How's this spec?

randomnine

randomnine

randomnine

Associate
Joined
19 Jul 2010
Posts
16
Hi helpful people! I built my last desktop about nine years ago and I've been using a rubbish laptop for the past three, so with SC2 coming out soon it's time to upgrade.

I want a workstation/gaming PC that's fast, responsive and OK for games, and my budget for the whole thing is around £900-1,000 - though it's very flexible if there's good reason.

I've built the whole system around the Crucial SSD, since that seems like fun, which requires 6Gb/s SATA; a cheap graphics card, since that's not my priority; a CPU that can take some overclocking (apparently?); and room to upgrade the system a long way in a few years. I haven't picked a monitor or other peripherals yet, but here's the basic spec I've come up with so far:

- Antec 300 Three Hundred Ultimate Gaming Case
- Asus P7P55D-E LX Intel P55 (Socket 1156) DDR3 Motherboard
- Corsair CX 400W ATX Power Supply (CMPSU-400CXUK)
- Intel Core i3 530 2.93GHz (Clarkdale) (Socket LGA1156) - Retail
- Cooler Master Hyper TX3 CPU Cooler
- Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 10666C7 (1333MHz) Dual-Channel
- Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive
- Western Digital Caviar Blue 160GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM
- XFX ATI Radeon HD 5750 XXX 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
- LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM
- Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit - OEM (GFC-00599)

Comes in at £758.90.

Now, sorry for the noobness :D but will all that work together? Are there any much better options I'm missing available at similar prices? I'm mostly worried about the CPU. Since there are so many options, I just had a poke around Intel stuff on the latest chipset, and I have no idea what's OCable... sorry.

Thank you for your time :)
 
Looks like a good start, you could change your mother board to a Gigabyte H55M-UD2H and use the spare cash to get a faster GFX card like a 5770 or 460 768MB.
 
Thanks, but that doesn't support 6Gb/s SATA. (Or is that not a problem?)

However, the Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3 Intel H55 does, for £27 cheaper than the motherboard I have. It doesn't support Intel i3s, but adding £47 nets me an 3.2GHz i5 650 instead. £20 extra for a much better CPU looks like a definite improvement :)

The 460 seems to benchmark nicely, I might swap to that as well!
 
You could also consider an AMD spec :)

1kspec.png


That motherboard is very affordable for a full ATX board with SATA 6gb/s support, the RAM is low latency, the processor is a true quad core and the power supply is modular so you'll have less clutter in your case.

edit: Spending an extra £15 to get the retail version of Windows 7 means you'll be able to reinstall without any hassle if you need to change your motherboard at some point.
 
Last edited:
Wow, awesome. I'll definitely go AMD then - but that motherboard's feature list says "Memory: 4x DDR3 DIMM 2000(OC) / 1333 / 1066 MHz (Max. 16GB) / Dual Channel", so does it even support the 1600MHz RAM?
 
OK, after doing a lot of research... I think this is my final spec.

I've changed case, since I'm not a fan of blue LEDs and windows (ironically to another case with blue LEDs, but there you go; it's Zalman, reviews well, and has an 2.5" SSD bay.) I've kept a CPU cooler, since that AMD chip's stock heatsink is apparently noisy and not very good. I've switched the GTX 460 for the OcUK Value model, since it has twin DVI-I outputs for a dual monitor upgrade later.

For my HD2 I've followed the price/performance curve up to the bargain 640GB Western Digital drive, since for some reason I trust WD drives. The OS is back to Home OEM, since I don't plan to change my motherboard and I'm not worried about having to call them if something breaks. Finally, I've added some basic speakers and a mouse, and changed the keyboard for something simpler - I'm not a fan of overly complicated/flashy KBs.

desktop%20spec.jpg


Any final thoughts on possible problems or improvements? I'll order it tonight if not :cool:
 
the only thing to ask is, do you need some thermal compound with the cooler? apart from that- looks fantastic.

Edit, retail copy of win7 is a better pick.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom