Need help building all-rounder system

[martindiag]

Looking to kit out a new fairly multipurpose PC for:

- Hyperfast media encoding and video editing.
- Very fast document indexing.
- 1080p / bluray playback through a large screen
- Running 2 or 3 virtual machines, possibly under hyper-V (this is for my work).
- Possibly running Windows Home Server in a virtual machine (i.e. rather than lavishing a whole machine on it).

Probably want to get into gaming more and more later on. I may start with a fairly basic card (4770 or 4870) but maybe upgrade to 2 faster cards down the line, playing through a large LCD TV. May also want to hook up my guitar at some point so may look to get the Asus Xonar D2X (and a DAC to hook up to my hifi, again later on).

I would also like the system to run as quiet as possible. No water-cooling, maybe overclocking -- but in general, as low-maintenance as possible.

However, everything's still up for grabs as far as the case, choice of processor, graphics card, amount and type of memory, etc., is concerned.

I haven't built a system before so it would be nice if there isn't too much b*ggering around fitting things together, it runs fast and quiet, and it still has plenty of expansion options (SATA, PCI, PCI-e) down the line, and plenty of USB ports round the back.

Help??!

Also, are Overclockers reasonable about returns if I mess something up?

 

[Admiral Huddy]

Welcome to the forums.

I doubt any retailer would be reasonable with returns if you mess things up. This is your liability.

However, they are pretty good with sorting of any problems with delivered faulty equipment.

If you have never built a system before, I would suggest you do your homework fully before buying. There are plenty of on-line guides to get you started. Best place to start is to set a budget.

 

[hp7909]

As mentioned, good to have a budget first then you can know/see what's possible. Once you provide that, the good people here can draw you up a spec going by the uses. After that you can start researching further (here/Google/etc) on the components to familiarise yourself. But remember that you can get help here if you do get stuck, etc

Good build guide here.

Oh & welcome to the forums

 

[cmndr_andi]

Without a budget I threw together a build which is good value and will happily meet all of your needs:

I chose an intel i7 processor as it eats video encoding for breakfast and virtual machines for lunch, plus it is one of the best you can get for gaming and overclocks VERY easily.

For the graphics- that 4870 should be more than enough for all of your day-to-day computing on a 1080p monitor, and if you step into a bit of gaming it will run very smooth too.

I chose two WD caviar black HHDs because they are among the best 7200rpm HDDs and you can RAID 0 them together and get a big performance boost.

Finally, that antec case is cheap and no thrills but it is very well designed and will hold all your components, keep them cool and not stand out too much.

Edit: Also use the Windows 7 Release Candidate as the OS, its free until March 2010 and very nice.

 

[martindiag]

Thanks a lot everyone, yeah I should have put in a budget, circa £800-1000, so the system from cmndr_andi looks very interesting. And thanks for the system-building link.

 

[martindiag]

Actually just a couple of questions about the system quoted by cmdr_andi.

Will it be fine down the line for if I want to go SLI, if I want to add an SSD and perhaps several more data drives, a sound card, plus random expansions (more USB / firewire ports)? On paper it looks fine but I am just thinking about what kind of space is going to be available after I've done my semi-hack job putting things together.

Also, any opinions on the Gigabyte 3D Aurora, probably my preferred case out of those I saw in a competitor? Quiet, big enough?

 

[hp7909]

First, get to know the forum rules

SSD drives are SATA based therefore will work, & mobo quoted comes with:

• 10 x SATA connectors
• Up to 12 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (8 on the back panel, 4 via the USB brackets connected to the internal USB headers)

Read more here