Hello guys and girls. It may sound like a joke, but I thought I know something about Hardware. Well, honestly, for the past 2-3 days I've been looking forward to build myself a new PC, and thought "Hmm, in 2002 I did it by myself, It won't be so difficult now, and there wont be many changes " ... Oh dear .... I was soooo wrong. Anyway, here I am , with all my noobnes, proudly ashamed asking you for an advise. Or it's better if I say : Asking you "Please Build me a computer for my money, I've had enough of reading forums and reviews that I don't completely understand" The market is obviously so huge, that my "me" can't take a decision. So here I'll try to complete the template, with my optimal budget/needs/wishes etc... Hope you can find me something.
this is the best I could do using scan You can use it as a reference. I only used scan prices to make it, and it's just a little bit above budget. I could cut some parts to make it fit into your budget more nicely, but then it'd start cutting into the future potential of the build, so that's as low as I'm willing to take it without sacrificing too much. Your external hard drives may be able to be converted into internal hard drives if you remove them from their case and reformat them. You just have to make sure that they use SATA connections and that they're not extremely slow (that's the minimum you need to have). The problem with doing that is you don't know the specifics on the HDD so it's hard to say exactly how good the HDD will be as an internal. If you want to play it safe I'd up the budget to £450 and get a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drive. Most external hard drives are simply internal HDDs put into a plastic box with some LEDs around it set to flash at certain times, but there's always some chance that yours are different. If the HDDs do work out for you though it'd be nice to have them set up in RAID0 for the read/write boost .
He could possibly consider going for the CoolerMaster Elite 430 Case instead of the overpriced Antec 300. It was still selling at £37 two weeks ago, but now it is only at around £28! http://www.scan.co.uk/products/cool...-with-window-120mm-front-led-blue-fan-w-o-psu The money saved can be put toward getting a GTX460 1GB instead of the 5750.
Hello again. Thanks for all of you, who spared some time to help me. While At work, during my brakes, I've spend some more time in updating myself to 21 century and also with the help of a good friend of mine, I came to a new build , which I'd like to ask you , once again, if it's better than Dae314 and Marine-RX179 suggested ? http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/6972/roskopc.jpg
Case is always more to do with personal choice than anything else (cooling asides), so if you like that case then by all mean get that. The layout for the case seems alright. As for the PSU, I would go for a decent branded one than some cheap generic PSU. Why not use generic PSU you ask? Check out the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTVEtr14FEA I did have a generic PSU failed on and gone out with a bang before like in the video, but luckily it didn't take the rest of my hardware with it... The general saying is PSU is the most important hardware of a computer that nobody should skim on...don't gamble your hundred of pounds worth of hardware for the sake of saving £20~£30... As for graphic card, GTX460 768MB is only about £5~£15 higher in price than a 5770, but it is faster by quite a margin: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/172?vs=156 Also I wouldn't recommend the "i5" 650...it is basically the same dual-core CPU as the cheaper i3 530, i3 540 but with higher default clock. If you are getting a Intel dual-core, just get the i3 540 at around £80. For the price of the "i5" 650 at £135, you can already get a i5 760, which is a REAL quad-core CPU; but if you are getting i5 760, you should get P55 chipset motherboard instead of H55 chipset motherboard...either way, it will be above your £400 budget.
