TBH honest rather than spending £2000 pound on the greatest thing out now, you get more mileage from £1000 or less and then upgrading to newer tech as it becomes available.
Well, Showerhead, I do see the sense in this, and if I perhaps get the new job I've applied for then this will be something I'll be able to consider. As then I'll have some spending money each month that will actually get me some decent kit. But for now, once I've bought this computer it'll take another two months just to save up for a bit of extra RAM... Let alone a motherboard, or CPU, GPU, etc.
Yeah, you definately want to buy everything at the same time, otherwise you could end up with out of date hardware or hardware thats gone down in price since you bought it. You could get away with buying the case and optical drive now, as I cant see them going down in price that much, but thats about it for now Best to wait and buy everything in one fell swoop
I'm meaning rather than buying the best of every available range at the moment. Go for something that has greater bang for buck and you'll probably find the stuff you've got will go obselete around the same time as the more expensive ones. For example get an i52500k now unless you have something you know will take advantage of hyperthreading. By the time software is regularly released that can take advantage of eight cores you will probably find intel has released an eight core processor that can do it far more efficiently than an i2600 so the extra money you spent is in effect wasted.
I would have agreed a few years ago, but this is getting harder and harder to do these days with pretty much everything on the motherboard becoming outdated in no time. RAM will stay DDR3 for a while, and GPUs will be PCI for the time being but who's to say what the CPU sockets, peripheral connections and the like will be in the future? Hell, I bought into esata just as USB3 became popular. I feel like there's a betamax port on my pc. OP - Budget £50 or so to replace all the fans in your case with nice ones. The fractal cases come with great ones but your whole system will benefit if you fill the remaining spaces up.
To be fair Intel stuck with the 775 socket for a while, and to a bigger point AMD have for a long time now made a point of making the processors fit into other sockets, AM3+, AM3 definitely, possibly going back further though I could be very wrong there...
I think media has an awfull part to play in hyping whats 'popular'. They say that so consumers and enthusiasts think theyre missing out. Is your USB performance really so dire that you NEED USB3 as oposed to your perfectly good eSATA? Betamax on your mobo? Have they stopped supporting eSATA? I wasnt aware Even if DDR3 does become outdated, your RAM will still work on your mobo, as will your GPU. Companies will give plenty of notice before they change something like PCI. As for CPU sockets changing, well you just buy the best CPU you can justify when you build. If you want to upgrade in a few years that'll be well easy, you can still get AMD AM2 and intel 775s brand new, I dont think theyre gonna be chucking the SB giant out of the shops any time soon
I agree with the media thing. Butttt.... I have an eSATA port on my PC, and honestly? I've just never used it. I can't see any advantages. Any time I've worked in an office or at school, their machines don't utilise eSATA. Which means my only real use will be at home for backing up. But then if I'm at home backing up, why not just use an internal drive? It never really caught on except amongst enthusiasts. USB3 can and will be used for more than just transferring files, it means devices such as phones and MP3 players can charge faster, and devices such as webcams can stream higher quality video (and consume more power), not to mention for extra monitors (like apple's thunderbolt port) etc. eSATA to USB3 is like CD's are to BluRay.
I disagree. Youre comapring chalk and cheese, a universal serial bus (clue's in the title) and an external hard drive link up. One is bound to have it's limitations. Ports on a mobo are like the size of your Swiss Army Knife. Some are industry standards. You WILL use USB2. Thats the big blade. But lets face it, nobody uses serial ports these days, and I dont know of anyone who uses the optical sound ports. (The weird hook thing that's used for getting stones out of horse shoes). Half of what is included is for willy waving and will hardly ever be used. The truth of a mobo's strength is the R/W transfer speeds, graphics power and O/C ability... thats all we look for in honesty isnt it. If you havent got USB3, then buy an add on card untill you really need to buy a full mobo, it will perform just the same as if it were on your mobo. I'f you had bought into a mobo format that is supported by no case manufacturer with a power source that no PSU caters to then I would understand the problem, but honestly, there will always be something you 'miss out on'. For me its PCI 3.0. Do I care? Not a jot. Why? Becuase 2.0 has been so well manufactured for so long that when I upgrade the GPU, getting a 2.0 card will be as easy as getting a 775 chip in the golden era of sandybridge. Yeah, eSATA isnt as flexible as USB3. But then you can do a lot more with cheese than you can with chalk, but it doesnt mean chalk is rubbish.
Actually I saying that I'm confident we'll have PCI and DDR3 for a while yet. All I mean is that it's not as easy to buy a mobo now and stick a new chip in a few years down the line. Certainly not as easy as it used to be anyway.
That, as they say, is progress. Theres no way we could have 2500k performance from a 775 socket. There just isnt any way to allow the CPU to compute that much data on so few pins (not yet anyway). Not to mention that its kinda pointless droppin a new chip in a motherboard that wont support SATA3, uses AGP for its graphics interface and USB2 is its fastest external I/O port. Pointless having a new chip without the trimmings to make you appreciate it. Appologies to the OP for the slight diversion of topic... But the fact is, if youre setting up a PC, you save your cash. 1500 has always delivered a great machine, 10 years ago it would have been the same (By todays standards it wouldnt be great, but this is my point). When you have the cash, research what you can get for your money now or in a couple of weeks (if any new platforms arriving etc). Then buy it. Then enjoy it. Back on topic. What should your budget be given that you currently have no cash? Depends what you want. You can build a cheap gamer for 800, a good gamer for 1000 or a great allrounder for 13-1500
that's absolutely bonkers. sauce please? Serial ports are still used alot, and this probably isn't going to change. most network infrastructure REQUIRES programming over a serial port. Cisco stuff ships with a serial - rj45 cable (serial plugs into your computer, rj45 plugs into their com port on the equipment), so I think its fair to say, alot of people use serial ports alot of time. though granted, you can also get a usb - serial adaptor which I have to use with my laptop as that doesnt have a serial port. I know alot of people that use optical ports. Its the best way to get a digital sound signal out of a computer, and its fair to say, unless you have a decent internal DAC this is the best way to get a signal to an external DAC - if you are that way inclined. If you don't know about something, please dont preach about it being a bad thing.
LOL that got your back right up didnt it. The majority of home users and even enthusiasts will never use a serial port, they just arent utilised anymore, pretty much all new peripherals are USB based and if they arent, theres a USB adapter as you mentioned. In pro use, serial as you state is an industry standard (a friend of mine has kept a PC from 2001 becuase all his engine tuning and diagnostic software works via serial and he cant afford to restart his collection to be USB compatible), but theyre the equivalent of Midi. Audio producers have it as a basic standard, but most people never use it becuase USB works fine for them producing music at home. As far as digital to analogue is concerned, thats fine if youre pooling thousands into your lateset denon set up, but lets be honest here the vast majority of people wont use it. They will use either the onboard 3.5mm analogue i/o or a dedicated sound card because thats what their speakers, headphones and hifis work with (and Im not even talking about the likes of Lynx soundcards). Because it sounds good enough, barely any discernable difference, even when you use this for a home theatre rig. If youre an audiophile the kind with a beard and a pipe who swears that valves sound better than digital emulation( ... and theyre wrong by the way) and that a £5000 vinyl player that is balanced to create no pops or hiss is far superior to lossless digital (wrong again) then go ahead and use optical, but ive heard it and Ive been able to tell nothing in comparison. It still remains superfluous to the majority. I never said any of the above were bad things, eSATA isnt a bad thing, nor is USB2, but there are better alternatives, and in some cases cheaper.
The 2700k won't do much over the 2600k and costs a lot more. The 2600k will not do much more than a 2500K, for now, but is a bit more future proof. It has mroe cache and hyperthreading (which is why I went with it), so it does have some advantages, the 2700k is just a little faster, it's a matter of diminishing returns. All 3 will do 4.2 with only a multiplier change and a decent air cooler, it gets more complex after that but around 4.5 is doable on all 3 on air. All 3 are plenty fast and will last a long while. That video card, will it actually use all 3 gigs? It seems most are coming with a lot less. Scale back the memory on it to save some money, scale back 200 or so watts on the PSU, and wait on the sound card. You won't notice much/any difference and you will get it sooner. The sound card is easy to add in later. You could even consider leaving out one of the drives if you have another you can use temporarily. Regardless it doesn't matter on the exact components until you are ready to buy, the best bang for the buck changes weekly. In games, some of the quads (Q9550/Q9650) can still keep up and beat AMD x6 processors and older I5's. It's not Sandy Bridge, but it's also nothing to scoff at, especially when you consider the age of the Q series. However... like you said, the trimmings do make a difference. What actually made me finally upgrade my Q9550 was that my SSD was being crippled by Sata2.
