For the sake of your components, don't be tempted to cut-corners with choosing a power supply, you could regret it in the long run. I'd recommend choosing the CPC recommended PSU for £80. This leaves you with £20-£70 for a case (from budget to huge stretch). As others have already recommended, the Antec 300 is a solid choice, and will set you back £40, bringing the total to £120. It's a little over budget, but you'll be left with good quality components.
any decent 500 watt psu would suffice more than enough 750 watts is overkill for a single gpu system you can run crossfired 5870s on a 600watt psu with i920 pushing 4ghz cyberpower sells a pc like this with a 3 year warrenty so they think its stable enough.
My 620W PSU does get quite noisy under load though, so it's something to bare in mind. I'm aiming for 750W-850W as that way I know it'll never get noisy I've been keeping an eye on that win7 student deal too, as Ultimate edition for £55 is a steal!!!!
To the OP: A 650w or 750w would be good. Just make sure it is a stable, branded and efficient model. Always a good idea to have a more powerful supply than your components require. 1.Psu will be under less strain which means less heat. Which also means the psu will last longer (they degrade over time). 2.Less heat means less noise from the fan. 3.Gives you more options when wanting to upgrade or rebuild your system at a later date. 4.Means you can crossfire/sli at a later date if you choose to.
Aye, this is what worries me slightly. I know 600 W should be plenty with a quality manufacturer, but even quality PSUs can get a bit on the loud side if they are at 80-90 % load for a prolonged period of time. After giving it a long thought I think I'll just apply for finance on the remaining components because there is just no way I can cut corners in here it seems. Going to order the Corsair TX 750. I've seen loads of reviews for the HX series and all have been stellar. Is the TX similar? I know it is not modular and cheaper. I assume it is 100 % stable like all Corsair products. But how does it behave when it comes to noise? Especially in the 60-90% load scenarios. Will go for the Xigmatek Utgard case. R2 does suit my taste better, but the thermals in the review were a bit too high, especialy for a 15-20 pound premium compred to Utgard. I planned to get an SSD as a next upgrade, but might as well do it now since it will save me the need to reinstall the OS at a later date. I was looking at either Kingston SSD Now V or V+ 64/128 GB or the Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB. If I understand this right, read performance will be much more important than write for an OS partition with a few extra programs/games. Though if I only get a 64 GB then I guess I'll just put the OS and Office on the SSD. Mind you I normaly don't play more than 2-3 games at a time. With my usage pattern I rarely write something on the HDD compared to reading from it. A few things have me slightly confused. Do I need a retail version or the desktop upgrade kit? compare http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/64GB...-SATA-3Gb-s-Read-200MB-s-Write-110MB-s-Retail with http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/64GB...-200MB-s-Write-110MB-s-Retail-inc-Desktop-Kit Also differences between V and V+? Much higher write speed and slightly higher read with a much higher price tags. Seems like the + is not worth it for me or am I missing something? This seems even more attractive to me at a similar price level: http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-007-CR Scan don't have those yet. I think they don't stock Crucial SSD's. I'm wondering about the space though. With Win7 and MS Office installed how much space will I have left? Do games benefit from being installed on an SSD? From my reading so far, not much.
they load quicker if you play an mmo like wow the benifit is quiet high. And from playing final fantasys beta if you want a score above 4000 on there benchmark you need an ssd drive as they measure load time as part of the performance. wow is always loading something so an ssd does wonders. But you could always just stick the mmos on the ssd itself and not windows i know people who do this and why would you install ms office on an ssd lol v+ is there performance drive similar to intels extreme. They are quick but expensive.
When I was using MS Office 2010 beta on my laptop it took ages to load. Though I am not sure why. Similar for Acrobat when loading bigger PDFs. Though it might just as well be a combination of poor RAM/CPU rather than HDD performance. I used to play an MMO, but will never do that again. Too addicting XD. I mostly play single player games, strategies and RPGs most of the time, a shooter once in a while, though not very competitively, often just sticking to single player mode. I plan to buy the Saitek X52 after I get the PC assembled and finaly play Il2 Sturmovik properly. I just have no idea how an SSD would affect performance in my use scenario. Though if it is even remotely useful then I guess I would rather grab one now and avoid the hassle of doing another clean instal of Windows a few months down the line. Regarding the V, V+ and Crucial SSD. Crucial has by far the higher read spead (64 GB models) and the slowest write speed. V has slightly better write rate than Crucial and slowest read spead out of all 3. If I get this right, then 95 % of the time I would use only the read spead. Write would only matter in system install/updates/game instalations. PS and I don't think the FF14 beta is out yet
random read/writes is what you should be looking at when your playing games and such since it needs to read info then write back changes. if you were loading a file/game then that would be read only. PS - FF14 is in closed beta at the moment, not sure if they doing a public one.
And back on topic. I bought the parts. Everything will arrive on Monday. I'll be building it on Tuesday.
All the parts arrived today, but I'll probably wait until tomorrow to put it together with a mate of mine. I had a look at the case and components though. I removed the top and the side panels in the Xigmatek Utgard, but can't remove the front one. In the manual it's just stated remove the front panel. Should be idiot proof then I guess. But I feel like I am about to break the panel to pieces. The one in my old case just popped in and out of place by simply applying a little bit of force. I am looking for screws, a switch, anything really. Using brute force like with the old one doesn't seem to work. Literally in the manual "Pull out and remove the front panel." Nothing else. My first impression is that this thing just won't budge. Since this is my first experience of putting computer parts together (not counting Ram and GPU upgrade in the old PC), please be gentle on me. Nvm, managed to remove the panel. Just had to apply more force. For a noob it is a bit scary since you have no idea whether you should be actually using this much force or are you about to break something.
Obviously as I encountered minor problems with opening the case, more trouble followed. Much, much more... First, the Gelid Tranquilo... I was following a reference guide for i7 stock coolers plus the manual (5 crapy sketches). First thing that got me worried is that it felt like I am putting too much pressure on the CPU with the cover and later when mounting the heatsink. I checked again and again, and the CPU was positioned properly, and I read some resistance will be felt. Maybe it's just me being paranoid. Also, nothing I read mentioned that you are supposed to mount the cooler with the mobo outside the case. Had to take it out again. Then I had a problem fitting in the PSU screws. Don't even ask why. Same for mounting HDDs. I look at the pics in the manual, I look at the case, I don't really see what they want from me. Also it turned out you can not take out the HDD tray with the mobo fitted in so I had to spend more time rearranging stuff. After that connecting all the cables, power cables, SATA, fan controller, front panel, etc. Inside of my case looks like a mess. Everything jumbled together with no logic present anywhere. Just made sure no cables obstruct components and left it at that. Spent almost 12 hours today trying to put the bloody thing together, browsing the web looking for guides and so on. Best thing is that I'll only have my Graphics card tomorrow, and the OS on wed/thur. So the only thing I managed to do today is to make sure that the whole things powers up and the fans are working. At least this is something of an achievment for me. Can't even go to bios setting to see whether everything is working right because I have no way of displaying video from the computer until tomorrow. Pretty much, if you imagine you average noob who has little idea of what they are doing you get me. Now just waiting until tomorrow so I can know whether I fitted everything properly or destroyed 300 pounds worth of CPU and mobo....
