After a new gaming PC... but I'm fussy!

I'm going to be boring and say that I don't want some uber-powerful machine that's going to blow my socks off. All I want is something that'll run a racing sim smoothly and reliably - probably rFactor 2 or iRacing, or anything with a good community.

I'm good at taking PCs apart and tinkering around with them, but I'm completely hopeless when it comes to understanding specs. I stopped paying attention to them over a decade ago!

If you think it's reasonable, should I keep my old desktop and replace everything inside, or buy a whole new computer?

No idea what the specs of it are right now (it's over 100 miles away), but from what I can remember head it's an old Pentium 4, 1 gig of ram. It just about runs rFactor 1 on medium graphics. :p

Any advice will promtly earn a GPG special (or , if that's more your kind of thing)

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You know you want to. [judgegrudge.mybrute.com]

What are you ideally wanting to pay and do you want a monitor, keyboard & mouse?

I'll try and come up with something over the next couple of days.

Cheers, Gav. I don't need a monitor, keyboard or mouse. Ideally it'll be no more than £400-500 but if that's not possible then that's ok.

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You know you want to. [judgegrudge.mybrute.com]




Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2012 10:05PM by flat tyre.

Wow, that proved a little more difficult than I anticipated.

ft_proposal.xls

A touch over budget when you add a Windows license. I'll let you decide if you want Windows 7 or Windows 8 - just make sure you use 64-bit Windows.

I've included a 3rd-party CPU cooler as the one included with the processor isn't quiet. Perhaps I'm being picky there, but I wasn't happy with level of noise from the CPU fan on a system I built a few weeks ago. If the system is going to be under a desk or something though, then it should be OK, so feel free to lose the Arctic Cooling cooler.

The case is Micro-ATX, so not a full tower. We're down to basic cases with this budget.

I don't know how big a hard drive you want, but I've included a 1TB Black Edition (the fastest you'll get before you go SSD). If you think 120GB would be big enough, or want to carry over a hard drive from a previous system to add more space, then you can get a strong SSD drive for only £10 more - highly recommended. Note that the Samsung 830 is better than the Samsung 840 non-pro.

The cables on the PSU are supposedly quite short, so I've added a couple of extension cables from the PSU to the motherboard and graphics card. The PSU is the semi-modular type though, so hopefully a little easier on cable management.

Ive built a PC recently that runs F1 2012 at nearly max rather smoothly. Cost me about £400-£450 i think.

MB: Gigabyte Z77X-D3H
CPU: Intel i5-3450
PSU: OCZ CoreXStream 500W
HD: 1TB Barracuda SATA 64mb 7200RPM
GPU: Gigabyte nvidia 630 GT 810 mHz 2GB
RAM: Kingston 2x4GB
Cooling: Arctic Cooling freezer 13
Case: Gigabyte GZ-G2

CD/DVD drive is easy to get for pretty cheap, and i already had one when i built mine.

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For a list of EVERY download for GP4, look here: [docs.google.com]

Thanks, Gav, I've taken a good look at all of it and it seems pretty good to me. I think 120GB would be more than enough for me, so I'll be going for the SSD instead. Appreciate the time you put into that!

Connor, cheers for that, as you've probably guessed I'm looking more at Gav's setup but yours has definitely opened my oh-so-narrow mind a bit more :p

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You know you want to. [judgegrudge.mybrute.com]