My first build in years - What do you think!

reefbarman

reefbarman

reefbarman

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I have been out of the PC game for years having relied on laptops for work.

Now I want to get back into the PC scene and enjoy all the fantastic PC games coming this year!

Anyways I have been putting together a build for under £1000 and trying to get as much bang for buck! I think I have done okay but not 100% sure as am not totally up to date on today's tech! Without further ado here is my build!

Computer Specs:

Case: Coolermaster CM-690 II Advanced - £80
PSU: Corsair 850w CMPSU-850TXV2UK - £85
CPU: Core i5-2500k 3.3ghz - £160
Motherboard: ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Motherboard - £160
GFX: Palit Geforce GTX 570 1.28GB 750mhz/3900mhz - £250
RAM: 8gb Corsair CMX8GX3M2A1600C​9 DDR3 XMS3 - £49
HDD: 2 x 500gb WD Caviar Black in Raid 0, 1 x 2TB WD Caviar Sata II - £140
Optical: Samsung SH-B123L/BSBP 12x Blu-Ray player - £45
Wifi: Wifimax EW-7612PIN 300Mbps Wireless PCI-E Adapter - £17
Total: £986

What do you think?

Anything I can drop for cheaper products in order to up the more important things or know of cheaper equivalent parts?

EDIT: Changed caviar blue to black
 
Last edited:
Grimley said:
Any reason for not wanting a Solid State hard drive?
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Just the price to feature/performance ratio isn't there for me i think! I wanted enough fast storage for my games while not sacrificing too much of my budget!

But I'm open to suggestions on SSDs that may fit my requirements
 
I think most of the 128GBones are near enough £1/GB which is somewhat reasonable. Even a smaller one as a boot drive would be an improvement.
 
Tom Biddulph said:
I think most of the 128GBones are near enough £1/GB which is somewhat reasonable. Even a smaller one as a boot drive would be an improvement.
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So what would you suggest

A 128gb SSD for a windows installation
The 2 500gb Caviar Blues in Raid 0 for my games and applications and then
the 2Tb for storage?

Is that possible?

What I'm mainly worried about is load times and stuff of my games more then the boot time of windows. But i need enough storage to save me having to cycle my installed games all the time to fit new ones, while still being decently fast in load times
 
It's OK if you can't fit in your budget. I'd rather have a good mobo, CPU and GPU than compromise to fit a SSD. Then you can get a SSD later.

However, I would recommend a SSD over two RAID0 drives, or not bother with RAID at all. Typically, one SSD and one 2TB / 1TB drive is all you need. Else, just one 500GB drive would be enough for your system and apps. Raid 0 is just to much hassle.

I would prefer a gen 3 motherboard. If you just get one 500GB drive, that would fit in.

The PSU should be good enough for SLI. For the price, you also have the OCZ Z-850, and the Lepa B-850, that will also take 570 SLI.
 
Well you specced two 'sub optimal' 500Gig drives for Raid0 That's only a few quid of the price of a good SSD, ok ok more than a few quid, but not that far, and ok you'll get a tenth of the capacity, but you'll massively feel the speed increase. But you still have a good 2Tb drive in your spec/budget for the other stuff! A 1/2Tb WDBlack would be enough speed wise.

For a machine that you want to enjoy using and appreciate, SSD is the way to go.
 
Yeah people tell me SSDs are amazing but at £1/GB i find it really hard to justify in my bang for buck build.

I would consider better hard drives for a Raid 0 array but i think until SSDs get cheaper I will have to pass storage is more crucial then speed atm (I plan on having a good list of games to appreciate on my drive)

What im more interested in is better motherboard/GFX/RAM choices or better hdd choices

Sorry SSDs i still love you :p
 
reefbarman said:
Yeah people tell me SSDs are amazing but at £1/GB i find it really hard to justify in my bang for buck build.

I would consider better hard drives for a Raid 0 array but i think until SSDs get cheaper I will have to pass storage is more crucial then speed atm (I plan on having a good list of games to appreciate on my drive)

What im more interested in is better motherboard/GFX/RAM choices or better hdd choices

Sorry SSDs i still love you :p
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Good decision making there!

P.S. Avoid raid0 (Data loss is a B**CH
 
Buchanan0204 said:
P.S. Avoid raid0 (Data loss is a B**CH
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Yeah this is also something else I'm worrying a little about people are telling me reliability on RAID 0 is terrible! And the hassle vs the speed increase isn't worth it!

What do you think is a realistic percentage of performance increase i can expect from RAID 0 over a drive by itself?

Because the way I manage my PC is having a storage drive + cloud storage (The 2TB drive plus dropbox premium for most important stuff) to keep all the stuff i care about on and then having just games applications and the os on a drive that doesn't really matter if it fails (because it only holds applciations) in any number of ways because I normally create an image of a fresh install that I can then just blast back onto a new hard drive if need be.

So is the performance going to be worth maybe having to do restore an image every year or so?
 
MasterPlan1 said:
Having a top notch system like the one you're specing out and not having a SSD is like having a Ferrari, and having a Fiat punto engine in there.
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Haha I know! (I love this analogy) but unfortunately I'm a rich man on a budget! The missus has only just grudgingly agreed to let me spend £1000 on a new PC (I had to bribe her with a new dress and a day at a spa)
 
reefbarman said:
Haha I know! (I love this analogy) but unfortunately I'm a rich man on a budget! The missus has only just grudgingly agreed to let me spend £1000 on a new PC (I had to bribe her with a new dress and a day at a spa)
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order the ssd the day before her spa day so that it comes when she is at the spa, she will be so releaxed when she gets in she wont have realised what you've done ;) :p
 
panyan said:
order the ssd the day before her spa day so that it comes when she is at the spa, she will be so releaxed when she gets in she wont have realised what you've done ;) :p
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dude sssssshhhhhhhhh she may be reading :p

Haha i just updated the spec with caviar black hdds and the asrock z68 Extreme4 Gen3 it looked good after reading some reviews
 
Take her out to dinner, and convince her to let you spend £100 more, and as the price denotes, it's 69 over what you initially asked for... ;)



Imo, nicer case, nicer board, you don't *really* need 850w, 650w will suffice, H60 thrown in for fun. Plus, added SSD.
 
When specing my sytem I wanted a 128Gb SSD but couldn't fit it into my budget and I'm glad I didn't stretch it. My F3 Samsung is plenty fast for me right now, Windows 7 boots up in no time.

I will be getting an SSD later in the year but I'd ignore the "omgzzz must have SSDs nowzzz" comments if you cant afford it at the moment.
 
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