New Rig Feedback.

PC related discussion and other issues.

Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby whiffen on Thu Dec 10, 2009 5:42 pm

I would recommend that you build your own rig. You can get the most out of a computer from doing so. Don't be discouraged if your not sure how, its a very simple process. There are many videos, all parts come with installation manuals, you can get help in forums like this one, etc...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103674
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814150447
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131398
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817139005
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231189
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136284
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811119196

GTG to work so I can't refine it but I think it might be to much on the HDD, Memory and a few other things but that stuff how it is was about 820$
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby Saxon on Thu Dec 10, 2009 5:57 pm

The advantage of overclockers.co.uk is that they assemble all the custom parts for you. It certainly looks cheaper than buying a more conventional system.

I just need to know if the system I linked above would be worth buying or not.

Well I guess it would be OK if the components came with instructions... but the thing is, I don't know which parts would be good to get. Is there a list of particular components people would recommend?
EDIT - missed your edit above :P
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby whiffen on Fri Dec 11, 2009 1:47 am

I'd be glad to tell you more about what to look for. Add Whiffen to your steam friends list.

I was writing all the information out here but after 100 paragraphs I think it was beginning to be to long. (Screw it I will post it anyway XD)

Processor:
For processors you have the big two, AMD and Intel. Intel holds the lead for fastest line of processors, however while AMD can't fully compete with Intel's fastest they offer very good value for there processors, great for anyone with a tight budget. AMD's flagship is 5x cheaper than Intels flagship, and only 10%-30% slower in most benchmarks, sometimes even matching Intel.

In gaming performance where multi-threading is still quite new this difference in speed is defiantly not worth the extra cash and more for those who do video encoding, rendering and other CPU heavy stuff or has cash to burn.

If your buying from AMD look for the Phenom II line. Then look for either X2, X3, X4 which tells you how many cores it has. Lastly you will find a number at the end which tells you what speed the processor runs at. I would highly recommend above 2.5 Ghz and aim towards the 3Ghz+ range. Now remember not all things are multi-threaded, meaning not all cores will be active or at there full potential. This means a dual core running at 3Ghz is not equal to a 6Ghz single core, or a quad core at 3 Ghz is equal to a 12Ghz single core. The processors will never run over there rated 3Ghz. Socket AM3 is the newest and supports all the Phenoms. Phenoms are also backward compatible with AM2+ boards but those don't sport support DDR3 memory.

From Intel I would say there Core2Duos are a nice budget processor but Intel has since abandon there socket 775 LGA line. This means any newer processors from Intel will not use this socket type. Thats OK if you don't ever plan on upgrading, but if you were planning to one day then you would also have to replace your motherboard and memory as well as the processor. The new socket types are LGA 1156 and LGA 1366. The later of which is only for i7 processors. LGA 1156 is what you would be looking for but unfortunately these motherboards are more expensive and use more expensive memory. The goal for a budget system is to spend the most on the CPU and GPU as these are the powerhouses of your computer and to spend so much on the motherboard and memory doesn't seem as reasonable.
Anyway the i3 and i5 lines of processors are what you should be checking out. (I hate this stupid putting "i" in front of fucking everything fad XD)

Motherboards:
Whew. Now motherboards the main two are ASUS and Gigabyte. Both are great brands and they have similar specs and prices. You don't want to go dirt cheap with motherboards like most prebuilding manufacturers slap on there computers to lower the prices. About 80$-100$ is good. When you buy a more expensive motherboard your not getting a lot of extra speed from it, most people do so for the extra features like higher overclocking ability, more options for voltages and other nice features. Almost every year a new model is put out in the same price ranges as last years model so just look for the newer ones as they are just an upgraded last years model with different features more power saving options and other nice things.

