I've been trying to come up with a build to replace my aging laptop and keeping the whole lot (including monitor & OS) under £1000 is proving trickier than I'd hoped! This is where I've got to (prices are today's on Scan) Core i5 3570k - £173 GA-Z77X-D3H - £103 2 x 4 GB Corsair Vengeance low-profile - £31 Freezer i30 - £29 Define R4 - £91 be quiet! Pure POwer L8 630W - £63 1TB Caviar Black - £76 for a total of £566 before postage. Add on a U2412M (so I'll be on a 1920x1200 res) for ~£220 on Amazon, and Windows 7 for ~£70 and I'm left with about £145 for a graphics card. I'll be using the system for a bit of gaming - ME3, Skyrim and AC3 are the only things I'm desperate to play, but between my job and real-world commitments I'm unlikely to have much extra time for whacking aliens/dragons/limeys... And hitting 'ultra' settings isn't necessary, but 'high' would be very nice indeed. Beyond that, I'm a heavy Excel user, enough so to bring both this laptop & my work PC to a gringing halt), and need the PC for music playback/editing, web browsing, and some totally amateur-ish dabbling in graphic design. Having utterly filled this 320 GB HDD with plenty more things I'd like to add, 1 TB looks like the right amount of storage for me. So, the question is - if I add on an expensive 7850 or a cheap 7870, (so somewhere between £150 - £180), will I have the best system for my money? Or would you redistribute the money for a better graphics card, or indeed anything else? I realise the R4 looks like £40 overkill compared to the Antec One - I'm quite taken with its looks and sound-proofing, which (sadly) do matter - but all input would be really welcome, this'll be the first desktop I'll have owned in 5 years, and the first PC I'll have built from scratch, so fire away - thanks in advance!
Looks good, the performance of that should blow you away. Excel will never trouble you again, it's nothing like using laptops n stuff. I wouldn't bother with the Freezer i30 at £29 though, the Gelid Tranquilo or something like that will provide all the cooling you need in utter silence. Put the £13 saved towards the graphics card. Then again my advice is forget overclocking altogether and get a cheaper mobo and perhaps CPU. The rest of it looks nice, I would hunt for a cheaper hard drive too, you should plan to upgrade to an SSD in the future (or even factor one in now) so a simple, high capacity low RPM drive will provide adequate storage in more silence (and less vibrations) than a 7200RPM HDD. This will complement your Case choice in ensuring a silent build overall. I personally found that a 7200RPM HDD is a major noise factor.
Cases are completely a matter of personal taste and requirements. Like Fishlock says, an SSD is desirable - even just a 64gb one for OS and Program Files (definitely put games on the 1tb). If you can stretch the budget for an SSD, go for it. 7850 will do you just fine, 7870 will have more longevity. Given you're on a budget, just stick to the 7850
All grand advice, cheers all! Longevity isn't crucial to this build, I certainly hope to have a bit more money to put toward tech in the future, so I think upgradability is more the key. That at least was the rationale behind leaving out the SSD - as Hamza said, what's up above will be a vast improvement over the current laptop - and throwing in a 128 GB or larger SSD when I have the money made sense, and would be a nice little boost in 8 - 12 months time. Upgradability was also the reason I went for a Z77 mobo - I wouldn't like to limit my OCing options down the line, particularly if I decide I can tolerate more noise & thus better cooling... Like I say, brand new to this PC designing/building malarkey (did upgrade my last desktop extensively, and similarly with my parents machine, so perhaps not a total greenhorn) so if my logic's been a bit off, or if the conclusions I've got to are glaringly wrong, I'd love to know!
