Hardware PC Hardware Buyer's Guide August 2013

Our regular guide to getting the best components for your PC build, whatever your budget.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2013/08/22/pc-hardware-buyer-s-guide-august-2013/1

 

"Windows 7 "

Either you really believe in Win 7 or you didn't update this. And I genuinely don't know your advice here!

 

I'd stick with Win7...

 

The start screen in windows 8.1 is far better than the start menu in windows 7, due to a superior search system. What with search being the only reason you would ever open the start menu since Vista, I'm not sure why you would want to downgrade to Start8.

There really is not much in it, so much that its hard to recommend paying for an upgrade, but there are a few minor improvements (multi monitor taskbar and wallpaper, file copy pausing, task manager, native zip and iso opening, etc), and literally no disadvantages.

In other matters, it's good to see this feature back.

 

If that's your definition of 'regular' I'd hate to use a bathroom after you

Joking aside, does anyone here anticipate AMD GPUs becoming a more sensible choice over the next decade due to a more similar architecture to the consoles?

 

Wow, when your GPU is worst than the affordable all-rounder you know it's time to upgrade!

Great to see this back though, I usually point people to this when they ask me about buying a new PC. That way I get none of the hassle and only 99% of the liability when it goes wrong

 

The AMD FX 6300/6350 is a far better CPU than that i3 for the affordable all rounder, even though they're slower per core, 6 of them at 4GHZ or more will be far more useful over the next few years in games and apps.

Especially with all the multi-core console ports that will be incoming from 2014 onwards..

 

I don't accept your priors; your argument depends on unwarranted assumptions.

I don't use Windows 7's start menu, since I prefer the XP menu, and I use ClassicShell to get it. It has the search functionality, but I seldom use it, I use a Cygwin terminal window if I want to type to start a program. I generally use the start menu for selecting a program based on categorization / spatial navigation / muscle memory.

Windows has had "native" support for zips since at least XP SP2, and I've disabled it ever since it was implemented, because it bogs down Explorer and litters the treeview with in-zip directories. MS have had an ISO mounter freely downloadable from their site since at least the early 2000s too. Having these baked in is not an advantage to me.

Windows has supported multi-monitor wallpapers ever since it supported multiple monitors. The trick to it was that you had to compose your wallpapers on a single bitmap and set it as the tiled wallpaper.

Multi-monitor taskbars are another non-advantage. I have an infinitely configurable desktop at work (Linux) that can easily do that, but I'd rather spend the extra centimetre on my browser window. Widescreen monitors aren't high enough as it is.

I generally pause file copy / moves with Ctrl-Z. If you've never used the terminal, you may not know what I'm talking about...

The biggest disadvantage is encouraging MS's further adventures in TPM and locked down boot loaders.

 

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/giga...r3-sata-iii-6gb-s-sata-raid-pcie-20-(x16)-atx

your affordable motherboard is eol...

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the 670 faster than the 760? And considering it's £200 - or below if it's on offer like it is now on overclockers and probably scan too - would it not be the better choice? Assuming of course they don't all vanish.

 

Lol.

 

Whats premium about this "8GB 1,600MHz DDR3" ? Its the same as the others..

 

Mostly what I would've gone for, although when I get enough scratch for a new system, I'm not going to be using any more mechanical drives. Thankfully, large-capacity SSD's are coming down in price!

 

Agree in priciple (and im no amd fan) will say though that they trade blows in the various benchies so id imagine the fact that the I3 uses a fare bit less power for its needs is probably the reason it was chosen.

Xbitlabs have the i3-3240 (id imagine identical power usage to i3-3220) under load at 91w where-as the fx-6300 is at 162w, thats a big margin, 31w more than an i7-3770k in the same test/system!

 

do I even need to click it to know intel have bought and paid for another BT article....


£400 would get you a mini itx A10 based gaming rig or are you still `recommending` £1000 itx kit??

 

Fair point. Even if there's not much in it I personally would still go for the OC 670 for the extra ~£10, simply for the higher min frames on skyrim, though both push over 70fps, and the slightly lower power draw at load.

Also, @£191 that's a standard 760 on scan, the OC ones hit ~£200.