For ASUS AMD you will see something like M4A77TD. M is AMD socket types, 4 is the generation, next year it will be 5, A means an AMD chipset, the other would be N for and integrated Nvidia chip set. Chip sets are like an onboard video card. They are there to output information to your display and transfer information between the CPU and memory and also connect every other component. Some are more powerful than others but they all generally suck balls when it comes to running graphics and you will be buying a dedicated GPU anyway so it shouldn't matter to much to you. They are good for people who need to run Win7 and Vista at full visual settings and play 2D games but thats about it. 77 is the chipset model, in this case an integrated AMD 770. No idea what TD means and to lazy to look it up lol. Sometimes you will find a -E, -M or something at the end. This can indicate Energy saving, Micro ATX which is a smaller sized motherboard among other things.

ASUS Intel same story. P for Intel, then the generation, currently 7. Then a Crazy naming scheme for the chip set from P to Q to T xD But again, the 775 models fit with the AMD board prices starting at 80$-100$, the new socket type however breaks out of this loop and starts at almost 200$, which when building a budget rig seems pretty tight.

One you picked a nice board that comes with everything you need, which most will as 1 PCI express x16, (Graphic card slot) a few PCI slots for general things like a wireless card and many many SATA ports for newer hard drives and DVD drives are pretty standard.

Memory:
Now you look at what memory types your board supports. DDR2 is pretty standard these days and as such is a bit cheaper than the newer DDR3, however AM3 boards only breath DDR3. Any speed thats supported is fine, DDR3 very fast and the differences between them are negligible. So find one with a good price and lots of nice reviews, try to stay away from the cheap lesser known brands. OCZ, Kingston, Patriot, Gskill, Corsair and Crucial are all fine.

Look for DUAL channel memory, not Triple as those are for the i core Intel boards which have 6 memory slots not 4. Last thing to look at is CAS latency. You might think wait these two memory sticks are at the same speeds but this one is 40$ cheaper!?! Its probably because the cheaper one has a higher latency than the other.

Video Card:
For the video card ATI/AMD is really doing well and have finally pushed Nvidia off the performance thrown. ATI is kicking ass with DX11, sweet prices and lower power consumption. Nvidia is struggling to get out there new cards out and have mainly just been rebranding older cards. Look for any HD 57-- card or even better a 58-- card. A 5770 or 5850 is more likely to be the card in your range.

Power supply:
Lastly the PSU. I would say 600watt or maybe even a 500watt would be more than enough. Perhaps even higher if you would lake to have some headroom for a later upgrade. You don't want to go cheap with a PSU, get somthing decent and dependable. Antec, Corsair and OCZ are good. What you then want to find is the Wattage on the 12v rail. This supply's power to your DVD drives, hard drives, graphics card and CPU so its important to find one with good power. You might see 12v1, 12v2 and more rails. This is because a law was passed which stated the maximum amount of power each wire can have safely running through it, so it doesn't heat up and burn your house down.

http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/new ... 05?$S640W$

Look for 12v+ and look under you will see it has 60A available. This is a very good amount, much over what you will need though. You can also sometimes find "Max combined wattage" on the PSU and it will tell you what rails this applys to.

http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/new ... 06?$S640W$

In this you see 12v1 and 12v2 both with 22A. You could assume this PSU must have 44A on the 12v rails. However you can see underneath that only 423w of the PSU's 550w is available to those rails. In brackets you can see that really the maximum you can have is not 44A, but actually 36A. If it doesn't tell you the amps in brackets its a quick calculation, just divide the available watts by 12 (12v rail). 423w/12= 36A.

On the safe side I think 30A is enough. People tend to buy more watts than they need. This calculator is saying a 300 watt PSU is enough to run the above setup but I think 500w would be on the safe side.

So to update the list at the top

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103471
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128392
OR: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131603
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817341017

Also I chose those because of the prices after the sales. It all depends on what you can get for yourself wherever you live. That PSU is a good deal for you price range on sale, however if you can't get it at that price and its over 100$ your spending to much.

