I am looking to build a general purpose system that will also be able to handle games quite well. I’ll be looking to play Rome TW2 & Arma3. My budget is around £700.
I’m budgeting for a 27” monitor separately and am happy to spend around £400. Regarding that, is there a big impact on having a 60hz monitor rather than some of the 120 hz ones (not interested in 3D). Also, the Dell that I fancy has an 8ms response time as opposed to some that are much lower. Is that noticeable in games?
Here are some of the components I have researched based on online reviews and comparison charts etc. I would really appreciate some layman friendly input.
27” Monitor
My budget is between £300-£500
Options: Dell U27HM (£419.00). (Any good alternatives as a lot of them are getting negative user reviews due to screen bleed and yellow mist at the bottom left corner.
Case
Just need something good looking but functional I like usb/mic & Headphone jacks to be in the front and I won’t be installing any physical disk drives. I’m attracted to the Bitfenix Prodigy which I first came across on this site. I just hope it will fit the motherboard I eventually choose and one of the high end graphics cards. (About £60)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/syscon_int.php?prodid=FS-346-OE
Motherboard
I don’t know anything about Motherboards. As I’m leaning towards an Intel/Nvidia set up then I guess I just want a good motherboard at a good price, maybe with some capacity to take newer chips in a year or so.
CPU
I’m out of touch with CPU tech. As with graphics cards, I want to get a powerful CPU but I don’t want to be paying crazy money for diminishing returns. Can you give advice on i5 v i7. I assume it depends on the model and some i5’s might be better than some i7’s.
Graphics card
Here are some that scored well on comparison charts and I’m going for as high on the curve as I can get before the performance to cost ratio starts to get ridiculous. Also I want to balance it with everything else such as the processor to avoid a bottleneck.
GTX 670 -- £280
GTX 760 -- £233
GTX 660Ti --£180
GTX 660sc -- £ 170
GTX 560Ti -- £ 150
RAM
I figure more is better and as 16GB isn’t that expensive then is it better to go with 16 rather than 8?
Kingston Hyper X 16GB -- £100-140
Hard disk
I have an older (from five years ago) Maxtor 250GB 7200rpm HD that I can use for further storage so I was interested in having an SSD as my main boot up and game content drive. I tend to only have about five games on my PC at any one time so I don’t need a massive amount of space.
SSD 256GB £195
OCZ VTX450-25SAT3-256G Vertex 450 256GB 7mm 2.5 inch SATA 3.0 Internal Solid State Drive
Sound Card
Do I even need one or do most motherboards have on-board sound these days? I like good sound and will probably get the whole five speaker surround set up but I don’t know if I’m that sensitive that I would notice the difference between on-board sound or a dedicated sound card.
Power Supply
They all look the same to me but bearing in mind the components I’ve listed can you recommend one?
I’m budgeting for a 27” monitor separately and am happy to spend around £400. Regarding that, is there a big impact on having a 60hz monitor rather than some of the 120 hz ones (not interested in 3D). Also, the Dell that I fancy has an 8ms response time as opposed to some that are much lower. Is that noticeable in games?
Here are some of the components I have researched based on online reviews and comparison charts etc. I would really appreciate some layman friendly input.
27” Monitor
My budget is between £300-£500
Options: Dell U27HM (£419.00). (Any good alternatives as a lot of them are getting negative user reviews due to screen bleed and yellow mist at the bottom left corner.
Case
Just need something good looking but functional I like usb/mic & Headphone jacks to be in the front and I won’t be installing any physical disk drives. I’m attracted to the Bitfenix Prodigy which I first came across on this site. I just hope it will fit the motherboard I eventually choose and one of the high end graphics cards. (About £60)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/syscon_int.php?prodid=FS-346-OE
Motherboard
I don’t know anything about Motherboards. As I’m leaning towards an Intel/Nvidia set up then I guess I just want a good motherboard at a good price, maybe with some capacity to take newer chips in a year or so.
CPU
I’m out of touch with CPU tech. As with graphics cards, I want to get a powerful CPU but I don’t want to be paying crazy money for diminishing returns. Can you give advice on i5 v i7. I assume it depends on the model and some i5’s might be better than some i7’s.
Graphics card
Here are some that scored well on comparison charts and I’m going for as high on the curve as I can get before the performance to cost ratio starts to get ridiculous. Also I want to balance it with everything else such as the processor to avoid a bottleneck.
GTX 670 -- £280
GTX 760 -- £233
GTX 660Ti --£180
GTX 660sc -- £ 170
GTX 560Ti -- £ 150
RAM
I figure more is better and as 16GB isn’t that expensive then is it better to go with 16 rather than 8?
Kingston Hyper X 16GB -- £100-140
Hard disk
I have an older (from five years ago) Maxtor 250GB 7200rpm HD that I can use for further storage so I was interested in having an SSD as my main boot up and game content drive. I tend to only have about five games on my PC at any one time so I don’t need a massive amount of space.
SSD 256GB £195
OCZ VTX450-25SAT3-256G Vertex 450 256GB 7mm 2.5 inch SATA 3.0 Internal Solid State Drive
Sound Card
Do I even need one or do most motherboards have on-board sound these days? I like good sound and will probably get the whole five speaker surround set up but I don’t know if I’m that sensitive that I would notice the difference between on-board sound or a dedicated sound card.
Power Supply
They all look the same to me but bearing in mind the components I’ve listed can you recommend one?
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