Titan Goliath or DIY?

[Kellogz]

After my latest pc dieing on me im looking at buying a new rig. Ive been looking to buy the titan goliath on offer with the Radeon 4890, Antec 300 Case and a copy of windows 7 Home Pro x64 for about £900. But im also looking at the option of building a rig myself. I already have a Samsung SyncMaster 932GW monitor, a keyboard and mouse and im use too running everything in 1440x900 resloutions before it all went wrong.

Ive also considerd building my own rig, im pretty confident enough with it all ive been replacing parts when needed to since ive been using PCs but ive never built a new one from scratch. Ive also never done any over clocking as i always thought it was risky and i remember being told not to do it unless i knew what i was doing so i guess this is the main thing i would be worried about.

The use is for mainly gaming, i want to be able to run games like Aion in full specs with full 8xAA running, and also i play call of duty 4 / Call of duty WaW and possibly MW2 in the future. Also too add i dont want to have to upgrade it for 2-3 years atleast, My old rig was:

Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor @ 2.4GHz
3GB Dual Channel DDR2 800 / 667 x 4 DIMMs PC2-5300 (3x 1024 MB)
ATI PCS Radeon HD 4850 1GB GDDR3

I paid £350 for the above PC with a NVidia GeForce 8400 GS and it did me rather well for a year and a half after the card was upgraded, i was hoping it would last me longer, but for the amount of use it takes daily i cant complain too much. It also ran Aion in full settings but with full AA but became very slugish and the odd crashes due to mass pvp battles and frames dropping to about 9 FPS sometimes although most of the time i was sitting at about 50 FPS

I would like people to advise me whether to build my own, although if i do this i doubt i would attempt the overlocking myself at the risk of doing it wrong and loosing out on £, or splashing on the Titan. Also if you think i could build a decent rig without overclocking i would like to be shown some possible ideas in the price Range of £600 and another of £800 would be greatly apprieceated. Both would need to come with Windows 7 Home Pro x64 as the pc that died with me came with a OEM version of vista and from what i read theres no way to transfer that onto a new pc plus it gives me an excuse to try out 7.

Thanks for your help and advice in advance.

Kellogz

OT: How much better is the 4890 to the 4850?

 

[JonJ678]

What exactly went wrong with the previous computer? It'll either be repairable or pieces from it can be sold, either being better than skipping it.

Unsurprisingly given where you're asking, I think you should put it together yourself and overclock every part of it you can. Building a computer is aptly described as expensive lego, overclocking is following fairly simple algorithms. If you only look for a moderate overclock it's a case of repeatedly changing two numbers in the bios and running a program to see if it's still stable.

However this requires a considerable investment in time. If you don't have several hours to spend playing with the computer, you're best off buying one of the prebuilt ocuk machines.

I'm afraid I can't write you a specification as I don't know what balance of resources these games or future ones require. As a brief summary the Intel i7 920 is at the top of the pile, with amd quad cores and the Intel i5 750 a bit lower down but cheaper. ATI are walking all over nvidia in graphics cards, but I have no idea which one from their range would be suitable.

Welcome to the forums

 

[bifday2k]

All be it that u can get advise on overclocking on this forum, and actully a few people would guide u through it step by step too so that ur comfortable.

A self build and reusing some aspects of ur old set-up may be cheaper.

If you have never ever touched overclocking, then one of the bundles would be ideal for you, as they are guaranteed at the speed you buy it at, aslong as u don't mess with the bios overclock settings. And u have incase it goes wrong, back up from some very knowledgable staff members.

I found overclockers very late in my overclocking adventure, i went the long way of researching many many many hours and days before i got the confidence to overclock. But main thing at first is to stay in max specs (voltage and what not) and make sure ur cooling is upto it.

For me i can see benifits of both self build and pre-overclocked systems.

 

[Kellogz]

Nice to know im not the only one up in the early hours heh. Thank you both for the speedy replys anyways I think ill give the DIY ago, although overclocking is not something i have done i DO have a lot of spare time on my hands and can invest a lot into the PC as i actually already do so plenty of time to read up and get confident with it i guess, and of course i wouldnt have to overclock it straight away. If this helps heres the specs for Aion:

Recommended:

Windows 2000/XP/Vista
AMD Athlon 64 3000 or Intel CoreDuo 4000
1GB RAM
Graphic Card GeForce 6600 or ATI Radeon X1550 256 MB
Sound Card Sound Blaster Audigy
DirectX 9
16x DVD or 32x CD-ROM
18 Gb free space on hard disk
Broadband link with uplink 256kbps, downlink 1024kbps

Showing this though the game is actually getting a massive gfx upgrade even though its only been out here in the west for 4 months, and by the looks of it they will be using DX11.

