My Custom Build - Recommendations?

Mawat

Mawat

Mawat

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30 Oct 2011
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162
Hey everyone, my names Matt and I'm looking at doing my first proper PC build :)

I'm currently a student studying at Staffordshire University, England, and seeing as my laptop is getting a bit out of date, I want a new pc, perfect for running multiple VM's, running forensic and network software, and general just messing about experimenting with stuff.

I haven't really got a budget, but around £500 - £600 would be comfortable.

Currently, I'm thinking:

Intel Core i5 2500k - Unlocked multiplier for overclocking in the future. Built in integrated graphics perfect for the time being until I find a good graphics card.

Z68 Motherboard - I'm not really sure as to which motherboard to go for. I know that I want a Z68, so that I can do both CPU and graphics overclocking. So if anyone could recommend a good one, around £100, that would be great.

8GB 1600Mhz RAM (2 x 4GB) - 8GB will be plenty for the time being, but will also be upgradeable to 16GB in the future. I'm looking at the Corsair Vengeance with the lower latencies, but I'd be grateful for opinions.

1TB SATA HDD - With the recent rise in HDD price I'm not sure whether to go for SATA-II or SATA-III. I may possibly upgrade to an SSD in the future but at the moment I don't think I'll bother. Will the difference between 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s really effect me, or the difference between 32mb and 64mb make much difference? Suggestions for cheap, yet reliable drives?

Zalman Z9 Case - I've looked at cases and this one looks the most ideal for me. Its £50, cheap but comes with a great quality case, and multiple fans with a fan controller built in. I think I've decided on this case.

Power Supply - With everything so far, plus a decent graphics card, I'm not sure how powerful a PSU I'll need. To be safe, I think its best to go for a 700w or would a 550/600 be sufficient?

Graphics Card - This is where I'm stumped. I know the i5 comes with Integrated HD3000 graphics, which will do me for a short while, but I can't decide on a graphics card. I might do the occasional gaming, messing around on Minecraft and a few online games, and I want to do so without much hassle, but I don't want to spend the earth on a graphics card that I wont fully utilise. This is where I'd most like suggestions to go with my build.

Thats pretty much it. Theres a few extra's that I know I need, such as DVD drives but I can pick them up anywhere as their only cheap. For CPU heatsink I'll look for a good 3rd party one thats still a good price.

I may upgrade to a Blu-Ray drive in the future, and might upgrade to an SSD too, but for now I want to get this set up first.

Any suggestions, comments, questions, reviews etc... would be appreciated :)
 
have a look at the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3, slightly over your £100 budget (£110) but worth looking at.

got unlucky with the decent hard drive price increases :(, have a look at the Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB, sata III is only really useful on your SSD's, so sata II will be fine.

graphics card wise have a look at the 6850/6870 (£115 -£140) depending on budget, along with a 600-650w psu (BeQuiet Efficient Power 600W '80 Plus Gold' Power Supply £65 or BeQuiet Pure Power L8 630W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply £70)

case seems pretty well liked so will be fine.
 
Yee I may upgrade to an SSD in the future, and its not particularly more for SATA III so may go for that if I can.

I'll have a look into the graphics card. I'm gonna look on some benchmarking websites etc and see what I can find out. I may build it all up without the gfx card for now, as its not entirely neccesary at the minute.

As for PSU, thats the region I'm kind of looking at.

With regards to the motherboard, what benefits would I get from the one you recommended, and one for £20 cheaper?

Cheers
 
Oo interesting. I know that minecraft doesn't require that much power. The 6850's are around £100, 6870's a little more and the 6900 series almost £200. Would a 6850/70 be substantial enough for most online games for the time being obviously, even if not on full quality + extras?
 
I've been looking this morning at bits and bobs and I have a few questions.

Looking at motherboards, what would the main differences between these be?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-364-GI&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1990

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-343-GI&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1990

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-193-MS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1990
This MSI board only says it supports DDR3 1133/1066, however looking on the MSI website it does say that it will support up to 2133 OC RAM, which is the same model etc.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-192-MS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1990
MSI are also releasing a new motherboard with PCI-E 3. I don't know anything about this, and would it be beneficial or useful in the future?

I think I prefer the look of the MSI boards, and looking at the stats I feel they seem a little better.

Suggestions/opinions?
 
Let go through them:

1) Budget Z68 motherboard, has most common utilities. Overclcoks well. No Xfire/SLI support.
2) Has Xfire/SLI support, though mAtx form factor, This gives less space in which to work, especially if going Xfire/SLI
3) A mid range Z68 motherboard, all the ultilites you will need
4) Same as 3 but comes with PCI-E gen 3, this will support the next line-up of ATI and Nvidia GPU's. The HD 7*** series and the Geforce 6** series. If it is within your budget it is worth getting.

The RAM speeds mean 1333 Mhz and 1066 Mhz. I think the '2133 Oc RAM' mean that it will support RAM upto that speed but the board will have to be overclocked to do so. Id play it safe.
 
the problem with the corsair vengeance is the fins, many of the CPU air coolers tend to over hang part(or in some cases all, depending on their size) of the ram slots and large fin ram clashes with them. Unless going for water-cooling or closed loop liquid cooling(corsair h60 etc) which don't have this problem it's best to go for low profile(I.e those without fins) ram.

the dual channel pc3-12800 1600mhz c9 seems to be the best one one to go for.