Never said it was anything to scoff at, I totaly agree. I tend to find that the best stuff within any 3-5 year period tends to stay fairly relevant in the subsequent 3-5 year period, this may seem like quite a vague statement, but look at it like this. The best phenom chip, the hex, in 3 years time will probably still be marketable, but its lesser cousins, the x2 and possible the x4 wont get even a look at, mainly because the prices will have dropped so far that you will get more performance per pound from an x6. So while your Qchip set up wasnt new it wasnt a load of arse water either because it was one off the better chips in the range when you got it. The reason you upgraded was becuase of peripheral integration, not performance, and if youre not overlyconcerned with aesthetics, a PCI card can usually take care of your problems. SB wont be a world beater forever, hell its not a world beater less than a year after release, but it is one cracker of a CPU range, I dont see it leaving the shelves untill a while after 2016. (Not accounting for a brand new type of chip thats manufactured from another cheap plentiful resource that costs pennies to make, even less to power and can process more info that a dining room stuffed with servers... we can dream though) Again, sorry for the hijack
Whoaaa there's a lot to read here. Haha. Right, well, I've been doing some thinking. I can get £1,500 by the end of the month if I can sell my current PC, and some of my other junk I've got laying around. Then, at the end of the month, I'll be buying a new PC. (Also will be starting a new thread just to finalise the Components, lol) One comment that really stood out was the one about the 2700k being "a lot more expensive" compared to the 2600k. I know myself that budgets can be tight, but £263 compared to £239 is £24... I'm honestly swaying towards the 2700K. As childish as it sounds, I'm cool with spending £20 extra in exchange for bragging rights xD Also, about optical sound ports? I too don't know anyone who uses them, even the audiophiles in my friends and family that have ludicrously expensive systems don't. The setup I'm now toying with: Intel Core i7 2700K Asus Maximus IV Extreme7 Corsair 8GB DDR3 Vengeance Fractal Design R3 Black Pearl Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB MSI GTX 580 Twin Frozr LG Blu-Ray Drive Corsair 850HX PSU Creative X-Fi Titanium Soundcard Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro All coming in at around £1,440 (after looking around for good deals) So, it's something I could get at the end of the month I think. I know there's no SSD included in my price. But if I got one, I'd like something which is at LEAST 256GB, if not 512GB, so I might as well just stick with a standard HDD for now (albeit quite a nippy one) Has there been any news on these supposed new Nvidia cards? I'd rather put off buying for a couple of weeks after getting the money together and get a good card rather than get something now and have it feel old in just a month's time when the new range comes out. [edit] If I can sell all my junk and somehow get an extra £300, I'll be buying this: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD http://www.scan.co.uk/products/240g...force-ssd-read-550mb-s-write-520mb-s-85k-iops It looks nice and fast
You can make some good savings there my man ie- drop the bluray, unless youre using this for burning lots of bluerays or using it as your sole media player, I wouldnt bother. If it IS bragging rights youre after then go ahead. The rest looks like quite a nice prospect.
One question, why did you go for the Maximus Extreme? It only has PCIe 2.0 slots, so you may want to look for a GEN 3 board for the 7970/Keppler GPU's. I recommend the MSI Z68 GD80. It has 2 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and another PCIe 2.0 x16 slot so you can have triple SLI if you so desire for the future: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-...raid-sata-pcie-30-(x16)-graphics-on-board-atx Yes the Extreme does have 4 x PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, but I doubt you will use quad SLI, and I'm sure you would want the GEN 3 support
I dont know why anyone wants to use technology that causes stuttering in games. Singe powerfull GPU over cross fire any day. Thanks to custom PC for the tip