So if someone could show me some idea builds with everything i would need for a base including a OS, would be apprieceated. £600 would be ideal but i would like to see some £800 ideas too, Or even something inbetween £600-800. Soul purpose for this build is gaming nothing else really, maybe the odd movie here and there and of course Winamp in the background while gaming xP

As for the old PC i was suddenly getting blue screen errors, although it had been running fine but i supsect something has overheated and gone on me. At first i thought it was the GFX card but i was getting the same error when i replaced it with my old card so that kind of narrowed down the problems. It didnt seem to get any better from there the PC has a Factory restore option which i tried but it just whiped everything got to about 60% of the vista install and than skips forward and finishes off a little saying vista has been installed correctly, and now it wont even boot into vista now, it just goes back too Factory setting restore screen and theres no way to start up Vista. I tried to than install a copy of XP with streamlining the sata drivers into the install and durring the copying of files i was recieving errors of files not copying over. But i had two cds and i just switched the CDs each time an error came up copying the instal files for XP and it got through it in the end. Upon the installation of XP i got one error and half of the stuff in XP isnt working. It loads up and i can instal various bits but the windows manager doesnt work and is apparently disabled so i cant install any drivers. Its lead me too think its a HDD problem, but also upon research could be ram. The PC is built with cheap bits as most things are from PC world so i dont hold my breath for much to be salvaged. I was going to consider looking to fix it in the new year if possible and selling it on cheap to a relative as before falts it was actually a good machine.

 

[bifday2k]

Deffinatly sounds like a HDD or ram prob, more like HDD though.

I'll come up with a spec for a new system for you, well later today unless some others see this when they wake up and post first that is (and they most likely will).

For both £600 and £800 builds u should be easily able to be in the I5/I7 stuff, with the newer gfx cards too, so would eaily be able to play aion and anything else.

So unless others don't post spec idea's i'll certianly will after some much needed sleep, would hate to do u a spec when im slightly drunk still, hence why i hav'nt posted one yet haha

 

[Kellogz]

Deffinatly sounds like a HDD or ram prob, more like HDD though.

I'll come up with a spec for a new system for you, well later today unless some others see this when they wake up and post first that is (and they most likely will).

For both £600 and £800 builds u should be easily able to be in the I5/I7 stuff, with the newer gfx cards too, so would eaily be able to play aion and anything else.

So unless others don't post spec idea's i'll certianly will after some much needed sleep, would hate to do u a spec when im slightly drunk still, hence why i hav'nt posted one yet haha

ok cool thanks would be apprieceated even if others do post ther oppinions, as for i7/i5 ive read on here unless ive understand wrong that the i5 is a better option, its cheaper and in some ways is better for gaming.

get some rest and soba up ill wait your post much later

 

[JonJ678]

I'm fairly confident that's your ram misbehaving. If you can borrow a working machine for a bit download and burn an ubuntu livecd. Boot from it and one of the options is memtest, leave this running. If it throws lots of errors, then it's your ram. Take out a stick and repeat, if you're lucky one has died and the rest are fine. The joy to this is that it's running from cd, so hard drive errors won't affect it, and you can choose "try ubuntu without installing to your computer" if the ram is ok. It'll run like a dog as it's from cd and look different to windows, but you'll have office, firefox etc working again on your desktop.

If 700mb is far too much then just download and burn memtest and ignore the bit about running ubuntu from cd.

If it's all from the purple shirts the psu is most likely crap, which is a bit of a concern. The q6600 is good and still has value, similarly the 4850. What's the case like?

 

[Kellogz]

I'm fairly confident that's your ram misbehaving. If you can borrow a working machine for a bit download and burn an ubuntu livecd. Boot from it and one of the options is memtest, leave this running. If it throws lots of errors, then it's your ram. Take out a stick and repeat, if you're lucky one has died and the rest are fine. The joy to this is that it's running from cd, so hard drive errors won't affect it, and you can choose "try ubuntu without installing to your computer" if the ram is ok. It'll run like a dog as it's from cd and look different to windows, but you'll have office, firefox etc working again on your desktop.

If 700mb is far too much then just download and burn memtest and ignore the bit about running ubuntu from cd.

If it's all from the purple shirts the psu is most likely crap, which is a bit of a concern. The q6600 is good and still has value, similarly the 4850. What's the case like?

ok ill give that program ago, ive actually seen it mentioned a few times now so ill see what happens.

*Update* While runnign memtest it decided to freeze up... and this was from the bootable version. Gonna give it another go, only ran for 4 Min:12 secs before freezing up no errors found though.

Case is rubbish ive never really liked it, standard black advent case with little ventelation got fan on the back and a guided plastic for the cpus on the side but ive always thought that the case wasnt good enough, guess i should have upgraded it. The PSU is CWT 450W. No idea for MB i looked around a while back for info on it, cant remember why but i do remember its a chinese board and little is known about it even brand wise, apparently its something done within the Dixons franchise no idea on more info though. Although the cards never given me any real problems i do notice it runs very hot but has a Arctic Cooling fan on it. If i was to salvage the card atleast do you think it wouldnt be worth upgrading it? I dont know a great mount about how the GFX card relates to the over performance in games too much, i would like thoigh to improve the system quite noticabley from what i had. The pc Cost £350 and this was almost a year and a half ago now.

 

[Kellogz]

Anyone with ideas for a decent base unit with the windows 7 home edition? one at 600 and another at 800 would be apprieceated

Also i have a ATI Radeon 4850 1gb Card do you think its worth upgrading it to the 4890?

 

[95thrifles]

sounds like RAM is faulty then, if you wanted to you oculd replace and keep current system
If youre set on a new build check the thread in my sig/at top of page