The Glade 4.0

I'd never reuse a PSU but you can reuse the case unless there are custom mounts in there. The price difference is probably due to tax/shipping, I get everything from Amazon Prime.

Yeah, probably. Service is down ATM, so I can't play around with it more.

I checked, and Dell cases use a BTX mobo, so an ATX won't fit without modification. That leaves my HD as the only salvage, but was a 7200 barracuda best of my memory.

Put together a new build for around 630 including OS, so that's looking a lot better.

For OS: stick with Win 7, or go for an OEM 8.1? Or I guess a hackintosh build is the other option.

There we go, sites working again: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/yF4DQ7

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

No reason not to go with Win 8.1 IMO. Hackintosh wont happen if you get that GTX 750 Ti though

Bah. Which are hackintosh compatible? I assume the one in your build?

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

My build works out of the box, only issue is that my motherboard's wifi chip isn't supported by Apple, so I have to use a USB dongle (Asus N-13) for internets.

If you really want to look into the hackintosh world, that rabbit hole goes quite deep: http://www.tonymacx86.com/437-building- ... -2014.html

Only two things I will add to your latest posts.
1) I'd get the H97 instead of the H87 mobo. They are basically identical in price, and the 97 is the latest generation. You shouldn't need any bios updates, as they just came out. They are ready for the latest refresh haswell chips, like the one you are buying.
2) I'd go ahead and get a new hard drive, unless you feel really comfortable about using the old one. Especially if you are loading a new OS. I would think it will make life much easier than trying to reuse an old drive. YMMV

A quick look at things looks like you will save $100-$150 by building your own vs buying from cyberpower, with comparable parts. Cyberpower, I assume, is really lower the prices now as components are aging a bit. The power of buying in bulk. It may be worth it to just buy from them, if you don't mind paying that little extra. Again, YMMV. I personally enjoyed building my own this time, and felt I saved just a little in doing so. I also liked that I know exactly what I have put together, and what is loaded on my computer (i.e. no bloatware).

Whatever you decide, good luck.

Also, with that 100$ you save, you can get a 240GB SSD drive. It will make your system feel faster than just about any other part. Watching it boot up in under 8 seconds #feelsgoodman.

Sam:

Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it looks like I save ~100-150 by buying from Cyber vs building my own, based on the two links I gave ($900 vs $1025).

So reading around, it seems like a lot of the recommendations are to go with the G3258 / GTX 750 TI.

Other than it being a newer board, what's the benefit of the H97 over the H87? I can't see anything I'd really need that the H87 (or even H81) doesn't have.

I literally play no other games than WoW (and some throwbacks like D2, etc.) and plan on playing no other games in the foreseeable future, so putting together a beefier box than I need doesn't seem hugely wise.

Since WoW doesn't take advantage of multiple cores, seems like a G3528 at a 3.5 clock speed and dual core would be a solid upgrade, and is $120 cheaper than the 4690, which seems like overkill for what I need. My other option would be an i3 4350, which is around $100 cheaper than the 4690 and also seems to be more than I need.

As for an SSD and boot time... Maybe I'm just too used to OSX, but I don't reboot my system more than once every few months, so a few seconds off the boot time doesn't really seem like that big of a deal, and loading times are already plenty fast on a 7200rpm drive.

I'm not really interested in pushing up my graphics settings past Good/High, and don't really do anything other than game/stream videos on this computer, and I don't do the HD thing. I want solid raid performance, but spending an extra few hundred bucks for performance I won't really see doesn't seem like the best use of my money, unless I'm missing something.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

It's late and I'm cross eyed atm, but I just tried to do the best comparison using the parts on your cyberpower build. I think I saw $70ish dollars savings by building it yourself, using as close to the same components as possible. The good part about building it yourself, is you are not limited to the parts on cyberpower, and thus can save even more money in areas.

One being mobo costs. They don't give you the option of moving down to an H81 board. You do not need a Z board unless you need some of the features and are overclocking. And given that ASUS just recently made all their boards OC'able via update bios, there is no need for that now. Other brands have not done this, as far as I can tell. I know ASRock has not, and gigabyte either from what I see. So, if you are going to OC and want a cheaper board, probably should get an ASUS.

The H97 suggestion was when you were talking about the i5 and getting the H87 board. As I can tell, the 9 boards cost the same as the 8 boards. The difference is the 9s are newer, and shouldn't need any updates to the bios. They were just released to be ready for the new haswell refresh chips, like the i5 you were listing in your builds.

Your initial list that was over $1000 had some issues. 1. the hard drive was way overpriced, as the caviar black doesn't cost much more than the blue, and nowhere near $200+.....more like $60. 2. You had 16gb of ram, not 8gb. 3. The gpu was slightly overpriced. 4. You had an aftermarket cooler, and did not need one with the locked chip. 5. You had a much larger psu that you didn't need for that build.

