<£1000 spec for a mate

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My mate is going to be building his own pc, I will be giving him a hand.
he will be using it for gaming and be might go dual monitors. he has a max budget of £1000 this will be for case, all internal components and os. he dose not need a monitor as he will get it separately.
he will be going for a 24"monitor so the resolution will be reasonably high(although not included in the budget).
he will want a quad core cpu as he wont be upgrading for a long time.
he is not bothered about ssd.
blueray driver - only spec if there is spair cash as he has one on his laptop already.

I was originally thinking a AMD quad core but looking at benches and peoples revues it seems the i5 is better. so now the main choice is between the i5 750 and the i7 930.
I said it is prob best to hold back and see what the new nvidia series graphic cards are like, even if not as good as ati it is prob worth seeing. (can spec a ati card for now and change it if the nvidia cards are better)
he likes the look of the antec 902 as i have the 900 and he likes the look of that.


thanks for any advise :)
 
Are you guys comfortable overclocking? If you are I'd go with a Dragon platform build, if not I'd say i5, it really depends on what he's using it for?
 
yeah i am comfortable overclocking, not the very best but i should be able to get a fairly good stable overclock.
dragon platform build?
he is using it for gaming, i think he likes the idea of i7, but will be fine with a i5 if it means better other components.
 
Dragon platform = Phenom II + ATI 4/5 series GPU

Phenom II will get him more bang for buck as it's slightly cheaper than i5 and much cheaper than i7. i7 is pretty much pointless for gaming unless budget isn't a limiter.

Get a Black Edition (BE) Phenom II quad core, they overclock very easily. He's a student? What subject does he study? If it's an engineering/IT based subject, he could be eligable for the MSDNAA through the uni - ie free windows 7.
 
we both study civil engineering. i think we can get some discount (think its £30) dont know about free tho.
the phenom2 was an idea i half ruled it out when seeing some benchmarks and people saying that a I5 will be about 30% faster clock for clock.
the advantage of the phenom2 would be allowing more money to be spent on a better graphics card :)
 
mowlio said:
Does "dragon platform" actually do anything or is it advertising hype to sell more AMD cpus because they're fighting a losing battle?
Click to expand...

That's pretty much it, not sure about the losing battle part, they are selling plenty of 5series graphics cards.
 
If the OP has the budget for a Core i7 930 based build they should probably wait until next month to see how the Phenom II X6 fares especially if they want to get a Fermi based card. If it is competitive with the lower end Core i7 processors it may mean some price cuts and if it isn't then the pricing should stay the same.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
If the OP has the budget for a Core i7 930 based build they should probably wait until next month to see how the Phenom II X6 fares especially if they want to get a Fermi based card. If it is competitive with the lower end Core i7 processors it may mean some price cuts and if it isn't then the pricing should stay the same.
Click to expand...

i think we will try that thanks :)
wondering how the AMD 6core cpu will fare myself as it could be a good upgrade from a E6600 on a budget.
 
This for £7 over budget.

spec1.png
 
Clock for clock i5 is indeed faster - but not 30% real world. My friend's i5 is running at 2.8 with turboboost, my 720BE is running at 2.8gHz stock.

I've got one core less than him (3 to his 4) and with the same GPU (my 8800GT) his is only a little better in games - not so much as you'd notice - and about 40% faster in encoding.

Remember, though, that although that's clock for clock, mine's the tri-core and also I'm running DDR2 vs his DDR3 (my choice of board at the time). Obviously it's not quite a fair comparison, but it shows that i5, in real world terms, really doesn't romp away with the victory. Especially when you're paying for the privilege.

Since he's gaming focused, he'd be much better off getting the AMD CPU, and using the cash for the better GPU.
 
I was saying Dragon just because the AMD CPU's are cheaper and nicely overclockable, and their cpu's are backwards compatibles for mobos.

If he's using it for gaming then an OC'd 955/965 and 5870 are probably what you want to go for, the i5 won't really help you, and don't bother with a Bluray player unless you want to then spend more money on software that can play the disc. i5's aren't really worth it for gaming until you get into over £1200 for your system (minus monitor).

oh and on the losing battle thing, just because intel bribed their way into their position at the top of the performance ladder doesn't mean that AMD CPU's are crap, it's just their top end isn't Intel's top-end, and on a £1000 that doesn't matter.

I personally wouldn't bother with Fermi, the only 5870 beater is the GTX480 (and even then only marginally from what I've seen), and if you wanted to use that you would have to go with either an i3 or an x3, and if not those then a cheap motherboard or ram, which you don't want to do from the start.

Up until the £1200 mark I wouldn't really recommend anything other than a Dragon platform, the high-end 4000 series cards are now dirt cheap, and the 5000-series cards outperform cards well above their price bracket (consider, the 5850 outperforms the 5870 priced 295). Intel's i5 and above do outperform AMD's current offerings, but outside of video and image editing you probably won't find much to use the cpu grunt for, and definitely not in areas where you'd benefit more from a better graphics card.

Hope this helps :)
 
ringo that seems prity good altho for an extra £50 he could get the i7 4ghz pack from overclockers. a modular PSU is good i forgot to menction that in the spec, regret buying a non modular one myself.
 
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