New pc build

[critty]

Part of the reason I have been away was down to my old pc, and no not the amiga, going boom. It was an old core 2 extreme quad core. Actually the first gen on the core 2 quads. So I have spent a while upgrading the pc. My new specs are as follows.

Amd fx-6100 6 core over clocked to 4ghz
16gb ddr3 1600
Nvidia 560 ti
Blu-ray drive
1tb physical hdd and a 125gb ssd

The cpu is cooled with a closed loop corsair h60 water cooler. With I added an extra fan to in order to keep it chilly.

 

[ScottM]

Sounds good! I'm going through a similar process myself at the moment, I just fancied a change though lol.

Intel i7 3770k (Will be clocking to around 4.5Ghz)
8GB 1600mhz Crucial CL4 Ram
ASUS P8ZZ7-V Pro Motherboard
Corsair H60 Closed loop Cooler
Antec 1100 Case
2x Samsung Spinpoint 2TB Drives (F3 & F4 I think)
2x Samsung Spinpoint 1TB Drives (F1)
1x Seagate Momentus XT 2.5" 750GB Hybrid Drive
650W Corsair TXM PSU

I haven't bothered with an additional GFX card as I don't really use a monitor or anything like that. PC is only used as a media server :)

 

[Baldbrewer]

how much do the above builds come to fella's?
built my own pc back in 1998 cost me about £1100 then, twas huge!

 

[ScottM]

how much do the above builds come to fella's?
built my own pc back in 1998 cost me about £1100 then, twas huge!

£680 not including any of the large drives or the PSU, as I already had those.

Damn pricey but I tend to get a long time out of my builds so I consider it money well spent. £250 for a processor was a tough one to swallow though


I had a custom PC built in 1997, it was my very first PC and cost me around £1100 too. It was "state of the art" with a 16mb Voodoo 2 3DFX card, 64mb of SDRam and IIRC a 300mhz PII Processor. That came with a HUGE 17" Monitor, keyboard, mouse and all the trimmings. I must admit it served me well, I read up on and chose every component.

The 2nd PC I got was just a generic, bought from a shop job. Where the only customisation was the size of the ram and the speed of the processor, not really any proper options on branding etc. It was an absolute POS with everything onboard etc. It was after that I decided I was building my own from then on. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't pricey by any means... I just realised I would be happier knowing what's going into my system and knowing that any money spent is being spent on quality.

I build PCs for friends and family also, steering them away from the likes of Dell *spits* and PC World *vomits*

 

[bobsbeer]

Amd fx-6100 6 core over clocked to 4ghz
16gb ddr3 1600
Nvidia 560 ti
Blu-ray drive
1tb physical hdd and a 125gb ssd

The cpu is cooled with a closed loop corsair h60 water cooler. With I added an extra fan to in order to keep it chilly.

Sounds good. But to be honest it's gobbletygook to me. :grin: I hope it works. :thumb:

 

[Baldbrewer]

16mb Voodoo 2 3DFX card, 64mb of SDRam

ditto! I had 2 running in SLI, man those cards were awesome!
I had a 19" sony trinatron screen 'Kin huge thing! had its for a week and the tube collapsed!
had a single line running in the centre of the screen I really papped myself as I was playing "quake" at the time

mind you the courier nearly split his difference when he had to lift the thing!
thank god for flat screens :thumb:

 

[critty]

I had a choice of getting an Intel i processor but for the money I could only get either an i3 or i5. Where as I could have either a 4, 6 or 8 core AMD. So I went with the AMD because I got more for the money compared to a i7 bundle. My breakdown of costs went like this.

AMD bundle with processor, motherboard and RAM = £200
Nvidia graphics card = £180
PSU = £80
Corsair H60 cooler = £60
1tb HDD Seagate Baracuda = £40 (maplin managers special)
SSD = £100

Total is £660

But this PC should last me a good few years. My old Core 2 quad was bought when it had just come out so I bet it did nearly 6 years before packing in. This new rig eats games though. the new xcom I get 100fps if i remove the vsync and frame smoothers. Borderlands 2 I get 80fps and crysis I get 100fps. But I have to have vsync and frame rate smoothers on otherwise I get horrendous graphics tearing.

