Currently building my first PC, have had it for roughly three months or so now, used mainly for gaming, occasional word processing, for music storage and internet browsing. Started off with a heap of spare parts that my good friend Nelson (--Mike--) gave me over £200's worth of components, for which I can't thank him enough Parts he gave me were as follows -- Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT Motherboard - MSI MS-7309 Processor - AMD Athlon™ 64x2 Dual Core 5600+ at stock speed of 2.9ghz PSU - Stock 350watt 'ISO' power supply# Also thx to Graeme Clark for giving me this old spare case he had lying about - do yourself a favour& check out his pc hardware shop @ www.kustompcs.co.uk This only left me having to buy a hard drive and some RAM to get this rig up and running, which I did so instantly Got myself - Hard Drive Samsung F3 Spinpoint Drive RAM 2GB DDR-II G-Skill RAM; I then bought Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) about a month later, after the grace period had expired This is what all that shizzle looks like now CABLE MANAGEMENT Cheesecake! Just reecently I bought a Sony Optical Drive from Kustom's, luckily this made the gaping chasam of a hole in the front seem far smaller than before Next for this system? Firstly i'm going to need to upgrade the PSU, I've been reccomended the best value option in the Antec Basiq Coupled with, a new Graphics Card. Its between this at roughly £140 - HD 5770 Or (more than likely) the reecently reviewed GTX 460 1GB model from Gigabyte, costing around £200 Then after that, possibly a new case in the form of the Lian-Li Armoursuit retailing at £155 - http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_1092.html"] LianLi PC-P50WB avec shiny things like a cooljag display fan and sound sensitive cathodes this will go up to roughly £200 Mite upgrade processor,mobo,ram in future depending on the rigs gaming prowess after the above upgrades are carried out. Does anyone know of any good, fairly bang for buck yet effective combinations of motherboard&cpu Any further thoughts/suggestions ? Thanks all, Blizz
Help please! Does anybody know what I should go for a graphics card between a 460 and a 5850? Which is the stronger card (if both are overclocked)
To be honest mate i would be looking at a better psu than that...If you are going to start upgrading more and more you will deffinently need more than 550w psu
Is the performance gain huge with a 5850 though? I heard that with 4x AA on, ati 5000 series cards lose out vs similar nvidia models. What's a good sli/crossfire capable psu that's reasonabley cheap (yet well built, good quality etc? Thx for help so far guys
Cheap and well built dont usually come in the same sentence mate but i am willing to be proved otherwise
You neglect to list back up. Before you spend money on anything else, sort out a back up strategy or you may end up being one of the increasing number of posters creating "My hard drive has failed, help me recover my data" threads. This is how it happens: Builder on a limited budget has £200 to spend. Does he/she buy something shiny and sexy like a new GPU, or something dull like a hard drive that will only be used as back up. The temptation is to buy something shiny and sexy. Then the HDD goes belly up, and you've lost all your music, photos, saved games, e-mail etc. Don't think because your HDD is new it's safe either. I recently had WD Green go on me and it only had 200 hours on it. Back it up.... THEN pimp it. Get a 1TB HDD and a copy of Acronis 2010 while it's on offer. Even use Windows 7 back up if you really are on a budget (even though it sucks)... but get back up. You won't of course... you'll get a new graphics card instead... but at least you've been warned.
Simples. For a 460GTX or a 5770 (both good choices) a 500w PSU from one of the main brands will be fine (OCZ, Antec, Enermax, BeQuiet etc etc) - that one you linked is ok, but shop around, you might find something cheaper.
No I probably wont. Not only could a create a hard drive partition to protect against viruses, I have a hard drive in the family pc that has most of the data on it however, I might get a tb hdd if one comes on offer somewhere: ) Think I will go for the gtx 460 from gigabyte is this the best model to go for? Also I think I'll get myself a new monitor too - what's the best 22" or 24" monitor to go for?
I think the warning was more about a hardware failure, not about viruses. I've had many a mechanical drive give up on me full of stuff I'd like to have saved. You buy all the shiny bits to enhance the junk stored on them drives. Seems mental to sacrifice all that effort for the sake of no backup. If it's all on the family pc, I'd back that up in a hurry! Eggs, basket, scrambled mess comes to mind.
Wow dude, you pieced together a PC from spare parts and one of the first upgrades you consider is a Lian Li case that's probably worth more than the whole computer? I like your style.
Truly a god amongst men. A god of class. But srsly. If the case holds everything you have and doesn't cook it all in the process... consider saving money for new mobo+CPU instead?
that case does not look like it could cool a decent graphics card imo, what about others? i see temps rocketing and it overheating?
Thanks for your comments all. I think I will buy a new hdd a some point - its just not that high on my list. I have built my own rig but have a family pc with a hard drive of mine inside it, from which I transferred my data to a new hard drive that I bought for my new machine. Is there anyway to automatically backup or sync files between the two hard drives on the seperate computers without physically moving the drives themselves? Cheers dragunov&sloth haha. As you can probably see the case I currently have is a shambles. a lian li one would last me the ages& improve cooling quite a lot. I'm currently happy with my mobo, ram and processor as the processor is dual core at 2.9ghz (WITHOUT O.C.) and therfore good enough for gaming As asked before-whats the best 22" monitor? And which is the best gtx 460 to go for?!?! :O
yeah, set up a shared network folder/mapped network drive and copy it all across the network. Probably the Dell 2290 is the best value for money at the moment.