Kingston hyperx genesis grey, corsair xms3, corsair vengeance lp White and crucial ballixtics sport(it's c10 tho don't think there's any real world performance difference between c9 and c10) are the 4 choices available on ocuk.

psu wise antec, corsair, seasonic, enermax etc are the ones to look for, ocuk don't sell seasonic or enermax tho they have some which are made by those 2 but sold under other brands(seasonic makes some of the corsair ones also make the xfx ones and enermax make some of the lepa ones).
 
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Ok cheers. I like the look of the two MSI boards. I'm a little worried though about them. I would like to use 1600Mhz memory, as obviously it is faster than 133Mhz memory, but will this be supported by the MSI board?

With regards to the latest graphics cards, I'm not really going for a complete gaming rig, and I don't think I'll have the budget for the very latest cards.

Thanks for the advice on the RAM, I'll definitely take that into consideration :)
 
the msi do support the 1600mhz ram, I don't have personal experience but others on here have bought the g3 boards recently and 1600mhz ram and non have complained of the ram not working at 1600mhz.
 
Mawat said:
Ok cheers. I like the look of the two MSI boards. I'm a little worried though about them. I would like to use 1600Mhz memory, as obviously it is faster than 133Mhz memory, but will this be supported by the MSI board?
Click to expand...

had a look at the msi website and it showed the following :

Supports four unbuffered DIMM of 1.5 Volt DDR3 1066/1333/1600*/1866*/2133*(OC) DRAM, 32GB Max
 
Hi Mawat. Gotta be quick with this, I'm at college in Stafford and I need to make sure my lecturer isn't looking this way. Anyway my recommendations would be as follows:

i5 2500K
ASRock Z68 Pro3 mobo
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) @ 1600Mhz
This bundle for PSU, Case and CPU Cooler - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-043-OP&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=
Basically a decent case, 650w PSU and the H60 cooler.
Seagate Barracuda 1TB Sata-III HDD
For gaming, you need a graphics card. Go for something like the GTX560 Ti or the HD 6870 or above depending upon what kind of gaming you're doing.

Check my similar thread out. (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18330607 )
I've got my components and will be building tomorrow.
 
Hi JoneseyBoy1, I don't really have the budget for the ASRock motherboard, and I think I've settled on the Zalman Z9 case as the reviews are good and so are the specs.

I am looking at the 6850 and the 6870 cards but at the moment I don't think I'm gonna get a graphics card, stick with the integrated gpu on the i5 for a short while, rather than spend loads of money in bulk

The MSI boards, I would have thought should support the 1600Mhz memory, I don't see why they wouldn't when all of the others do. So I think thats topping my choice at the moment :)
 
Had a more detailed look at the ASRock Z68 Pro 3. It seems like a decent mobo, however for a little bit more I can get a dual pci express x 16 board, with more overclocking facilities, which would be beneficial for the future :)

Cheers for suggestion however
 
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Another things thats just come to mind. I'm not after a silent build, but I don't want some stupidly noisy thing. The PC I have atm has a coolermaster CPU fan which makes a huge racket, can here it vibrating from downstairs which I don't want.

I presume the BeQuiet PSU's are some of the quietest, but how would an OCZ ZS series compare. It says its developed to be one of the quietest in its class? If not, can anyone recommend some of the quieter PSU's?
 
Thats cool, if you want to run sli or crossfirex, you could get a PCI-E Gen3 mobo. Bit more expensive but it's future proofed for Ivy Bridge CPU's and the AMD 7XXX-series graphics cards and the nvidia 6XX series. Basically for Mobo's, it's either Asus, Gigabyte, MSI or ASRock. Anyone else just isn't good enough.

I've literally just built my pc (yesterday) and I can recommend some of the components I used (see my sig).

Also, yesterday was Wednesday so look out for deals of the week on Overclockers UK
 
quick question on the subject guys do you know if the gigabyte z68xp-ud3 will be compatible with the new tech like Ivy Bridge and PCIe3.

Im looking to buy this board for my new build but have doubts in case I want to upgrade my gfx in a few years. Or do you think the SLI would be able to make up for that gap?

i did some searching and there a few people sying that it may support it partially.

thanks
 
JoneseyBoy1 said:
Hi Mawat. Gotta be quick with this, I'm at college in Stafford and I need to make sure my lecturer isn't looking this way. Anyway my recommendations would be as follows:

i5 2500K
ASRock Z68 Pro3 mobo
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) @ 1600Mhz
This bundle for PSU, Case and CPU Cooler - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-043-OP&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=
Basically a decent case, 650w PSU and the H60 cooler.
Seagate Barracuda 1TB Sata-III HDD
For gaming, you need a graphics card. Go for something like the GTX560 Ti or the HD 6870 or above depending upon what kind of gaming you're doing.

Check my similar thread out. (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18330607 )
I've got my components and will be building tomorrow.
Click to expand...


Surely all of these specs are going to be way over the budget of the maximum 600 pounds?
 
Just built a pc using the Zalman Z9 Plus case. It is very easy to work with and pretty easy to hide cables etc. It did look a bit plasticy when I first opened the box but it's actually very solidly made.
It's also suprisingly quiet too -despite the grill on the side panel. I did move the fan from the side panel to the bottom of the case as suggested by another user -if left in place it makes a god awful racket apparently.

Don't think there's much better at this price point.
 
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