Building New Gamer PC

Mayhem

Mayhem

Mayhem

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20 May 2009
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35
Ok guys, I'm saving up my spare cash to buy a new gaming PC. I've had my old Althon 3000+ with 1GB DDR and Geforce 6600 long enough!

Right now, I'm looking at buying the best build I possibly can for the money. Obviously I'm going to be building it myself. I've got a good friend who can help me with assembling anything I don't understand. :D

My Budget is about £650 - £700 and I want to get the best components for that price that I won't need to upgrade for awhile, but maybe go slightly cheaper on other things. Here is the list of components I've come up with:

components.jpg


Basically, I just would like your advice on whether I've chosen well within my money limit and if the power supply will hold its own. Thanks guys in advance!

EDIT: By the way, I already have a 19" 4:3 1280x1024 vga monitor, and mouse, keyboard, speakers, dvd/cd-rw drive and 2 pata hard drives, plus the rest of my old machine, which just isn't worth salvaging.
 
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Looks like a nice setup, that power supply is actually very good and should do you fine. Btw, are you needing a new optical drive?

As you have a pretty low res monitor you could save some money and get this graphics card instead. You will likely see little difference in you visuals.

Also, if you are still using PATA hard disks - you may want to do yourself a favour and get a nice quick SATA2 disk like this one. It will definitely improve your day-to-day windows performance.
 
If you followed cmndr_andi advice with the gfx card - which is sound - you could put the extra money towards some better memory which the rig deserves - OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9
 
agree with above, unless your getting a new 24" monitor anytime soon, drop your gfx to the 4870 or even a 4850, and put the money into new HDD, better RAM and an aftermarket cooler like the titan fenrir
 
Aww... i wanted that overclokced 4890 :P But thanks a lot for the advice guys.

So would getting better RAM, HDD and a good cooler make a much more noticeable difference?
 
Well, you definitely would benifit from having 4 gig of memory - it's almost a must with that spec.

The HDD is a good shout as PATA to SATA2 is a large jump in the hdd world, and the 4870 on a 19" monitor at those resolutions will suit your needs comfortably.

Getting a good cooler gives you the oppotunity to overclock so you will potentially get more bang for your buck.

Look at it this way - clock your cpu to i940 speeds and you've, techniacally, saved yourself £200 all for the price of a third party cooler. (The stock heatsink may achieve this too but your temps would start to get scary.)
 
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Um... that G.Skill is already 6GB Tri-channel, but should I change that to OCZ? It's quite a bit more expensive, and that G.Skill is super cheap.
Is there anything wrong with this ram? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-130-OC
It's in the clearance memory.

If I ever want to overclock later I will buy a CPU cooler, but I think I'm right in thinking a SATA-II HDD will make a bigger improvement in performance, considering I would have been using two PATA HDDs.
 
From what I hear, the Gskill is fine. But that OCZ stuff is definitely nicer and will overclock very happily indeed. For the sake of £13 i'd say it was worth it.

Compared to your current setup - the stock speed of the i7 will blow you away. Some decent SATA2 hard disks will certainly make life easier. Faster booting up, file transfers and much more will be accelerated. Plus - with the price of storage today i'm sure you will be able to get a lot more capacity than you had before.
 
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Ok thanks a lot.

Btw, my well-informed and trusted friend told me that he found benchmarks that showed the core i7 actually had less FPS on some games with the 4850, compared to the Core 2 Quad, and that it works better with the 4890 and other newer cards.
 
This may well be the case, there are many anomilies in the computer market.

However, i'd wager than none of the frames per second readings of the i7 +4850 ever dipped below 50fps at your resolution. Furthermore, the i7 would much better in CPU intestive games as well as games which are multithreaded (8 threads in i7 compared to 4 in core 2 quad).

If you don't think you will use the massive cpu power of the i7 it is probably a waste to get one. Here is a spec based on a q6700 and I added a lovely 22in e-IPS monitor for your viewing pleasure.

796c2q.jpg


Its over budget - but it would give the vastly superior gaming experience.
 
Oh no I wasn't suggesting that I might not get the i7, I use quite processor intensive programs more than occasionally.

And this is a rig that will hopefully last awhile, at least the mobo and processor, for a couple of years minimum. I just meant I might be better off spending the money on the 4890 now, because of what I said above, and getting a better monitor later.

Also, I do have an optical drive thanks :D just forgot to mention it before, it's updated on the first post now.

Thankyou for going to that trouble looking through componetents though :) you guys are nice here.
 
I've made similar comparisons on other i7 threads - so i'm with cmndr_andi on this one.

It may not be as future proof - but it will be just as fast for gaming and you get a fantastic monitor to use with it for virtually the same money.

If you had the 2 side by side you would find it very hard to walk away from the spec above with the monitor.

Spoilt for choice? - I bet you wish your friend had kept his mouth shut now ;)

EDIT:
Mayhem said:
Oh no I wasn't suggesting that I might not get the i7, I use quite processor intensive programs more than occasionally.
Click to expand...

Fair enough - but worth a shot eh andi?
 
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Hehe - no problemo.

As you are not just purely gaming then I agree that i7 is the best route for you.

Yea - the i7 is so powerful it will happily make full use of a 4890 - and for the prices they are at now you will be getting a bargain.

Another good thing about the i7 platform is upgradability. You can add a 2nd graphics card later if you want (also it looks like new 6 core cpus will use the same socket).
 
Ok, well I've decided to stick with the 4890, because I will be getting a better monitor at some point in the future.

HDD wise, I decided to go for a Samsung HD502HI 500GB, and get another one in the future to RAID with. As you can tell I'm keeping my options open for later enhancements, I hope that's not too much of a bad thing.

Any idea what cache size it is? And how much difference does cache size actually make? My friend seemed to think not much, but that you would be able to tell between 8Mb and 32.
 
Sorry for the bump, things get pushed down quickly here. :P

I've got my eye on the new 4870X2 now, for £236, but I think I'm just daydreaming :D

If I'm going to buy a monitor, it might be something like the Samsung P2250 22"

Also, my previous questions still stand.
 
If it's for a gaming set up, go for phenom II 720 instead of i7 and get that 4870x2 and still save £50+ (new hdd?)
 
Mayhem said:
HDD wise, I decided to go for a Samsung HD502HI 500GB,
Any idea what cache size it is? And how much difference does cache size actually make? My friend seemed to think not much, but that you would be able to tell between 8Mb and 32.
Click to expand...

It has a 16Mb cache - and bigger is better, as rule - but whether you would notice the difference between a 16Mb and 32Mb is debatable...
 
The 4870X2 is a fantastic card, but at 1280x1024 resolution would be completely wasted. You would need a 22 or 24" monitor to justify it.
 
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