Enthusiast PC Parts and You.

Today, I thought I'd write on a topic that often gets glossed over. We all know that "enthusiast" PC components tend to involve premiums for insignificant gains, factory OC's, and branding. As such, I thought I'd write something informative on the topic.

First things first, I'm going to give you the two rules of enthusiast components.

1: Make an informed decision.
2: If you have to ask if it's a good idea, you should do a lot more research before paying more for it.

Multi-GPU Configurations

This is something that I think lots of people don't understand, and it's kind of stigmatized beyond it's issues at this point.

1: False Savings. Unless you use a dual-GPU single-PCB card (which isn't a savings by any stretch), you have to buy a better motherboard. No matter how you package the GPU's, you need better cooling and more PSU. In the case of two mid-range GPU's to top the performance of a single GPU, this will end up making it cost more, and be more of a pain to work with.

2: Driver issues and scaling. The scaling is dramatically improved in recent years, with games with decent SLI/CrossfireX support easily hitting 180%+ of a single card solution. The fact is, though, the scaling is variable, especially due to driver issues. Remember, if you buy a new release, the drivers may not work well with it day one. In that case, the driver problems will scale much faster than the GPU's, causing shit framerates compared to a single better card.

3: Tinkering. Some people see this as a feature, I'm one of them. I love tinkering endlessly with things to try and squeeze barely noticeable improvements out of my system. If you do, multi-GPU is awesome. Custom profiles tend to be the best way to get results, and this can give you hours benching a particular game and tweaking things trying to get 1-2 more FPS.

4: Noise. The increased heat from multiple cards and less airflow comes with another drawback. GPU fans get really really loud if they get loaded heavily, particularly if there's insufficient airflow, which tends to be the case with multiple dual-slot cards jammed close together on a motherboard.

You'll notice I haven't given any real definitive reason not to SLI/Crossfire? That's because it isn't objectively bad. It's objectively more work, hotter, noisier, and more power consuming, but if those things are worth it to you personally, that's perfectly fine.

Enthusiast Motherboards

For the sake of this discussion, I'm not just talking about the ability to overclock. When I say enthusiast motherboard, we're talking about feature-loaded. Tons of extra USB3 and SATA 6Gb/s, BIOS loaded with extra features, heavy chipset cooling, multiple PCI-e x16 slots for SLI/Crossfire.

Obviously, the motherboard is important. You don't want a junk one if you plan to overclock. But you can overclock without paying for features you don't need. If you aren't planning to go multi-GPU, don't pay extra for more PCI-e than you need. If you aren't going to use 6Gb SATA, don't pay for it. You don't need it for HDD's, so unless you're looking at SSD's, you can avoid getting a lot of the ports.

Good chipset and VREG cooling is handy if you plan to do a heavy OC, but for lower OC's, pretty much any board built to OC will be fine on cooling.

RAM

This is one of the big ones. You can easily pay 2-3x more for memory that gives, best case, 4-5% better performance. Given that that money could go into more CPU or GPU for bigger gains, that doesn't make sense unless those are already top end.

Getting memory working properly at better timings than CL7, or faster clock than 1600Mhz can be pretty involved, and due to weird voltage dependencies, even those numbers can be tricky, depending on your CPU clock. And again, you aren't seeing huge gains from it. if you really want to OC your memory, get a low voltage kit, not one that's been tested at higher clocks. The low voltage will let you OC the memory yourself, and they usually don't mention that above a certain clock in their testing, they were running higher VDIMM, sometimes unhealthily so.

Heat spreaders on RAM are pure gimmick factor. Servers and high end workstations don't tend to have them, why should your gaming rig? Unless you're being downright abusive, given that those chips are usually rated in the 90C range, the odds of your memory melting before your CPU or VREG are slim to none. The main two things heatsinks on memory do is block CPU coolers and look pretty. Actually, let's broaden that to all memory cooling.

Factory OC GPU's

Unless you're the epitome of lazy, these are almost always nothing but wasted money, the exception being certain cards where the only way to get certain non-reference cooling is to buy the factory OC. Overclocking a GPU is done through software with a GUI in the OS, takes little to no time, and you can find what should be stable numbers by looking at what the factory OC's run at. Not much else on this one.

Cooling

Here's the thing. If your PC was intended to have plumbing, the case would come with Drano and a plunger. It doesn't, so keep it where it belongs. The biggest problem with liquid cooling (ignoring the fact that it still bottoms out at ambient temperature, just like air), is the fact that if it dies, your PC isn't going to run until you fix it. Yous CPU can't work with no cooling, and a liquid cooler with no liquid is no cooling. A heatsink loses a fan, well, all you have to do is drop your OC down for a while and run it passive until you can get a new fan.

Spending extra money on thermal paste is downright insane for 99.99% of users. Why? Because, paying an extra $10 for 2-3C cooler at best doesn't make any sense when you could pay an extra $10 for a better aftermarket heatsink than you originally planned to get and lower temps more, or more quietly. Thermal paste will almost never be the key to making your temps comfortable for long term use, especially if you aren't shooting for records.