hi all, im looking buy new custom pc first build so im a newbie. i have an idea of what i want(what i thinks right) and tell me what you think and if any alternatives, all help is great. p.s probably buing from scan Budget: around £1200 max Main uses of intended build: the main uses of the build would be gaming but i will also be using to edit videos watching videos this computer will be hooked up to my 42" samsung tv using hdmi Parts required: complete build but no peripherals Storage requirements: about 1tb Will you be overclocking: yes i would like to although I have no knowledge how to yet but will be reading up Mobo: asus Maximus IV Gene-z Or asus P8Z68-v PRO i contacted scan to find out about the gene-z and will availible 7th of july and will be 125.84 ex VAT so both mobo's are around £150 Processor: I7-2600k £242 Cooler: be quite! dark rock Pro £53 Ram: Vengeance LP 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz £72 Graphics: MSi GTX 560 titwin frozr II £191 Maybe SLI in the future Power supply: Not to sure with this but i think that this will be ok Corsair HX 750W Modular HDD: 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 £42 SSD: OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD £169 DVD drive: 22x DVD Writer SAMSUNG £14 Case: coolmaster haf x £130 Total: £1190 thanks for any help
A Bit to fix here; Mobo: Unless you're definitely using the niche hybrid graphics and RST SSD cache, Z68 isn't worth it. Go P67. The MSI GD-53 is our board of preference. It'll overclock brilliantly and is feature rich, while costing just £108. CPU: The 2500k is almost as overclockable as the 2600k, and £90 cheaper. Get that instead. RAM: No one needs 8GB, especially games which rarely address more than 2GB. A 2x2GB kit can be had for less than £40. GPU, PSU, SSD and HDD all fine. Case will be down to personal preference of course. Hope that helps; by my estimates, that'll save you £150, for a system that performs pretty much identically. Of course, there's the matter of my consultant fee....
What Baz said is good advice. If you want to save a few quid you could cut the PSU to a 600W unit instead.. should be more than enough power. Otherwise, looks good.
What both said. Have a look at the hx650 or the coolermaster 600watt gold for a PSU. If I was spending 1200 on a pc I would be inclined to go for 8gb of ram as it will last alot longer. A few years ago people said the same thing about 4gb. It's also pretty cheap atm. I would look at the corsair xms3 ram as well as you wont have to worry about the heatsinks clashing.
thanks for the help Baz, I will be Video editing on this system and what I have read is that the Z68 is better at encoding video? and also the ram should help when adding effects on after effects if I am right? 2500k sounds great seeing as £90 off my bill consultant fee hmm..... How about a time share in my new build
thanks oasked and murraynt yea any money i can save is great thanks for advice is coolmaster as good as HX 650 for reliabilty?
I'm no expert but I was thinking the same. I have a gigabyte 560ti OC edition and I find the performance underwhelming (can't even run total war shogun 2 close to max) but that could be due to my CPU I'm not sure.
maybe something like this would better suit your needs, this is basically combining all the great information everyone has contributed into a build, if you want to knock a bit of the build you could always change the motherboard to the one baz mentioned, also remember 20 posts on here and you get free delivery with scan, oh and I picked the ax 750 because its fully modular, gold certified, and from what i hear silent at idle and worth the increase over the hx 750, also gives you headroom for another 570 in the future edit: just realised that you would have problems with the dark rock and the memory, so as murraynt said pick up some xms 3 stuff instead
Generally i'd agree with most of this other than the memory &, depending on how much video editing is being done, the CPU (though something like the specific SB mobo is choice). Well, in the former case bittech wrote - "We'd also strongly advise you to opt for at least a 4GB, dual-channel kit. We expect 8GB kits to be common this time around, and these are worth considering if you run a few resource-heavy applications concurrently." - & video editing (with some other common stuff going on in the background) tends to be pretty resource heavy - much as running some games with a variety of other programs running can have the same effect. Whilst i choose to have 2 machines for specific purposes & someone with a single machine 'could' choose to close down everything else whilst they carry out a more resource intensive task, this isn't ideal - & it's not as though the 8GB kit the OP's looking at is all the money in the world. it also, more generally, allows for a far lower pagefile usage which, whilst a SSD will eliminate much of the lag vs a HDD, obviously increases the r-e-w cycles. As to the latter, 'if' the OP is doing shed loads of video editing & transcoding & whatnot then the 2600K will provide a significant advantage - however for most people then the 2500K will be more than good enough. Moving away from Baz's comments, if you knock off ~£115 for the change in CPU & mobo & are looking for 2 ways to improve the system with that money i'd - (a) get a 2nd HDD - this will vastly improve your video editing speeds as you can use one as the source & one as the destination disk (plus extra space for backing up) - though i'd go for Samsung F3s from preference as they are faster. (b) consider upping the SSD to either the V3 or intel 510 - both are much better than the A3... ...though if you want to improve even further then the "max iops" V3 is king of the hill (but would up your budget slightly). Yeah, my rationale for suggesting at these is because you're only looking at a 1080p resolution - not that you wouldn't an improvement from upping the graphics card but... ...well, it's all choices when you're working to a budget & (a) waiting around whilst video's encoding is *really* exciting & (b) although any modern SSD will be an improvement, there is a significant difference for not *that* much more money.
thanks for all the advice due to having to get my car repaired i have had to reduce my budget to about £1000 for the mean time so i decided to remove the SSD and buy one later in the year a lot of you suggested the Samsung 1Tb Spinpoint F3 Hard Drive that SATA II 3gbs where as the barracuda is SATA III 6 Gbs for only £5 more surely that would be a better choice correct me if im wrong and you saying that i am going to have issues with the RAM the Vengeance LP are new and are only 1.03" tall designed for large CPU coolers and they run at a lower power than the XMS3 wouldn't this be an improvement? this is what i have thought so far
Everyone on here loves Samsung drives get the F3 , sata 3 is pretty much pointless on traditional hard drives, Your right to go for 8gb of ram on a new build I would only go with 4 if the budget was really tight
all of that would be fine, i only said you would have an issue with the ram I picked because it was the very tall vengeance memory, instead of the low profile stuff fine and as megadriveguy said sata III on normal hard drives is pretty pointless, while the samsung f3 is one of the best hard drives you can get, well priced, cheap, fast and quiet, also i would suggest changing that gtx 570 to the cheaper msi one on scan, as that 570 comes with the cooler that was on the 480, instead of the new vapour chamber cooler that is on all stock 500 series nvidia card.
All looks fine but a couple of points, first you don't want the Dark Rock Pro, that's way to big, you need the 'Dark Rock Advanced'! Also you could save some money by going OEM on the i5 2500K instead of the retail option. The OEM simply lacks the Intel bundled cooler. Besides that the LP memory will be fine as long as it works a Sandybridge build isn't to bothered! If it were me I'd rather wait to see how the even lower voltage Arctic White LP turns out. Also post some more and get free weekday delivery from SCAN... http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=186923 Go for the Samsung F3, a 6Gb/s HDD is just marketing crap! As thetrashcanman said, get this MSI GTX 570 instead... http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1280...-732mhz-shader-1464mhz-480-cores-dl-dvi-mhdmi
he would be fine if he got the lp vengeance memory that blogins suggested and the he's already put it in a preliminary build above
The new Vengeance LP RAM, as mentioned by the OP, won't conflict with any cooler. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-...pc3-12800-(1600)-non-ecc-cas-9-9-9-24-xmp-15v
oops missed that fingers well spotted (was hard to miss seeing as everyone mentioned the LP version, silly me)
I think you should definately stick with that PSU, it means it'll be good for future upgrades. Also with capacitor aging, you should easily get some years out of it. A good PSU is like a good case, buy one and it should last you ages!
