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Official 2008 "I Need A New PC" Thread

Y

Yixian

Banned
brain_stew said:
That processor, is slower, hotter, more power hungry and will use more power. It makes zero sense, again, spend the extra £3 for a SATA DVD drive, you'll thank me when you put it together.

The old motherboard you choose likely doesn't even support 45nm Core 2 chips and if it does they'll be held back by the board. Better performance, PCIe 2.0 and more BIOS options are all reasons to go with the newer board. It makes very little sense to keep the E5200 at stock, a mild clock to say 3ghz will make the thing fly and is ridiculously simply to do, and comes with basically zero risk.

And, honestly, for the sake of £15, you'll regret not getting the bigger HDD, 15GB+ installs are becoming the norm and they eat through HDD space.
Click to expand...

Am I doing it right? :D

2991887385_cbf7abaa35_o.png


With the exception of a bigger HDD. I have a 100gb external so.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Yixian said:
I r a noob, what benefits other than OCing the processor would there be to getting a better motherboard?

Or should I just get a Intel Core 2 Duo E4600?

EDIT: Ok here's a revised build. Note that I will buy that processor off eBay where it can be found for £20 cheaper.

2992635014_63ffd265e9_o.png
Click to expand...
The 4870 512MB is crippled. Get the 1GB version. The difference in prices is nothing compared to having a card that can last one more year at high settings in all games.

edit: Unless you overclock, your processor will bottleneck your videocard btw.
 
Y

Yixian

Banned
godhandiscen said:
The 4870 512MB is crippled. Get the 1GB version. The difference in prices is nothing compared to having a card that can last one more year at high settings in all games.

edit: Unless you overclock, your processor will bottleneck your videocard btw.
Click to expand...

Even if I am only gaming at 1440x?

Also, if I do overclock, to 3ghz like brain_stew suggested, will the processor still bottleneck the GPU?
 
B

brain_stew

Member
Yixian said:
Am I doing it right? :D


With the exception of a bigger HDD. I have a 100gb external so.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's much better in my eyes. Just so you know that external HDD will be 100% useless for game installs, as it'll be way too slow.
 
B

brain_stew

Member
Yixian said:
Even if I am only gaming at 1440x?

Also, if I do overclock, to 3ghz like brain_stew suggested, will the processor still bottleneck the GPU?
Click to expand...

At that resolution I highly recommend saving your cash and going with a 4850. In real terms the difference will be less than 10% at your resolution but you will save £70+. Novatech currently sell a 4850 for less than £105 delivered. The processor won't be a bottleneck at 3ghz, no.
 
H

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
brain_stew said:
At that resolution I highly recommend saving your cash and going with a 4850. In real terms the difference will be less than 10% at your resolution but you will save £70+. Novatech currently sell a 4850 for less than £105 delivered. The processor won't be a bottleneck at 3ghz, no.
Click to expand...

Do this, and spend the extra 10-20 for a 320GB platter HDD, either the new WD3200AAKS or the WD6400AAKS. (Or other brand).

More space, not much more, plus it'll be faster.
 
Y

Yixian

Banned
Guys it's really the motherboard, processor and GPU etc. that I am trying to decide upon, I can figure out what size HDD I need but I really have no experience with those other components.

brain_stew said:
At that resolution I highly recommend saving your cash and going with a 4850. In real terms the difference will be less than 10% at your resolution but you will save £70+. Novatech currently sell a 4850 for less than £105 delivered. The processor won't be a bottleneck at 3ghz, no.
Click to expand...

Hmm... okey doke. I will definitely consider that. I don't want a 4870 if I don't need one, but I do want an element of future-proofing.
 
H

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
Yixian said:
Guys it's really the motherboard, processor and GPU etc. that I am trying to decide upon, I can figure out what size HDD I need but I really have no experience with those other components.

If I overclock the 5200 to 3ghz will it still bottleneck the 4870 and would I benefit from 1gb of ram over 512 at 1440x900?
Click to expand...

No, no.

That 160GB is gonna be sloooow. HDD is just as important as other choices in your system.

5200, 4850, whatever mobo is fine.
 
N

Nemo

Will Eat Your Children
Yixian said:
I say 1440x900 as I'm planning on getting this or something similar: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148893

But even though that's a low res, I am still looking to play Crysis at very high with AA, or even ultra high. Are you sure a 4850 is enough for that?
Click to expand...
If you want to play Crysis get an 8800/9800. For everything else, the 4850 is the way to go.

