Hi Guys, I am sure the most common topic from noobs on here is which one should I get, but your advice would be greatly appreciated. I am hopefully going to have some money available shortly and would like to invest in a custom PC... I have looked around and being as I do not understand what half of the benefits and features are I can't decide what build to go for. I am part way through a degree in software engineering and I am self taught in VB, C++, XHTML, CSS, PHP5+ so the rig will be used for developing stuff in all of these languages, I am new to hardware but I may decide to delve deeper in the future so I would like a rig that can be overclocked or upgraded in the future should I decide to. And finally I would like a rig that can handle graphics and games, as I will occasionally play games and I might decide to get into rendering at a later date. I have a budget of around £1000.00, but I am not too concerned with sticking to it, if for an extra few hundred quid I can get something much better and more future proof, then I will save to get it, so the budget is flexible. Thanks in advance
To do the former (coding) I'd recommend a simple i5 or Phenom X4 computer, but for rendering and 3d work I'd say go for an LGA 1336 i7 setup for the memory bandwidth. Any particular reason you don't want a Mac? For that kind of money you could get a nice one Having said that it would be easier to game on a Windows PC.
Why say sorry, if we were not happy to offer the advice there would not be a option to choose "BUILD ADVICE"
@thelaw while there is a prefix for custom builds, I would imagine the people new to hardware use it more than the others, so many people might get sick of answering the same old questions. @woody_294, I dont like MAC's and I couldn't program in VB at least if no others with a MAC, I was thinking 1366 i7 myself, but I cant decide what to go for ASUS RAMPAGE III EXTREME, or a cheaper SABERTOOTH motherboard or something else entirely, I dont fully understand why 1 is better than the other and from a processor point of view a 950, 960 or save for longer and get a 980X EXTREME???
Not the case at all here in fact there is a thread floating about why people apologise in the title especially people who are new to the forums, as i said we would not have a prefix "build advice" if we as members were sick of offering the advice to new members.
That was my thread xD here it is Anyway, with a budget around £1000 but flexible I would recommend an i7-950 build! http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/2603/builde.png You need to add a case, a DVD burner, and Windows 7. You should end up around your budget area (but only if you're flexible).
Basically build this, except swap out the Geforce for a Radeon 5870 Eyefinity card so you'll have the option of easily adding additional monitors - If you're going to do any large scale development projects then multiple screens are invaluable.
Thanks for the responses guys, can someone please explain why I should go for these specs, I can just go to scan.co.uk and find the most expensive of each part, but they will not neccesarily be the best... Why is an i7 better than the others? Which motherboard is the best? @VipersGratitude - like the twin screen idea, thanks for that...
4D1, on the "Why is the i7 the best etc" then if you use this site and read the reviews on the I7 vs the AMD processors there are comparisons in performance with reviews/charts/graphs. You can do the same with the motherboards, graphics cards, sounds cards etc most PC parts are reviewed on here. Its half the fun of custom pc building reading up on what is what and this site has lots of reviews, just search use the search option at the top of this screen with the name of the item ie i7 950 etc - in short the intel processors have more cores to process information and the AMD processors seriously are behind in performance simply because the intel processors are far more advance. For your budget the I7 series is the latest product out there from INTEL and out performs all other processors and is the best for your budget hence the recommendations. As for the motherboard it may not be the latest and best one but its a damn good board for your budget, sure if you want to throw in £5k-10k you can get the best of everything but the builds recommended by the users are strong. Its a bit like comparing a 1970's 2 litre BWM engine to a 2010 2 litre BWM engine obviously same size but one more advanced in technology than the other therefore performs better.
What theLaw said for the i7. Through much testing of overclocking ability and benchmarks from multiple sources throughout the internet which you can look up, people have concluded that the i7 is a better high end processor than the AMD line. Regarding motherboard, what you want to look for in that is that it has enough memory slots to fit however much memory you want (most LGA 1366 boards come with 6 slots), if it has more than 1 PCI-e 2.0 x16 slot, and, if it does, how does it split the bandwidth when you do dual video cards. In addition to that you want to make sure that the motherboard supports SLI and/or Crossfire. You also might want to find reviews on it so you can see if people complain about the BIOS not having enough overclocking options (but normally this isn't an issue). You can also look at what chipset the motherboard has on it as this will sometimes lead to performance differences (look this up online). You also want to look at what memory standards are supported on the motherboard, and what extra stuffs the motherboard supports. Finally you want to look at brand as getting some off brand junkie motherboard is usually not advised. </walloftext> I'm not saying that you have to go after those exact parts that I listed. The 650TX might be a bit weak for you if you want to do like 480s in SLI so you may want to get a stronger PSU. The main point of what I posted was to give you a framework to start with and work on to make it easier to build your computer. The processor is really the only thing that should remain constant unless you want to get like an i7-980 or something. You also might want more storage space or an SSD or a bluray burner or other such things. The build is your build, I'm just giving you suggestions and a place to start which will bring you within your budget.