I like Dae's build. However, I think if gaming is the primary thing here's how I would go: Athlon II X2 250 - £45 For games (especially Black Ops), this should be ok, will overclock and saves valuable cash. Freezer 7 Pro - £15 A bargain frankly. Will allow some OCing, is quiet, but crucially again - cheap. Asus M4A87TD EVO - £75 8 series, so leaves room for upgrades and comes with USB3 and native SATA6gig. 4gig XMS3 - £55 As previously prescribed. Coolermaster Elite 330 - £30 I built a 3ghz C2D system in one of these and it was alright. An alternative would be: Silverstone PS02B - £38 Has 3 fan mounts over two, with one eye on future reqs. Up to you.... Seasonic S12II - 430w PSU - £55 Efficient, quiet, well built. Better than the Antec, despite it's lower power rating. EVGA 768mb 460 - £125 Quiet stock cooler, vastly outperforms anything from ATI for all of £10-£20 more and will cope better with the relatively high res of the monitor. Marine is right. Prices (from Scan) are rounded, but I believe I've hit £400
I would suggest you spend £10 more on the CPU and get the Athlon II X3 445 instead: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-...-31ghz-15mb-total-cache-ht-2000mhz-95w-retail Beside the one extra core, your chosen motherboard has the core unlock feature which might be able to unlock the 4th core that's locked away on the Athlon II X3. If you are lucky enough to unlock a working core, then you would hae a Quad at no extra cost. P.S. Black OPs is not too graphic demanding, but it is heavily CPU bound and almost all dual-core CPUs AMD and Intel alike fail to deliver decent frame rate. Have a look at the various CPU performance test with a 5970 on Black OPs at 1920x1200 4xAA, 16xAF: http://www.techspot.com/review/336-cod-black-ops-performance/page8.html
I wouldn't suggest the i5-650 route as at your budget, AMD offers more bang for your buck. okenobi's build is nice, and all the advice on this page so far has been very good. The most ideal GPU for future proofing your build would be the GTX 460 1GB, but that card is way out of your budget. The 768MB doesn't have as good performance as the 1GB but it's still a good card. At that price range though it's worth also looking at ATI cards (5750/5770). For a case, you can choose whatever you want to choose as long as it's not a sealed metal box that you use to bake in, it should be fine. Making a nice i5 build uses the quad core i5-760 and will run around £700-£1000, so I would stay out of the i5 zone for now, especially since sandybridge is coming out. You don't need to worry about sandybridge too much right now though as intel plans to release the higher end processors first, and the lower end ones later (I believe this is correct...).
No. GTX460 768MB is the best bang for bucks entry level card, and has made the cards slightly cheaper not good value. GTS450 and 5750 need to be as low as £65~£75, and 5770 need to be as low as £80-£85 to make them have the simliar price to performance ratio as the GTX460 768MB. Sure the GTX460 768MB doesn't has 1GB of VRAM, but it is still overall faster than even the 5830 1GB at 1920 res: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/171?vs=156
Thank you guys, you are trying to help me, but In my head is getting even more messed up Anyway, I'll me patient, and Will keep checking what's what, and what should I get. I found the specs for my external hard drives. Will they be ok with the new machine ? http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300466360942 http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/-/2144/1...-External-USB-Desktop-Hard-Drive/Product.html Also will I be able to use the RAM from the VAIO ? Or any part from it?
Note that both the Asus M4A87TD EVO and the GA-H55M-UD2H only support Crossfire. Most motherboards that will fit into his budget will be crossfire boards too. Getting an ATI card means having the option to get a second one in crossfire in the future as an upgrade. Getting an Nvidia card means not having the dual GPU option. Multi-GPU support is not necessary, but it opens up an avenue for upgrade in the future that would otherwise be closed (of course the PSU needs to be upgraded too to get a crossfire upgrade ). On a side note, the motherboard I recommended doesn't have a second PCI-e slot so it wouldn't matter which card he got with that one.
The boards only has x16/x4 pci-e lanes, meaning that when Crossfire at x4/x4, each card can lose average 9% speed. If he MUST go down the AMD/ATI graphic route, I would suggest try to find a cheap 6850 at around £140...as it offer much better performance to price ratio than the 5770. I helped a friend bought a Gigabyte 6850 (with the Windforce twin-fans custom cooler) from scan at around £150. I overclocked the card from 775MHz to 850MHz on stock voltage, and it ran BFBC2 completely smooth at 1920x1080 4xAA, 16xAF HABO enabled. But this was on a i5 760 overclocked to 3.8GHz. To be honest, I think a single 6850 or GTX460 1GB would pretty much handle any game fine at 1920 res at highest details with 4xAA, 16XAF, with the exception of Crysis and Metro2033. Also, I seriously doubt Crysis 2 would be anywhere near as graphic demanding as Crysis 1, as it is being made for consoles as well.