Playing Crysis at everything maxed out through a custom config I get around 30 fps at 720p with a 4850.
 
B

brain_stew

Member
Yixian said:
Guys it's really the motherboard, processor and GPU etc. that I am trying to decide upon, I can figure out what size HDD I need but I really have no experience with those other components.



Hmm... okey doke. I will definitely consider that. I don't want a 4870 if I don't need one, but I do want an element of future-proofing.
Click to expand...

You'd be better future proofed with that £70 in your bank account ready to go towards a GPU upgrade in a couple of years. By then a 10% difference will mean nothing. The big advantage of the 4870 comes from its masses of bandwidth but at such a low resolution you're not going to be bandwidth limited anyway, so its only the slight bump in clockspeed that will amke any difference to you.


Teetris said:
If you want to play Crysis get an 8800/9800. For everything else, the 4850 is the way to go.

Playing Crysis at everything maxed out through a custom config I get around 30 fps at 720p with a 4850.
Click to expand...

Crysis' benchamrk tool is deceptive, its heavily texture bound as its a fly through the levels and this plays to the 8800's strengths'. In game, you're going to be shader bound a hell of a lot more of the time, and this is where the 4850's much better shader performance comes into play. If site's actualy benchmarked gameplay, you'd see this was the case. The 4850 is a significantly more powerful card than an 8800GT and the extra £20 it costs makes it a no brainer.

At 1440x900 a 4850 is more than enough to use say Cuban's Config Level 5 at 30fps.

Oh, and you won't be using traditional "AA" in Crysis. The built in Edge AA is much more effective and comes at close to no performance penalty.
 
Y

Yixian

Banned
Well in that case, if a 4870 will only get me 3 more fps in Crysis than the 4850 at 1440x, 4850 it is.

Hope it's good for Alan Wake!

EDIT: But if it will get me 10 fps, then I'll pay...
 
C

CTLance

Member
400 Pound Sterling are what, 600€?

I've been absent from the PC scene, so take my advice with a huge grain of salt (other gaffers, please correct me if I'm wrong here!).

How about going for an AMD setup? They're not on par with Intel performance wise, particularly if you overclock, but they still deliver very good oomph at a fraction of the cost, just like in the graphics department against NVidia.

For example, a boxed Phenom X3 8450 costs ~90€, and a MSI K9A2 CF-F costs around ~80€. You get a crossfire capable 3-core setup with a comparatively powerful onboard graphics solution, quite the value IMHO. Add a (130€) 4850 and some RAM (50€), and you have a pretty capable rig that should get you through many games, for 350€ no less.

A Phenom X3 8450 should be able to go toe-to-toe with an old and busted E5200 any day. You could also opt for an Athlon X2 6000+ which should retail for around the same price, and has only two higher clocked cores. This would help with single-core oriented games (most older ones).

Once again, going with intel will certainly give you more performance, but you'll also have to pay a higher price. If I judge you correctly you are looking for budget hardware, not raw performance - which is more of AMDs domain.
 
M

Mr.City

Member
Mr.City said:
I got my pieces yesterday, and the pc is mostly assembled. I did hit a snag or two though. I can't figure out which cable hooks my case fans up to my power supply. There's a cable that has two male ends that says "fans only", however it has no male end to connect back into the power supply.
Click to expand...

Anyone?

edit: never mind. I figured it out
 
B

brain_stew

Member
CTLance said:
400 Pound Sterling are what, 600€?

I've been absent from the PC scene, so take my advice with a huge grain of salt (other gaffers, please correct me if I'm wrong here!).

How about going for an AMD setup? They're not on par with Intel performance wise, particularly if you overclock, but they still deliver very good oomph at a fraction of the cost, just like in the graphics department against NVidia.

For example, a boxed Phenom X3 8450 costs ~90€, and a MSI K9A2 CF-F costs around ~80€. You get a crossfire capable 3-core setup with a comparatively powerful onboard graphics solution, quite the value IMHO. Add a (130€) 4850 and some RAM (50€), and you have a pretty capable rig that should get you through many games, for 350€ no less.

