Hi – I’m a new guy here, so apologies if I’ve put this in the wrong place or made some other rookie mistake. Also, I'm sorry if you get a million of these requests every day.
I’ve been looking at a few forums online and this one looked like it had the potential for the best feedback because I’m looking for some advice. I should say that I may be a rookie here, but I’m not a beginner at building computers. I have built many machines for myself, family and friends over the years, but the last machine I built was about 10 years ago. It was then state of the art with a P4 3.0GHz processor, 200Gb HDD and a 512Mb graphics card. If you consider that the whole thing came to just over £1,000, you’ll realise how long ago that really was.
Anyway, my reason for appearing here was that in those 10 years, I’ve been married, had kids and all that kind of thing and I’ve just bought laptops because it’s suited what I needed. I’m thinking that now things have settled down, I feel like building a computer again to play games in my spare time.
I’m looking to build something that is competent with games, but not cutting edge and expensive. Something with enough grunt to keep me happy with decent frame rates of 24+ on 1920x1080 resolutions (on a single monitor, old fashioned 2D!). However, my problem is that since I last looked into what is available about 10 years ago, things have move on a lot. Processors have grown extra cores (yet clock speeds haven’t changed much at all), windows has developed another 32 bits, RAM is cheaper (per Mb/Gb) than ever and now one can have a HDD that doesn’t spin. These were all either unheard of or very rare when I last built a machine.
So here’s my first question to anyone who cares to help: Is there anything in particular I should be mindful of? Or for that matter, anything I should avoid? Any basic mistakes that are easily made with dual/quad core processors etc…? Or is it all pretty much the same as always but with bigger-better-faster-more, everywhere?
I have a budget for the machine (excluding monitor, keys and mouse etc… which I already have) of around £600. As I said, I want the thing to run at 1920x1080 native without struggling with a medium to high(ish) level of detail. The games I have at present are Fallout New Vegas and Railworks Train simulator 2012. I have a history of liking FPS games (such as the Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six/CoD type things) so I’ll probably end up investing in one of those. This is the kind of thing I’d like to run. I’ll say again that I’m not interested in benchmarking hundreds of fps – as long as it looks smooth, I’m happy.
My initial trawl on the web (using ****** prices), I put together this:
Motherboard - ASUS P8Z68-V LX Socket 1155
Processor - Inter core i5 2500K 3.3GHz socket 1155 6MB
Graphics - Asus GTX 550Ti 1Gb GDDR5 VGA PC-E
RAM - G-skill 8Gb (2x4Gb) DDR3 1600MHz Ripjaws Memory kit
HDD - 500Gb Seagate 3.5" 6Gb/s
DVD drive - LiteOn iHAS124 24x DVD+-RW
Windows - Win 7 pro 64 bit
Case - Coolermaster Elite 330 with 500W PSU
That lot came to £599. Am I kidding myself? Am I way off, or pretty close with just a few things needing tweaking? I don’t need huge storage – I have a 1Tb external drive for photos, videos, etc…
Help appreciated. Cheers.
I’ve been looking at a few forums online and this one looked like it had the potential for the best feedback because I’m looking for some advice. I should say that I may be a rookie here, but I’m not a beginner at building computers. I have built many machines for myself, family and friends over the years, but the last machine I built was about 10 years ago. It was then state of the art with a P4 3.0GHz processor, 200Gb HDD and a 512Mb graphics card. If you consider that the whole thing came to just over £1,000, you’ll realise how long ago that really was.
Anyway, my reason for appearing here was that in those 10 years, I’ve been married, had kids and all that kind of thing and I’ve just bought laptops because it’s suited what I needed. I’m thinking that now things have settled down, I feel like building a computer again to play games in my spare time.
I’m looking to build something that is competent with games, but not cutting edge and expensive. Something with enough grunt to keep me happy with decent frame rates of 24+ on 1920x1080 resolutions (on a single monitor, old fashioned 2D!). However, my problem is that since I last looked into what is available about 10 years ago, things have move on a lot. Processors have grown extra cores (yet clock speeds haven’t changed much at all), windows has developed another 32 bits, RAM is cheaper (per Mb/Gb) than ever and now one can have a HDD that doesn’t spin. These were all either unheard of or very rare when I last built a machine.
So here’s my first question to anyone who cares to help: Is there anything in particular I should be mindful of? Or for that matter, anything I should avoid? Any basic mistakes that are easily made with dual/quad core processors etc…? Or is it all pretty much the same as always but with bigger-better-faster-more, everywhere?
I have a budget for the machine (excluding monitor, keys and mouse etc… which I already have) of around £600. As I said, I want the thing to run at 1920x1080 native without struggling with a medium to high(ish) level of detail. The games I have at present are Fallout New Vegas and Railworks Train simulator 2012. I have a history of liking FPS games (such as the Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six/CoD type things) so I’ll probably end up investing in one of those. This is the kind of thing I’d like to run. I’ll say again that I’m not interested in benchmarking hundreds of fps – as long as it looks smooth, I’m happy.
My initial trawl on the web (using ****** prices), I put together this:
Motherboard - ASUS P8Z68-V LX Socket 1155
Processor - Inter core i5 2500K 3.3GHz socket 1155 6MB
Graphics - Asus GTX 550Ti 1Gb GDDR5 VGA PC-E
RAM - G-skill 8Gb (2x4Gb) DDR3 1600MHz Ripjaws Memory kit
HDD - 500Gb Seagate 3.5" 6Gb/s
DVD drive - LiteOn iHAS124 24x DVD+-RW
Windows - Win 7 pro 64 bit
Case - Coolermaster Elite 330 with 500W PSU
That lot came to £599. Am I kidding myself? Am I way off, or pretty close with just a few things needing tweaking? I don’t need huge storage – I have a 1Tb external drive for photos, videos, etc…
Help appreciated. Cheers.