Right, so my friend has asked me what to get for her PC she wants to try and build. I've not been looking at PC components for a while, so i'm a bit behind on what to suggest to her. So a little list of like, budget/its use, etc. Use: Gaming, high-end (Black Flag on high, skyrim+mods on high) She WON'T be overclocking it, at all. Her budget is £1500 ABSOLUTE MAX for everything (monitor,peripherals,etc included) Although she does have my old monitor which is a Samsung SM24 1050Res monitor at the moment. She will probably "upgrade" that at a later date but probably only to a 24" 1080p monitor. It does need to be kind of "future proofed" - she won't be wanting to change it up within the next couple of years. I know that it is impossible to future proof PC stuff, so it is a case of getting a happy medium of bits to work well 'til then. So long as it can play current stuff perfectly it would be fine. I'm not sure whether to suggest AMD or Intel CPU/GPU at the moment. and Motherboards I am totally lost with aswell, just far too many. I threw a spec together but I don't know if the bits are very complimenting of each other. She doesn't want SSD, it is too much hassle for her to make sure it is all ok. Current basket below, it doesn't include the mouse/kb, monitor and case are simply placeholders: Scan Basket
1) PSU is an overkill, that system will peak at sub-300W values. So you can save £20 by going for the 600W Strider. 2) Why do you have 1TB Red, 1TB Blue and 3TB Toshiba hard drives in one system ? Throw out the two 1TB drives, get a 120GB SSD instead. 3) case should be Fractal Define R4. 4) i would say get HP 23xi as display (~160 euros), but seems like Scan is not selling it ?
Recently bought a monitor for a friend, can't go too far wrong with this. Its refurbished, but there wasn't a mark on it and they display is of great quality. http://www.nrgit.biz/product/24-inch-flat-panel-tft-monitors/dell-p2414h.html?c=130&p=817 Very cheap considering what you get.
ty Will have a look at the PSU. I left one of the 1TBs by mistake xD She doesn't want SSD. The case is just a placeholder, price-wise. She still has to decide on one, but the FDR4 is a good choice indeed. Display is also simply a placeholder. Thanks :] Thanks looks good, I will look into it for her. Gives a bit more to go for a better GPU. Yeah, AWAndy, I chose i7. Pretty much the top one I think it is. Mainly as "future proof" for a week at least, haha.
Any reason for this performance killer decision ? If the reason is "SSD lifetime", then unless she gets a bad one (about the same chance as getting a bad mechanical hard drive), for most users their SSD will survive 10+ years of writes. My X25-M G1 80GB in 2009 is still running strong, so does all SSD i have, except one Patriot Torqx which died after a year or so (typical for that model).
Unless they use a lot of other things besides gaming that can take advantage of hyperthreading... you might as well go for equivalent cheaper i5. Hyperthreading is pretty much all the i7 brings to the party. I definitely agree with smaller PSU. I would go for something like a 460w 80 gold/platinum. Spend about the same on a higher quality high efficiency PSU. In fact I just did that myself and bought a new Seasonic SS-460FL2 to replace my old mushkin PSU. Also if it were me I would explain that hdd is the biggest bottleneck for performance in a 21st century PC, and basically FORCE them to take an ssd as a boot drive. I've been using ssd for several years now, and any time I encounter a PC that doesn't have one I nearly go into rage mode it's so damn slow. I've also found them to be more reliable than hdd and have zero lost data or failures with ssd.
Wish I had 1.5k to blow Try this and the Dell screen listed above? http://www.scan.co.uk/savedbasket/14ca725e7d2140e89ba30328246d31a1 SSD is a must, completely rubbish not to have one in a build these days!
get an R9 290..... :/ GPU should be the most expensive thing there... spending £280 on a GTX770 is really not advisable! the R9 280x is faster, has mantle and is £220.....
Yeah, she is hard to persuade. I think she is worried about an SSD being too much maintenance. She's been told you have to make sure you only use half of it, that it has to be firmware upgraded and it can bug out each time, etc. No idea. I'll keep on at her. Thanks Bungle. I'll check it out.
R9 290 is a £400+ card, it wont fit in the budget once she's included the keyboard,mouse, and headphones. Bungle has suggested a 780, although even that is nearing 400, lol But cheers for suggestion.
Most SSD don't have data destructive firmware update anymore, and most of the time updating the firmware isn't strictly necessary on current SSD. I would only do so if it would solve a particular problem, or gives a reasonable performance bump. I've noticed with most brands firmware update is much less frequent these days. As far as maintenance goes... not really. The easiest way to avoid performance degradation from overfill is to set up an over provisioning, which mean to simply make the usable partition smaller than the max size of the disk to leave free space for internal use. That's a small step done before install OS and is very simple. Otherwise on modern SSD the internal garbage collection and trim takes care of everything else to keep performance up. User initiated maintenance steps are really not needed anymore. Also another thing, a lot of people don't look. Check price for the 115X Xeons. Some of them are cheaper and better than i5/i7 counterparts if you won't be overclocking.
no its not... its £300 http://www.ebuyer.com/583808-asus-r...mi-displayport-pci-e-graphics-card-r9290-4gd5 Just a little more than the the GTX770 but a tun load more powerful! GTX770 at £280 makes no sense
You say it makes no sense to buy nvidia, because price/performance. If that was the only factor I would concede. But when it comes to power consumption and stability most people that aren't rabid AMD fans will agree nvidia win some points in those category more often than AMD. Even though I prefer nvidia for gaming build, mostly because I have had poor experience and lot of fighting with AMD driver... I do prefer AMD for htpc build as I find they tend to have less weird issues than nvidia with over/underscan on TVs and in such use the driver problems don't usually present themselves so often. If I was going to make a crypto miner obviously know AMD is the only choice there. I wasn't interested in starting another pointless debate, just stating some people do have other concerns when choosing components. Hell, some people will even buy one card over a better one if they prefer it's appearance/goes better with a build theme or things like that.
never had one driver problem ever on any GPU iv had, nvidia or AMD An R9 290 at £309 is to good not to have if its within his budget.
Yeah, was the way I was leaning towards Green because of drivers etc. She can't be having something unstable with noone close to sort it out when the drivers decide not to play nice. But the 290 is a nice price admittedly. As for SSD, i've persuaded her. Only problem is, she plays The Sims 2/3... a lot. LOADS of mods/addons etc. they load **** tones on to the C drive no matter where you actually install them. So anyone know a way around that to avoid it all clogging up the C drive? She checked her Sims and it seems to take up about 100GB (both games+exp+mods/addons/etc) - mental. :/
Arguments aside, the 770 has no place in a future proof £1500 machine - you really do want a 780 or R290 in there minimum. Maybe a couple of 4GB 770s in SLI if she's feeling tasty. Also I'd drop the CPU down to a 4670K if it were me and spend the additional on GPU grunt. If she's definitely not overclocking then a 4570 will give 95% of the grunt of a stock 4670K for £30 less. Also the Sims needs shoving on a storage drive - load times are non-existent as it is.
