Hey guys As the title says, I'm looking to build my first PC to replace the Asus laptop in my sig (it's about 5 years old now, and has started to rattle ominously whenever I load anything more taxing than Word ) My budget's around £650, but I could probably stretch to £700 if there was a really compelling reason to, I'm building it as a general purpose sort of PC, I will be doing some gaming on it (Fallout/Deus Ex/Dead Island at 1920x1080), and I'd like it to be as future-proof as possible for the budget (as contradictory as that term may be..). I'd also like to try my hand at overclocking (hence the P67 board and unlocked i5) I've specced up as I see fit below, it's mATX because it's going to uni, and portability will be important for lugging it up and down the country. CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K OEM - £160 Mobo: Asus P8P67-M - £105 PSU: OCZ ModXStream 500W Pro - £57 RAM: 4GB Corsair XMS3 Classic (1600) - £25 Case: Fractal Design Arc Mini - £65.50 HDD: 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 - £43 GFX: 1GB XFX HD6870 - £135 CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro - £16 Disk Drive: Samsung WriteMaster - £13.79 WiFi: Edimax EW-7722ln - £20.33 Everything barring the mobo (from Overclockers) and PSU (from Amazon) are from Scan, Scansure takes the total cost to just above £650. I've already got a monitor and Windows 7, so it's just the tower I need Have I specced myself a decent machine? I know the Thermaltake SP-530PCWEU was recommended in the mag and would give me a bit more power, but I wanted a modular PSU (I'm a bit of a neat freak haha), would that give me enough power? And does anyone know the difference between the Asus P8P67-M and the P8P67-M Pro? The pro is £15 more on Overclockers, but the only difference I can see is the Pro does away with the legacy PCI slot in favour of all PCI-E slots. Thanks in advance!
Looks spot on. One thing to consider is that being uATX the wireless card will directly restrict airflow to the GPU. Some extra case fans if possible perhaps although the case is well catered for alread. For £15 extra you could also get 8gb of Corsair Vengence which is definitely worth doing. Other than that the build is spot on. Personally I'd go ATX because if you ever want to install a sound card or anything else you're pretty much screwedbut hey, that's the tiny trade off! Very solid machine.
Nice build have you looked at the Silverstone TJ08-e? Has much better cooling than the fractal mini and costs only £5 more.
The Pro has better audio, an additional PCIE socket, an extra sata 6gb port and a couple of extra bits. The pro is no good for you because you need a PCI port for your wireless card.
Hmm yeah, none of that's hugely compelling to pay the extra £15 tbh. I chose the WiFi card so it would go in the PCI slot which is furthest away from the graphics card for cooling (dunno if that's a good reason haha) Just checked out the bit-tech review, I like the cooling, but I can't seem to find it anywhere for less than £80 Thanks for the advice guys
The bottom slot is PCIE, it's the third the wireless card would go in which would be right up against the GPU which takes up two slots.
Yeah, my bad So would this WiFi card be better then? Scan Link PCI-E 1x can go in the bottom PCI-E slot right?
Hi. I'll be interested to see how you get on with this. I am in a similar boat as you, no real budget but trying to keep the cost down as much as possible as yet another child on the way next month(3 in 3 years, ahh). I have mainly been gaming on consoles but my number 1 played game is FM2011 which i've been playing on my Acer laptop but it seems to be cooking up alot after a hardcore session and the Mrs is fed up with me hogging the laptop all the time. I'm thinking of transferring pretty much all my gaming onto my PC although one of my consoles will have to say in the front room as I don't want to be lugging my PC about constantly, Plus 64 player BF3! My build is not far from TheOneHeFears but i'd love some feedback from some more experienced gamers as this will be my 1st build too. CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K retail - £167 Mobo: Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 - £100 PSU: Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 750W V2 High Performance '80 Plus Bronze' - £80 RAM: Corsair XMS3 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz - £48 Case: HAF 912 Plus - £70 HDD: 1TB WD Caviar black - £65 GFX: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 OC 1024MB GDDR5 - £155 CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 - £16 Disk Drive: Asus 24x DVD±RW DRW-24B3ST - £19 WiFi: Probably use a cheap usb plug in Akasa Bluetooth Equipped Internal Card Reader - £12 Already seen the advice on the cooler change and will be looking into this. I will be adding an SSD when i've got a bit more cash or possibly at crimbo. One problem I do have is I don't have an OS yet, I did see several versions of WIN7 Ultimate on amazon for around £90 but surely these can't be offical copies on the record. I would be happy just to go for Home 64 version but is there really any reason to spend the extra cash and pick up the ultimate edition? Any advice would be much appreciated as i've been spending far too much time doing research and not enough time playing witcher 2
To be honest I would advise going for a Msi p67a-gd53, it is atx but is £100 or less and has more ports etc. Id also like the option for upgrading in the future adding cards etc. Defo go with 8gb it's peanuts extra. I would also use the stock heatsink until you gain funds and upgrade later. It's much more enjoyable and eases cash-flow - which is important for a student. I study economics at birmingham uni. Lol
If you want to game online forget wifi. Either use a LAN cable or a home-plug solution: http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-PA211KIT-200Mbps-Powerline-Ethernet/dp/B004INVKP4/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1315738489&sr=1-1
The WiFi card's for my house at uni, we've only got a HomeHub. At home I game more and I'll be using LAN then