Now, the G3258........it's made to OC. That's it's selling point. First unlocked chip outside the K series i5s and i7s. That's why people are suggesting them in budget builds. To OC for a cheap price. If you are doing so, you need a board like I mentioned earlier (ASUS).....and likely want that aftermarket cooler you listed initially.

Anyways.....tired.

Nephyr:

You are playing World of Warcraft -- ALL of your "bling" money needs to go into your CPU. You want the i5-4690K at a minimum. You would not be remiss in getting an i7-4790K, since your primary game is CPU-limited and always has been.

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Ok, so call me confused, but my understanding was that while wow is CPU determinant, it's based on single core clock speed, and multiple cores have almost no effect.

And from friends in WoD beta, that hasn't changed.

Also, from what I can see, an i5-4690 seems to be overkill for what I'm looking for, which is ~30-50 FPS on good to High graphics.

Not against spending some extra if it's really beneficial, but trying to keep this as cheap as possible.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

That's not exactly accurate. While it does not necessarily benefit from multi-threading, it benefits significantly from the improved floating point and ALU performance of Intel's better CPUs. The i5-4690 is the goto budget processor of choice across almost all games at the moment, but even Tom's Hardware and Anandtech mention material gains in CPU limited games by jumping up to a i7-4790, which is relatively inexpensive for the level of computing you get. It will outperform some of LGA2011 CPUs in limited circumstances and the LGA 1150 processor family will likely get another revision shortly.

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Ah, ok.

I'll play around with benchmarks and see where it sits with WoW.

Part of the problem I'm having putting something together is that most people either play on really budget systems, or play on very nice systems, with very little in between.

Since I'm building something that's pretty much just for WoW, I don't mind optimizing a bit.

I know a lot of the build advice I see on the MMOChamp and WoW official forums don't recommend anything plast a 4350/3258 for budget/midline builds.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

That's because they put too much stock in the GPU. You also likely want an ATI Chipset, since I believe the R7 275X is about the same prices as a GTX 750 Ti and is a full featured GPU, not a reference board mobile chipset.

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Ok, so some financial difficulties arose, and I'm saving up for a build, but thinking about what to do in the meantime.

I've got my old gaming box that was semi-retired. It was an old Dell XPS, rock solid. C2D E6600 at 2.4 GHZ, 4gb of ram, good PSU, really good cooling.

The graphics card, however, died, and I replaced it with a 4550 HD, since I wasn't using it for gaming at the time.

I can't really do any mobo/CPU upgrades in this box, but I can upgrade the GPU to something half decent. I was thinking about dropping in a 750TI, and then reusing that when I build something new in the Spring.

It should be better as-is than the mini I'm using now, with a higher clocked CPU and a non-integrated GFX card, and what I'm using now is working OK for me.

I get conflicting opinions on the CPU. CPUboss says it's a solid 6.5 out of 10, and a really good performance for the price. Everyone I talk to says it should be condemned, and there's no way anything from 2006 will be playable. I'm thinking there are differences in expectations.

Is this a horrible idea?

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

You'll be replacing it soon. You can survive on a Core 2 Duo playing WoW for six months. You might appreciate what we've been saying about CPU, particularly when you make the upgrade and compare two CPU platforms with the same GPU, but I don't think it will kill you, and WoW thrives based on its friendliness towards aging platforms.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

K, thanks.

Considering I'm playing it on a lower clocked C2D now, I couldn't see why it would be a bad move, but I thought I'd check.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

If you're cool with overclocking, you might want to look into the Pentium unlocked 20th anniversary chip, the G3258. Apparently it's a monster, for 70 bucks.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pentium-g3258-b81-cheap-overclocking,3888.html

Yeah, I'm considering it when I build.

Honestly, the CPU/GPU/mobo costs don't bother me, but having to add the case, PSU new ram and OS adds quite bit.

None of the CPUs I can slot in my mobo are worth the cost, and since it's BTX, can't just replace the board.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Going back to cyberpower for a minute, I discovered that, depending which pre-set build you use it's possible to get price differences of around $100 on identical builds. I'm not sure why this is but I think it's that different presets have certain discounts associated with them, and then you can recustomize it how you want. I don't know if it still works (this was almost 3 years ago now) but if you use the site, try building the same computer from different presets and you may be able to get it a little bit cheaper.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Just thought I'd update....

As a stopgap, I installed 7 Ultimate 64 bit, increased the ram, and dropped in a 750ti.

Now I can run using my old E6600 C2D at a mix of High/Ultra settings outside of raids with 75-120 FPS.

Huge upgrade for about $120.

I'll see how it lasts with the WoD expansion pushing to multiple cores and more of the raid load to the GPU, but I'm imagining it will work out pretty well until I get together a new case/mobo/CPU to go along with it.

Thanks again to everyone for the help!

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.