New Machine £400

Jonny L

Jonny L

Jonny L

Associate
Joined
10 Nov 2006
Posts
1,859
Location
Lincoln
Hi guys,

I'd like a new computer, don't need any peripherals just the box and an OS.

I'm out of touch with the tech these days but am confident enough to build it.

It will be used predominantly for email, internet, word processing and some of the less taxing games - WOW, Total War/ Mount & Blade etc.

All your help in picking the components is much appreciated.

Jonny
 
Thanks mate, could probably stretch to 450 to get both the card and the quad core. Any other changes you'd make if I went that far?
 
Thanks for all your help guys, I'm just looking at that motherboard stulid and wondering if i should spend a little more to get a bit more future proofing - i.e. more ram slots and better facilities and overclocking capability?

The MSI 870A-G54 AMD 870 (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard seems reasonable, would this be a good choice?

If so I'll get this ordered today :)

Thanks again guys!

Jonny


edit: also, just thought, if I buy the OEM optical drive, will I need to purchase another SATA cable?

Cheers
 
Last edited:
Me again guys (sorry), I got this all ordered yesterday, I originally placed the order on Saturday but there was a delay due to OcUK's security check (which i was actually very impressed with). The customer services team were brilliant and really friendly. The last time I dealt with OcUK was a few years ago and if anything they have improved.

So I blew the budget and ended up ordering:


Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5830 Extreme 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **OcUK Exclusive** £74.99 1 £74.99
AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition "125W Edition" 3.20GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £74.99 1 £74.99
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM (GFC-00599) £66.66 1 £66.66
MSI 870A-G54 AMD 870 (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £58.32 1 £58.32
Coolermaster Elite 430 Windowed Case - Black (with 500w Elite Power PSU) £54.16 1 £54.16
Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) £29.99 1 £29.99
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (WD5000AAKX) £27.49 1 £27.49
Sony Optiarc AD-5260S 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.32 1 £13.32
Arctic Cooling Keyboard - Black £8.32 1 £8.32
TP-Link 300Mbps Wireless-N USB Adapter (TL-WN821N) £8.32 2 £16.64
Zalman CNPS10X Flex CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/AM2/AM2+/AM3/775/1155/1156/1366) £23.82 1 £23.82

Order Total: £538.44

And I noticed the case only comes with one fan so I popped to the shop and grabbed an akasa amber 120mm (I have a few of these at home and they're great but I'm currently at uni so two fans will have to do for now :))

Oh and the second wireless dongle is for my mate.

What I wanted to ask is would I be better off putting the fan as an outtake fan or on the CPU cooler which is a passive Zalman with two 120 mm fan fixings. And also, which way up would I be best to face the cpu cooler, blowing towards the rear outtake or blowing towards the top outakes (considering I will be fitting fans there eventually).

Also I intend to regain my lost overclocking skills and hit 3.8 ghz maybe 4 if I'm lucky :D

Thanks,

Jonny
 
Will do. I'm at work all day tomorrow but my house mate is staying in to take delivery. Building will commence at 6pm when I get back. I'm going to attempt to braid the cables. I bought some heat shrink and stuff from the shop today. Should improve air flow a bit.
 
Posting from my new computer :D It's super speedy compared to my laptop.

Had a few issues yesterday (motherboard only came with 1 sata cable and the cpu cooler was a nightmare to fit as my mate and I had never fit one before) but we got there in the end this morning, all installed and ready to go.

Now to get some games installed :D

Thanks for all your help and support guys, will post back at some point with pictures. The cable management is nigh on non-existant though, which will be rectified but not just yet, too mmany hours at work this week.

Thanks again.

Jonny
 
Ha, yes I did, I also forgot to plug the 4 pin cable for additional cpu power in and wondered why it wouldn't boot, that took hours of head scratching.
 
All done :). One thing I have noticed is that the system gets significantly louder when gaming. Since I have purposefully run all fans on max anyway I can only assume this is the graphics cooler, so I'll get a side/bottom fan to give that a bit more air.

I've done the windows score thingy and it gets 5.9 but I looked at the break down and everything but the hdd got around the 7.5 mark.

All in all I'm well chuffed thanks again lads.
 
Ok, thanks mate.

Also, I grabbed a kit to braid the cables (right word?) with some heat shrink and netty stuff. What sort of thing should I be using to shrink the heat shrink? Just hold a soldering iron near it? Or is that a bad idea?

Cheers
 
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