I'm going to stop typing now XD
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby Saxon on Sat Dec 19, 2009 9:02 pm

Thanks for the advice mate, Christmas is burning too big a hole in my pocket to get around to doing this now :/ Though I will be saving your list for future reference (hopefully the new year will bring more moneh :D)

Will be adding you on Steam btw ;)
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby snufflez on Sat Dec 26, 2009 9:30 pm

W00T I built my new rig today:

-Asus P7P55D Mobo
-Intel core i5 750 processor (2.66ghz)
-4 gig kingston ddr3 1600 (or pc3-12800, whatever you prefer) memory w/ Intel XMP
-500 gb Western Digi HD w/ 32 mb Cache (I was gunna get a veloci but I'm not faxing rich)
-Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 Vid card (coulda gone with the 5770 but they were out of stock, stupid boxing day early shoppers)
-some LG dvd-r optical drive.


And a new 20' monitor, 5ms response time but i doubt I'm gunna notice the 3ms difference that I would've got if I splurged for the 2ms response time monitor, plus this supports the DVI option on my card! /glee. Also got a new case, 500W supply, Windows 7 for 40 bucks (yay student discounts), and a new cheap ass keyboard that was seriously 10 bucks (yay last minute boxing day shopping).

I'm installing windows xp on it right now so I can burn the windows 7 iso to a dvd and then install the new OS on it.

This system is rockin, I'm so happy that I'll be able to drop an i7 processor in there come summer time and upgrade to 8gb of ram, along with the crossfire chip that came with the video card, so I'll be able to set up a crossfire system on it too. I just spent the last ~4 hours setting this rig up, and it went off without a hitch (terrifying I know right?!).

Anyway, critiques/comments!?
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby zombie@computer on Sat Dec 26, 2009 10:50 pm

snufflez wrote:W00T I built my new rig today:

-Asus P7P55D Mobo
-Intel core i5 750 processor (2.66ghz)
-4 gig kingston ddr3 1600 (or pc3-12800, whatever you prefer) memory w/ Intel XMP
-500 gb Western Digi HD w/ 32 mb Cache (I was gunna get a veloci but I'm not faxing rich)
-Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 Vid card (coulda gone with the 5770 but they were out of stock, stupid boxing day early shoppers)
-some LG dvd-r optical drive.


And a new 20' monitor, 5ms response time but i doubt I'm gunna notice the 3ms difference that I would've got if I splurged for the 2ms response time monitor, plus this supports the DVI option on my card! /glee. Also got a new case, 500W supply, Windows 7 for 40 bucks (yay student discounts), and a new cheap ass keyboard that was seriously 10 bucks (yay last minute boxing day shopping).

I'm installing windows xp on it right now so I can burn the windows 7 iso to a dvd and then install the new OS on it.

This system is rockin, I'm so happy that I'll be able to drop an i7 processor in there come summer time and upgrade to 8gb of ram, along with the crossfire chip that came with the video card, so I'll be able to set up a crossfire system on it too. I just spent the last ~4 hours setting this rig up, and it went off without a hitch (terrifying I know right?!).

Anyway, critiques/comments!?
you want critiques?

4 hours??!?!?!! How many dozen of these machines did you build?
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby snufflez on Sun Dec 27, 2009 1:57 am

zombie@computer wrote:you want critiques?

4 hours??!?!?!! How many dozen of these machines did you build?

Haha, I had to install windows xp (takes a billion years), then install windows 7 because I got an upgrade version. Kinda sucked balls cause windows xp takes wayyy too long to partition the hard drive.
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby korge on Sun Dec 27, 2009 2:59 am

Im putting my pc back together. Radeon 7000. :B
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby 1/4 Life on Wed Jun 23, 2010 7:39 am

Just built this monster!

