New PC time

macca672

macca672

macca672

Soldato
Joined
20 Mar 2005
Posts
3,111
Location
Leicester
ok time has come for a new PC and I dont fancy building one myself so Im buying a pre-built jobbie :)

its rare I game on my PC anymore (occassionaly have the odd blast on TF2 and cod4 etc) as I have the 3 main consoles for that, so its going to be used for mainly video editing/photoshop etc etc although would be nice if it could cope with the occasional new game too just incase I fancy it. It is however going to have to last me a few years.

the spec Im currently looking at is as follows

# AMD Phenom™ II X4 955 Black Quad Core Processor AM3 (3.20GHz, 8MB Cache)
# Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium with Service Pack 1, 64-bit - English
# Midi Tower XGS Gaming Chassis - Black / Black Mesh + 550W PSU
# ASUS M4A78 Pro Hybrid CrossFireX Mainboard, AM2+/AM3 Phenom II- ATX
# 8GB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM - (4 x 2GB)
# 1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive with 32MB Buffer
# Samsung 22x Dual Layer DVD Writer Super Format +R/-R/RW/RAM
# 1GB ATi HD4850 Graphics accelerator - DVI, DirectX 10.1 PCI Express 2
# 512MB Onboard ATI Radeon HD 3200 GPU - Hybrid CrossFireX Technology
# 7.1 High Definition onboard sound card - for 8 Channel Cinema sound
# PCIe Gigabit LAN controller featuring AI NET 2 - ASUS M4A78 Pro
# Battle Forge - EA Games - PC DVD Game - Rating 12+
# 1 Year Hardware Warranty - Return to Base Parts and Labour (UK Mainland only)

I will be ripping the 1Tb and 500gb HDD out of my current machine to go in it too, and keeping my current monitor/KB/mouse

does this look like a decent capable spec that will see me thru the forseeable future? It will be a massive improvement over current pc (2.0ghz Athlonx2 with 4gb ram and 7900gt) but need it to last as said probably 3-5 years. And no I wont be overclocking it.

Im not going to post a price up as I dont need people telling me I am over/under spent on it. Im happy with the price its available for so its irrelevant ;)


cheers for any opinions/advice
 
It only has an AM2+AM3 DDR2 board, it would run better with an AM3 DDR3 board. Plus Vista will be replaced with Win 7 so seems pointless buying it now.
 
theres an option for windows 7 upgrade at 15 quid so would probably take that too, will the board be a serious drawback?
 
It would run better on an AM3 board, but for that you'd need DDR3, which is more expensive. Since you want to buy a pre-built PC, i won't go into much detail.

The chip you've got there is pretty good. It's a very good overclocker, so you can get it lasting longer by overclocking (some people have managed over 4GHz with it, and 3.8 is common) so you've got a good one there.

the Board, thats not bad either. Supposed to be a good overclocking board, so thats ok. HDD, since you're doing lots of video editing, the 1TB drive is good. But load times for 1TB drives are generally slower than some smaller drives. The cache makes a difference for video editing, so 32MB on that one is good. One i can definitely say is a good drive to use for general storage/OS disk is the 640GB Western Digital Caviar Blue.

The reason its a good disk is because its 2 platters of 320GB, meaning there's less seek time to go, and it can read in a similar way to RAID (although of course, its not actual RAID). Definitely worth the money.
 
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