myself. Never had any inclination for that kind of work so I am just going to pay the extra.

[Tamas]

Ok I really SHOULDN'T buy this now as the 750 it costs would be well above 800 due to the need for a monitor, but this is very much the config I am now set on buying, whether tomorrow, in a month, or October:

Thermaltake Suppressor F51 Mid-Tower Silent Case
CPU: INTEL® Core™ i5-6600K Quad Core 3.50 GHz 6MB Cache LGA1151
Cooling Fan: Be Quiet Dark Rock 3 CPU Fan with 6 x Direct Contact heat-pipes
Motherboard: ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming INTEL Z170 Chipset, ATX Mainboard w/ 4 RAM slots, USB 3.1, 3 PCIe x16,
3 PCIe x1, 1 SATA Express, 4 SATA3, 1 Ultra M.2 [+29]
Memory: 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4/2400mhz Dual Channel Memory [+20] (HyperX Fury w/Heat Spreader)
Video Card: MSI GeForce® GTX 950 2GB 16X PCIe 3.0 Video Card [+22] (Single Card)
Power Supply:600 Watts Power Supplies [+25] (Cooler Master 600 Watts B600 B2 Gaming Power Supply,
80+)
M.2 PCIe SSD Drive: 128GB (1x128GB) Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD - 2000MB/s Read & 650MB/s Write
[+63] (Single Drive)
Hard Drive: 2TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64M Cache 7200rpm Hard Drive [+15] (Single Hard Drive)
Optical Drive: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE. (BLACK Colour)

[Barrister]

Ok I really SHOULDN'T buy this now as the 750 it costs would be well above 800 due to the need for a monitor, but this is very much the config I am now set on buying, whether tomorrow, in a month, or October:

Thermaltake Suppressor F51 Mid-Tower Silent Case
CPU: INTEL® Core™ i5-6600K Quad Core 3.50 GHz 6MB Cache LGA1151
Cooling Fan: Be Quiet Dark Rock 3 CPU Fan with 6 x Direct Contact heat-pipes
Motherboard: ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming INTEL Z170 Chipset, ATX Mainboard w/ 4 RAM slots, USB 3.1, 3 PCIe x16,
3 PCIe x1, 1 SATA Express, 4 SATA3, 1 Ultra M.2 [+29]
Memory: 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4/2400mhz Dual Channel Memory [+20] (HyperX Fury w/Heat Spreader)
Video Card: MSI GeForce® GTX 950 2GB 16X PCIe 3.0 Video Card [+22] (Single Card)
Power Supply:600 Watts Power Supplies [+25] (Cooler Master 600 Watts B600 B2 Gaming Power Supply,
80+)
M.2 PCIe SSD Drive: 128GB (1x128GB) Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD - 2000MB/s Read & 650MB/s Write
[+63] (Single Drive)
Hard Drive: 2TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64M Cache 7200rpm Hard Drive [+15] (Single Hard Drive)
Optical Drive: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE. (BLACK Colour)

That's very very similar to what I purchased last year.  For a gaming computer you might want to up the video card a bit if you can - although for strategy games I'm sure that'll be perfect (I went with a 960).

[viper37]

just like BB, I think your video card is on the weak side.  The rest is pretty good though.
Consider an AMD card, they might be cheaper.

[Alcibiades]

The 970s should be getting pretty cheap soon, and if not the 1070 will be 300$ or less from what I read, and the new AMD RX 480  clocks in at $235, which is phenomenal from what I've read at  that price.

[Brezel]

Thinking of buying a new gaming pc. My goal is to play today's games with high settings and not having to upgrade parts every year. Not interested in VR. How does this build look?

Asus 27" LED FreeSync MG278Q
Corsair Carbide SPEC-03 Midi Tower
Cooler Master B500 VER.2 KPC
Intel Core i5-6500 Skylake
ASUS B150M Pro Gaming, Socket-1151
Kingston ValueRam DDR4 2133MHz 16GB
XFX Radeon RX 480 8GB RS
Corsair Force Series LE 240GB 2.5'' SSD
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5" SSD

[viper37]

Intel Core i5 will likely be a tad weak if you want to run games in 1440p.
XFX Radeon RX 480 will take anything you throw at it at 1080p, but combined with the i5, it might struggle on some games at 1440p, especially if they ain't DX12.

If you can, squeeze a few more dollars for an i7, if not, plan on upgrading within 2 years (something you don't want to do).