The guy's got a budget. My built is spot on with the 768mb 460. Marine's suggestion of a triple core Athlon is a good one for that money. Although I should've mentioned that you might well get another core out of the X2 on the same mobo anyway. Either way, that mobo will support up to a 6 core AM3 chip, so plenty of scope for upgrades. You could put the X2 in there and see how you get on. Then if after a while you want more juice, slam a Phenom in there etc. But for a tenner, Marine probably isn't wrong.
Actually unlike the Phenom II X2, the Athlon II X2 are REAL dual-core CPU with no extra cores locked away, whereas the Athlon II X3 is the Athlon II X4 with one (working or not working) core locked away.
When you say you've got an OS, what exactly does that mean? You do know that you can't use what's on your laptop on your new build.
@Cerberus90 Firstly I do have a installation cds for my old PC Windows XP And for my new Laptop. Although the recovery OS for the laptop is in a hidden partition on the hdd. So in case I can't use my Vista OS, that is on my laptop, I'll use my old XP. If it still doesn't work, I will find "something else...." If I have to, I'll buy a new one. @okenobi and Marine-RX179 Thanks guys, but all that letters and numbers are a fog in my head. Would someone of you make a snapshot of the actual basket with all the items you just described , so I can simply purchase them from the screenshot... Thanks for your hard work in solving my request.... Also nobody answered my post, about the Hard Drives I've got. Will they be ok with the new build ? Also I got about 8 USB (2 of them are the Hard Drives ) devices connected, but If the mobo doesn't have enough , I've got an 7 port USB Hub in the Drawer. ...
Well, you won't be able to use Vista from your laptop, as that's installed on your laptop, and probably some special OEM copy for the laptop. Also, if your XP machine is still in use you'll have issues. If not, then it should install, might need to use the phone activation. I would highly recommend getting Windows 7 though. If your running XP, you'll only be able to use about 2.5 - 3GiB of RAM, and it won't run quite as nicely IMO. It depends on what the hard drives inside the units are. Best way to find out is to open them up and just take a look at what drive it is in there. You could just post the make + model of the drive on here and we should be able to advise you.
Here I did a basket for you using ebuyer: I've changed the CPU from Athlon II X3 445 to Athlon IIX3 450 because it is 100MHz faster for just £2 more. Also note that the list doesn't have a hard-drive or a 3rd party CPU cooler. If you want to go with AMD/ATI graphic instead, you can get the Gigabyte 6850 from scan: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...-960-stream-processors-dp-dl-dvi-i-dvi-d-hdmi But do bare in mind that the MSI motherboard I picked has core-unlock feature, USB3.0 and SATA 3.0 ports, however it is also only has x16/x4 pci-e lanes, meaning that it will only crossfire at x4/x4. One of the the board's feature "OC Genie" manage to automatically overclock the Phenom II 955BE from 3.2GHz to 3.65GHz, so I suspect it can do roughly the same for your Athlon II X3 450, considering it is also 3.2GHz (however it might not be go smoothly if the unlocked core is not as strong as the 3 main cores), but you should get a 3rd party CPU cooler before overclocking though. As regarding the 2TB hard-drive you already have, do you know what brand is it and is it 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm? If it is a 5,400rpm drive, I would recommend you get a faster drive as the main operating/boot drive. Usually I would recommend getting a Samsung F3 1TB at £40 for a new build, but considering you already have big enough storage driver as it is, I would advise you to consider investing on getting a SSD drive for installing Windows and other applications and games you use the most. I would recommend you consider getting this (if your existing 2TB drive is indeed only 5,400rpm): http://www.ebuyer.com/product/225804
