The inevitable 'build me a computer' advice thread >_<

Evening all,

I know I'm giving in to laziness in many ways, but I could do with some advice here. My iMac is rapidly advancing into old age, and I don't have the money nor the desire to buy another Mac, so I've decided to put a box together myself. The only problem is this: after five years out of the PC loop, I literally have no idea where to start! I get the impression that Intel are now more popular than AMD, but that's all I have. If it helps, here are my requirements:

Budget: Around £300
Desired spec: Something good enough to play Portal 2 and rFactor 2, neither of which are currently an option. A 19 or 20 inch screen would be fine.

I'm going to have a look around and see what I can see, but any tips would be gratefully received

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...actually, I think all I'm really lost on is a decent processor, motherboard and graphics card. I have a spare hard drive that can be requisitioned, and RAM isn't too difficult a choice.

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I have an Intel i5 2500k CPU, and it performs admirably. I'd recommend it on a budget.

A £300 gaming machine including monitor? That's a tough ask.

I presume you'll need a Windows license too?

You're looking at £60-70 for the cheapest monitor and another £70 for Windows (unless you have access to a university .ac.uk email address).

£160 for a case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card is asking a lot. I'm not even going to say it's possible - I'll let you confirm the above before I look at anything.

Just be thankful you don't need a hard drive, as the prices have gone through the roof recently due to the flooding badly affecting Taiwanese manufacturers.



Ho3n3r, I know you're not familiar with the British Pound, but we're looking way, way below what you're suggesting. It's a cracking CPU, but it's £160 by itself, leaving a budget of £0 for the case, PSU, motherboard, RAM and graphics card.

gav Wrote:
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> A £300 gaming machine including monitor? That's a
> tough ask.
>
> I presume you'll need a Windows license too?
>
> You're looking at £60-70 for the cheapest monitor
> and another £70 for Windows (unless you have
> access to a university .ac.uk email address).
>
> £160 for a case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM and
> graphics card is asking a lot. I'm not even going
> to say it's possible - I'll let you confirm the
> above before I look at anything.
>
> Just be thankful you don't need a hard drive, as
> the prices have gone through the roof recently due
> to the flooding badly affecting Taiwanese
> manufacturers.
>
>
>
> Ho3n3r, I know you're not familiar with the
> British Pound, but we're looking way, way below
> what you're suggesting. It's a cracking CPU, but
> it's £160 by itself, leaving a budget of £0 for
> the case, PSU, motherboard, RAM and graphics card.
>

I read his last message too quickly - I thought he said he's only looking for a CPU, GPU and mobo.

I follow the exchange rate, so I know you can't get a whole PC for that price - not a modern one, anyway.

gav Wrote:
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> A £300 gaming machine including monitor? That's a
> tough ask.

Heh, I guess I do ask a little much! A lot of it hinges on how much I can sell my iMac for, but I've looked into it this evening and think I can probably get nearer to £400.

> I presume you'll need a Windows license too?

No, I'm planning on installing Linux and using an old XP disc for games, which is similar to the setup I have with OS X and Bootcamp. The XP installation has precious little network access, so isn't too much of an open goal.

> You're looking at £60-70 for the cheapest monitor
> and another £70 for Windows (unless you have
> access to a university .ac.uk email address).
>
> £160 for a case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM and
> graphics card is asking a lot. I'm not even going
> to say it's possible - I'll let you confirm the
> above before I look at anything.

I don't know how much of a difference removing Windows makes to your estimate, but FWIW you can probably take RAM off it too - our sysadmin is quite helpful in that regard

> Just be thankful you don't need a hard drive, as
> the prices have gone through the roof recently due
> to the flooding badly affecting Taiwanese
> manufacturers.

I'd heard about this, and I'm duly thankful.

Aside from all that, thanks to both of you for the help. I didn't realise quite how blinkered you can end up when owning a Mac :S

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2012 11:38PM by senninho.

Woah... right.

Do you need a keyboard and mouse?

You'll need DDR3 RAM. I've included it below, but if you can source it off a mate, then obviously remove that.

I think the best I can do without using an ASUS barebones kit with an unknown PSU is as follows.

CPU: Intel Pentium G620 - £47.54
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-S2-B3 - £41.53
RAM: 4GB Corsair DDR3 2x2GB - £18.16
PSU: Coolermaster RS450 450W - £27.98. This is a ridiculously low price for an apparently decent PSU. Sadly it's not modular, but you're looking at £50+ for a half-decent modular PSU.
Case: Fractal Design Core 1000 - £27.58
Monitor: 19" Samsung 1440x900 - £68.63
Graphics card: XFX HD 6770 - £75.65
DVD drive: Samsung DVD R/W - £13.67

Total: £320.74

Obviously over budget, but I've included RAM in that. Remove the RAM if you can grab some off of a mate for a beer or 2 and it'll be a smidge over £300.

Everything is from Scan. There may be shops which sell parts at a slightly lower price, but when you factor in delivery, it'll start mounting up. Scan and Ebuyer are generally the cheapest I find.

It's a nicely rounded system. A dual-core CPU is the best you're going to get, but it is Sandy Bridge-derived. Surprisingly cheaper than the AMD option I was originally looking at, though the AMD does have strong built-in graphics.

Sadly, with graphics cards there's not a lot between the £40 low-end cards and the £80 mid-range cards.

The monitor's resolution is more usable than the horrible 1366x768 which is the standard at the moment.

We could save £7-10 on the case, but for £15-20 you're looking at a horrible sea of shiny plastic, and I'd rather pay more for at least some metal. I've worked with the higher-range Fractal cases, and they're lovely. Obviously this is a bit thinner and a little less friendly to work with, but it seems to have all the basics covered. The only complaint is the location of the front USB and audio sockets, which is low down on the right-hand side.

For me it's a standard PC I'd be looking to buy rather than a gaming PC, so I'd probably be spending a touch less, but still this is a great help to me for when I finally get round to buying a new PC to replace my current crappy old one(Built 2003, upgraded 2009, currently not being used cos the 75GB hard drive is literally full to bursting and I don't want the thing to crash before I've salvaged the files I want from it).

The main things I'll be looking for when the time comes will be plenty of RAM and as much hard drive space as possible. It won't become an immediate prospect till I've done some saving up, but meantime it's good to have an idea of what I would be buying when the time comes. So thanks for posting the list of parts in such detail.

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Wow, thanks Gav - I'd have been lost by now. Just a little bit in answer to your questions:

- I have a keyboard and mouse, so that's no problem
- I don't think the memory I have is DDR3, so good call there
- I can cannibalise a DVD writer from a broken server I have lying about

The case is actually pretty nice, so thanks for that too. I think you may have missed my late edit, but the going rate for my iMac seems to imply that my budget will be more towards £400, so I guess I'm not quite as restricted as I thought. Would adding another £100 give me much more leeway with a monitor and graphics card?

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Gav, can you repeat your last post but where budget is not a consideration?



I too am out of the PC market for about five years and have no idea where to start, but I have more than £300.

I think it's quite a nice setup as is, but if you want to push the budget towards £400, then I'd replace the PSU with the Antec 520W Neo Eco Modular (£51) and replace the graphics card with the MSI GTX 550 (£100). If you want a larger screen and resolution, you can swap the monitor for the Viewsonic V223HQVbd 21" 1920x1080 (£82). Chances are that the monitor won't include a DVI cable, so if you don't have one, add ones of those too (£6)

Total: £387.

I should add that all the parts I've priced are the ones in stock. I've not priced parts out of stock at Scan as there's no point listing something that might not be in stock for months.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2012 09:25PM by gav.

Loque, by without a budget, what do you mean? Unlimited, or decent value for money gaming machine? If it's the latter than I'd go for something along the lines of the one above but with a few tweaks to perhaps add a quad-core CPU. Let me know and I'll price one up.

Would you need monitors, mice/keyboards and Windows licenses?

Give me an ideal budget of what you'd like to spend and I'll see what I can do.

Monitor, Win7, PC Case, Keyboard and Mouse are NOT required.

Erm, £500?

gav Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think it's quite a nice setup as is, but if you
> want to push the budget towards £400, then I'd
> replace the PSU with the Antec 520W Neo Eco
> Modular (£51) and replace the graphics card with
> the MSI GTX 550 (£100). If you want a larger
> screen and resolution, you can swap the monitor
> for the Viewsonic V223HQVbd 21" 1920x1080 (£82).
> Chances are that the monitor won't include a DVI
> cable, so if you don't have one, add ones of those
> too (£6)
>
> Total: £387.
>
> I should add that all the parts I've priced are
> the ones in stock. I've not priced parts out of
> stock at Scan as there's no point listing
> something that might not be in stock for months.