CPU: Intel Core i7-860 2.8GHz
GPU(s): Gigabyte Radeon HD 5870 SO Edition 1GB + EVGA GeForce GTX 470 1280MB (Lucidlogix Hydra Multi-GPU)
Motherboard: MSI Big Bang Fuzion
RAM: 8GB Patriot G Series 'Sector 5' DDR3 1333 Memory (2x 4GB)
Hard Drive(s): Western Digital 500 GB WD Caviar Blue Sata 3.0 (x2 - Raid 0)
Cooling: ZALMAN Reserator 1 Water Cooling Tower
Case: Antec Skeleton
Monitor(s): BenQ G2220HD (x3 - Eyefinity)
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby Dives on Wed Jun 23, 2010 7:46 am

1/4 Life wrote:Just built this monster!

CPU: Intel Core i7-860 2.8GHz
GPU(s): Gigabyte Radeon HD 5870 SO Edition 1GB + EVGA GeForce GTX 470 1280MB (Lucidlogix Hydra Multi-GPU)
Motherboard: MSI Big Bang Fuzion
RAM: 8GB Patriot G Series 'Sector 5' DDR3 1333 Memory (2x 4GB)
Hard Drive(s): Western Digital 500 GB WD Caviar Blue Sata 3.0 (x2 - Raid 0)
Cooling: ZALMAN Reserator 1 Water Cooling Tower
Case: Antec Skeleton
Monitor(s): BenQ G2220HD (x3 - Eyefinity)
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate x64


But... can it run Crysis?

I kid. Thats a very nice system.
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby Gary on Sat Apr 09, 2011 1:23 am

Okay, I'm trying to find a good laptop to replace my old one. My old one is maxed out at one GB of Ram and a single core 1.5ghz processor... Though I'm looking for a new laptop that will be able to do more, like desktop grade stuff(well, maybe no HD renders or Full Hammer map complies). Basically, I want a "cheap" laptop that shouldn't have any problem with:

CAD programs(Inventor, Max, no huge renders or stress tests)
GIMP/Photoshop
Games(not like maxing out Crysis or anything, more along the lines of EP2 on Med/High settings)

Here's the challenge though, it gotta be like <= $600, it can be a little more.

So, any ideas? Or maybe just advice on what makes a good laptop? I already try to avoid stuff like Intel Graphics.

I have never looked for a laptop before, so go easy on me...
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby Gary on Sat Apr 09, 2011 1:52 am

HP Pavilion dv6-3143us Intel Core i3 370M(2.40GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 + Intel HD NoteBook


Is this good for $600?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834157466
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby Gary on Mon Apr 11, 2011 12:16 am

I'm gonna buy the above one, seems good for the price.

Why did no one give me any advice...
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby cz_squishy on Mon Apr 11, 2011 1:43 am

Going to get this when I get a job (very soon)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBund ... mbo.619493

[*]AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Thuban 3.3GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor
[*]ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Extended ATX Motherboard
[*]ASUS EAH6950 Radeon HD 6950 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
[*]CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) Dual Channel Desktop Memory
[*]Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5""Hard Drive
[*]LITE-ON Black 12X BD-R 16X DVD+R 8MB Cache SATA Internal Blu-ray Burner 12X Blu-ray Burner with Blu-ray 3D feature
[*]Antec Lanboy air Red Black / Red Computer Modular Case
[*]Antec KUHLER H2O 620 CPU Cooler
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Re: New Rig Feedback.

Postby joe_rogers_11155 on Wed Jun 15, 2011 3:47 pm

So I am standing inside Fry's Electronics looking at all the cool stuf they have on the walls. I am fairly new to building computers but I think everything will work out alright. The wall of motherboards looks intimidating at first glance, lol.

I have a question though: why do all the desktop cases look like they were ripped out of a retarded sci-fi expo? They all look blocky, obnoxious, plastic, and stupid. Why can't I find a single case here that looks cool, sleek and awesome? And kind of small?

Also, is an ASUS GTX560Ti decent for a video card? Will I be able to run two monitors with it? Thanks!!
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