A Phenom X3 8450 should be able to go toe-to-toe with an old and busted E5200 any day. You could also opt for an Athlon X2 6000+ which should retail for around the same price, and has only two higher clocked cores. This would help with single-core oriented games (most older ones).

Once again, going with intel will certainly give you more performance, but you'll also have to pay a higher price. If I judge you correctly you are looking for budget hardware, not raw performance - which is more of AMDs domain.
Click to expand...

Nah, the X3 8450 is a good £25 more at least here in the UK, and with a 2.1ghz clockspeed, much lower overclocking headroom, and less performance per mhz I just couldn't recommend it sadly. The E5200 is anything but "old and busted" its a fully featured 45NM Core 2 with a reduced L2 cache, which in reality only has a minor effect on performance anyway. As games become more multithreaded it "might" pull ahead, but then the clockspeed advantage of the Intel chip would probably tell.
 
bee

bee

Member
Mr.City said:
cables from the front panel labeled "ac97" and "hda" have me baffled. Where do I put these?
Click to expand...

look in your mobo manual and it should have a layout picture showing all the main connectors, one of them should be either a ac97 or hd audio header
 
M

Mr.City

Member
bee said:
look in your mobo manual and it should have a layout picture showing all the main connectors, one of them should be either a ac97 or hd audio header
Click to expand...

found it. but now it will not turn on
 
C

CTLance

Member
brain_stew said:
Nah, the X3 8450 is a good £25 more at least here in the UK, and with a 2.1ghz clockspeed, much lower overclocking headroom, and less performance per mhz I just couldn't recommend it sadly. The E5200 is anything but "old and busted" its a fully featured 45NM Core 2 with a reduced L2 cache, which in reality only has a minor effect on performance anyway. As games become more multithreaded it "might" pull ahead, but then the clockspeed advantage of the Intel chip would probably tell.
Click to expand...
Whoa, 30+€ price difference? Ouch. The E5200 costs ~80€ around here, so it's only a 10€ difference - roughly £7.5; boxed models, of course.

I kind of doubt Yixian will overclock the hell out of his rig though. He's a console gamer judging by his post, he'll have enough to worry about without pushing hardware past its specifications. Doing so would require a dedicated cooling solution anyway, the intel stock cooler seems to be a bit rubbish.

Anyway, since the price gap between intel and AMD seems to be much worse in the UK going AMD makes no sense. Bleh. Oh well.
 
C

CTLance

Member
Mr.City said:
found it. but now it will not turn on
Click to expand...
Since you still lack experience I'd recommend you go at it step by step. First, install the CPU and connect the PSU, case speaker and power switch to the mainboard, nothing else. If you turn it on, the motherboard should yell loudly at you for not installing RAM.

Next, install RAM and the VGA. Connect the latter to a monitor. Turn the system on again, wait for the BIOS to show up, it should count through the memory banks and stop when it finds neither a keyboard nor a medium to boot from.

Now connect the other components step by step. Always check whether your system still boots after adding another piece.

I admit it's tedious, but at least it's foolproof. You'll always know what caused the system to freeze up.


Anyway, troubleshooting.
*You did use the spacers to keep the motherboard off the backplate, right?
*Look very very closely whether you connected the leads correctly. those connectors are tricky.
*Disconnect everything from the front panel except the power switch. Does it boot? If not, then you need to check everything else. If yes, then check for polarities.
 
M

Mr.City

Member
CTLance said:
Since you still lack experience I'd recommend you go at it step by step. First, install the CPU and connect the PSU, case speaker and power switch to the mainboard, nothing else. If you turn it on, the motherboard should yell loudly at you for not installing RAM.

Next, install RAM and the VGA. Connect the latter to a monitor. Turn the system on again, wait for the BIOS to show up, it should count through the memory banks and stop when it finds neither a keyboard nor a medium to boot from.

Now connect the other components step by step. Always check whether your system still boots after adding another piece.

I admit it's tedious, but at least it's foolproof. You'll always know what caused the system to freeze up.


Anyway, troubleshooting.
*You did use the spacers to keep the motherboard off the backplate, right?
*Look very very closely whether you connected the leads correctly. those connectors are tricky.
*Disconnect everything from the front panel except the power switch. Does it boot? If not, then you need to check everything else. If yes, then check for polarities.
Click to expand...

Looked like it was the front panel connectors. It's currently on and installing vista. :D You're a lifesaver.
 