Gav, you're a legend - I tried to up the spec a little bit myself, but did far less for more money. Thanks again ^_^

I guess it's now time to start backing stuff up on my iMac, so that I can get the actual monies

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Quote
loque
Monitor, Win7, PC Case, Keyboard and Mouse are NOT required.

Just to confirm, by that you mean you don't need any of the above? I know in English it is as it says, but I've seen people structuring a sentence like that where they mean they do need everything but a keyboard and mouse, so thought I'd check.

If so, how about £3 over budget?

The main problem is the hard drive (as above, due to the flooding in Taiwan). A drive you'd have paid ~£30 for a few months ago now costs £75. Still, we can just about fit in a nice Sandy Bridge set up.

Motherboard: Asus P8H61-M LE/USB3 REV 3.0 - £47.53
CPU: Intel Core i5 2310 - £144.18
RAM - 8gb (2x4gb) Corsair DDR3 - £38.59
Hard drive: 500GB Samsung HD502HJ F3 - £74.12
PSU: Antec 520W Neo Eco Modular - £51.02
Graphics card: XFX HD 6870 - £134.02
DVD drive: Samsung DVD R/W - £13.67

The 8GB of RAM is only of any use if you'll use a 64-bit operating system (though there really is no point in running a 32-bit one unless you're having a very specific problem.

The only change I'd suggest over the above would be to recommend a slightly better PSU. The Antec is apparently OK, but the Seasonic M12II is a proven workhorse. It's £30 more, but if it means waiting for another week or months pay, personally I'd do it.

We can trim down the system and still have a fantastic set up if you'd prefer to save perhaps £70, though we'd lose the opportunity to have a quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU, though AMD's mid-range offerings aren't bad.

Ok. Cheers for that. What's important about the Sandy Ridge CPU?


I meant it as it's written, I don't need any of them, lol. Also there is a cheap supplies shop near where I live which sells 500GB Sata drives for about £50, don't know what make they are though.

If it's Western Digital or Samsung (as long as it's the F3 version) then you'll be fine. Personally I wouldn't recommend Seagate and I'd run a mile if it was Maxtor, Hitachi or Toshiba (though I think Toshiba only supplies drives to the OEM market).

Quote
loque
What's important about the Sandy Ridge CPU?

It's fast.

I think it's a Maxtor. Hah!

Gav how much would it cost to add a decent PC case and a Windows 7 license to the setup that you've outlined for Loque

I'm looking at replacing my PC at home, and would be open to spending around £600

Perhaps a silly question but would I be able to run GP4 with this PC, or could there be potential problems?

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Races: 163 - Wins: 23 - Pole Positions: 24 - Fastest Laps: 22
Season 9: Constructors' Champions

To be honest, I've not run GP4 since around 2004, so I can't tell you whether it'll run better on AMD or Nvidia graphics cards, or even if it will run on Win 7 64-bit. You're better asking in the GP4 section about which modern cards people use and for any tips for getting it to run on Win 7.

You could dual-boot with Windows XP if needs be (just using XP for GP4), but then you'd need to acquire an XP license too.

If GP4 plays better with Nvidia, then swap the HD 6870 for the GTX 560. They're very similar.



As for cases, I can't look beyond the Fractal cases at the moment. I've worked with 2 of them now for systems I've built for others, and as I said a few posts ago, they're lovely things for the money. The only problem is that they're quite deep (as are all decent cases). Depending on whether you want a shorter case or a normal mid-tower there are a couple of options. The ones without the door will cool the system better, while the ones with the door are quieter.

Short (with door): Fractal Design Define Mini - £74
Short (without door): Fractal Design Arc Mini - £62
Mid tower (with door): Fractal Design Define R3 - £74
Mid tower (without door): Fractal Design Arc £72

There are cheaper cases, such as the NZXT Source 210 (£36), but then once you've bought a case it will last for a decade or more if you want it to, so you might as well get a good one.

All the above cases will work with the motherboard I specced for Loque, but the mid-tower cases (the NZXT included) will take a larger ATX motherboard if you'd like a few more expansion slots.



If you've access to a university email address (must be a .ac.uk address) then you can get Windows through Microsoft's Ultimate Steal program.

Otherwise, you're looking at £73 for an OEM Win 7 Home Premium license. The OEM license means that it's tied to the motherboard it's installed on. Unless the motherboard breaks and is replaced with as close to identical model as possible, then you're not supposed carry on using the license if you upgrade your PC. The retail license (which will last as many PC upgrades as you like) is £119.