Spec me a gaming PC... (Updated 02/08/2016)

Theydon Bois

Done.

thekeemo

I think it would be even better if you made it in pcpartpicker and allows easier editing

WildeKarde

Any reason the skylake has twice the SSD size and half the ram? Was it just to get in to fit the budget?

Might have been good to have both the same with exception of the CPU and motherboard and let them fall around the budget

Cha1ky

Don't think you can buy quad channel memory in 8gb. Normally comes in 16gb and 32gb.

WildeKarde

Just thought for building would be good to have both top specs as close as they can to each other for comparison.

Sniper Ash6

16GB is the least you can get for a quad channel DDR4 (4x 4GB) set up and for most people it's more than will be needed so with some of the other savings in the Skylake build (e.g. the motherboard difference) it allows the spec to be balanced slightly differently where 8GB is still enough. It's perfectly possible to go for 2x 8GB DIMMs in the Skylake setup and that only costs ~40 quid more

broona

Is it worth getting a M2/PCIE SSD drive over a SATA one as a Windows drive? I'd be very tempted by a Samsung SM951 if I was building a new machine but would like to know if the real world performance differences are tangible?

thekeemo

Not all too much on the other hand NVME is very very very fast

broona

Yeah, it was the NVME variant I was looking at, it will probably be next year before I get round to building something to upgrade from my 3570k, sure something newer and shinier will be around by then though!

ChuckMountain

My SM951 went pop which I wasn't happy about when I tried to upgrade to Windows 10.  For some reason my backup decided not to back up my Witchers 3 Saved game so looks like I have lost a ton of progress

I took it back to Scan yesterday hoping they would have some NVMe ones in stock but alas no so back with the same.

I read an in depth review which I can't find now which compared Samsung top end SATA vs AHCI vs NVMe.  There were differences in between all 3 more so between SATA vs AHCI interestingly as the IOPs for the AHCI seem understated.  In the real world it was also quite difficult to hit the NVMe upper end so diminishing returns.