M

Mr.City

Member
That's weird. I just installed vista, but the computer doesn't think vista is installed. I rebooted the pc after installing the gpu drives and now it's asking for the vista disk. I put it in and now installing vista again. What am I doing wrong?
 
Chiggs

Chiggs

Gold Member
I just installed an LG Blu-ray read/write drive in my pc. Good Lord, this thing is fast. Loading time doesn't even exist.
 
L

LordK

Member
Alright peeps, so basically the graphics whore in me wants to play games in 1080p since I have a 1080p tv. Basically, my old ass current setup is as so:

Athlon X2 3800+ (That's 2.0 Ghz with a puny 512K L2 cache)
1 gig of ram
6800 XT
3 drive stripe RAID of Seagate 7200.10 drives

I'm thinking of getting a GTX 280, Radeon 4870, or GTX 260 at this point. I'd hope that one of these cards plus an extra gig of ram would be enough to run, say, DMC4 at 1080p 60 fps. I'm absolutely not looking to play Crysis at full settings. Hell, I'm not looking to play Crysis at all. Really, for PC games I know of, I'd want to play Starcraft 2, Devil May Cry 4, Street Fighter 4, and Dead Space (maybe...). So will the CPU limit me? Obviously a bigger cache is always preferred.

Really, I don't *need* a new card *right now* since I've already beaten DMC4 on the PS3 and SC2/SF4 won't be out on PC for a while. I might see if there's something on Black Friday. Regardless, I can get a decent deal using ebay cashback and getting Far Cry 2 bundled with the card to just sell it. So yeah, what do you guys think about my plan?

Thanks.
 
A

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I think I'll just bite the bullet and go with the i7 920 when I do my build in December. I was going to go with a Q9550, but 'keeping up with the Joneses' and all :eek: :lol
 
Y

Yixian

Banned
Will there be any sub £100 i7 processors come late Nov/Dec? If not, should the release of i7 drive down the cost of current C2Ds?
 
bee

bee

Member
Yixian said:
Will there be any sub £100 i7 processors come late Nov/Dec?
Click to expand...

no way, if you want i7 this year its a £600+ investment, £250 cpu, £200+ mobo, £200+ 3gb ddr3

If not, should the release of i7 drive down the cost of current C2Ds?
Click to expand...

probably but not by a great deal
 
Y

Yixian

Banned
bee said:
no way, if you want i7 this year its a £600+ investment, £250 cpu, £200+ mobo, £200+ 3gb ddr3



probably but not by a great deal
Click to expand...

Ah well ok, no need to wait then I guess. eBuyer have a buy now pay in 9 month deal going on so as soon as I can find a decent mintor for less than 100 quid, I'm gonna order it all.
 
L

LordK

Member
Alright, so I have to ask now. I have the very first Audigy card from way back. Back then, onboard audio was pure ass. But that was back then. I'm looking at the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P mobo right now and am wondering if onboard audio these days is better than my Audigy from a bajillion years ago or if onboard audio is still ass.
 
H

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
copybeaver said:
Alright, so I have to ask now. I have the very first Audigy card from way back. Back then, onboard audio was pure ass. But that was back then. I'm looking at the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P mobo right now and am wondering if onboard audio these days is better than my Audigy from a bajillion years ago or if onboard audio is still ass.
Click to expand...

Onboard is pretty good now.

Mine personally on my P5B (P965) was messing up so I got a AV-710. ($23 + Made in like 2003)

So awesome. I wouldn't shill out $100 though, maybe $30 tops for me.
 
Manp

Manp

Member
Yixian said:
Behold, the final build, unless anyone can see anything wrong with this one, I'll buy it tomorrow! :)

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3043/2996093197_9aba670f38_o.png[img][/QUOTE]

for the love of God get a decent PSU and if you can get 2 HDDs and go for a RAID 0 (of course you'll need MB support for this)

:)
Click to expand...
 
Y

Yixian

Banned
bee said:
but the case and psu are just horrific, go back to the coolermaster deal it destroys those 2
Click to expand...

Wow O_O Strong words.. I thought maybe the PSU wouldn't be great, but that case looked nice.. oh well..

The reason I changed it is because on another forum people kept telling me that that 460w PSU with the Coolermaster case wouldn't be enough to run my build.
 
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