 

[Vossy1]

I'm envious of you guys :mrgreen: , I'd love to upgrade my processor but it's something I've never looked into. My neighbour taught himself, he was always telling me it's a doddle, I've never had the bottle :lol:

 

[PD]

so you baffle him with the beer brewing Vossey....

 

[Eric_S]

I have a first gen i7 I'm thinking of sprucing up.

Thinking about going down the SSD route when I reinstall with Windows 8, and perhaps get a more beefy graphics card to replace the nVidia 260 I currently have, maybe with a 660 or 670. Still has 12GB ram which should be plenty enough for the time being, although with prices of 4GB sticks being quite low is is tempting to go to 24GB just because you can!

To be fair I don't do much on this other than play flight simulator occasionally but sometimes you just need to tinker!

 

[ScottM]

I'm envious of you guys :mrgreen: , I'd love to upgrade my processor but it's something I've never looked into. My neighbour taught himself, he was always telling me it's a doddle, I've never had the bottle :lol:

It is an absolute doddle to be fair. The hard part, when you aren't used to doing this sort of thing, is figuring out what to actually upgrade with. There are so many different variations that compatibility can never be taken for granted.

If you have, say, a 3.0ghz P4 processor, there will be an upgrade available. The question is which socket and chipset variant of the P4 that you need.

Once you have all that figured out it's a very simple process of removing the heatsink, removing the current processor, putting the new processor in, putting some heatsink paste on the processor, cleaning the heatsink and putting the heatsink back on.

Bish bash bosh

 

[ScottM]

I have a first gen i7 I'm thinking of sprucing up.

Thinking about going down the SSD route when I reinstall with Windows 8, and perhaps get a more beefy graphics card to replace the nVidia 260 I currently have, maybe with a 660 or 670. Still has 12GB ram which should be plenty enough for the time being, although with prices of 4GB sticks being quite low is is tempting to go to 24GB just because you can!

To be fair I don't do much on this other than play flight simulator occasionally but sometimes you just need to tinker!

SSD is an unbelievable upgrade. I recently got a new laptop, bit of a monster with an i7 processor 6gb DDR3 etc. Not long after buying I treated myself to a corsair SSD and it's just ridiculous how fast things load, mostly windows. It's literally a 10 second boot up for me... no exaggerating.

Just FYI, 12GB isn't an ideal quantity of ram to have. From that I can surmise that you either have 3 channels filled with the same RAM or you have 4 channels filled with different RAM. It's always best to fill the channels as equally as you can in order to promote the efficiency of the dual channel interface.

This was one of my minor gripes with this laptop. It has 4GB in one channel and 2GB in the other. For the sake of the difference in cost I just can't understand why they would do this. Leaves room for improvement though I guess

 

[Eric_S]

I have a first gen i7 I'm thinking of sprucing up.

Thinking about going down the SSD route when I reinstall with Windows 8, and perhaps get a more beefy graphics card to replace the nVidia 260 I currently have, maybe with a 660 or 670. Still has 12GB ram which should be plenty enough for the time being, although with prices of 4GB sticks being quite low is is tempting to go to 24GB just because you can!

To be fair I don't do much on this other than play flight simulator occasionally but sometimes you just need to tinker!

SSD is an unbelievable upgrade. I recently got a new laptop, bit of a monster with an i7 processor 6gb DDR3 etc. Not long after buying I treated myself to a corsair SSD and it's just ridiculous how fast things load, mostly windows. It's literally a 10 second boot up for me... no exaggerating.

Just FYI, 12GB isn't an ideal quantity of ram to have. From that I can surmise that you either have 3 channels filled with the same RAM or you have 4 channels filled with different RAM. It's always best to fill the channels as equally as you can in order to promote the efficiency of the dual channel interface.

This was one of my minor gripes with this laptop. It has 4GB in one channel and 2GB in the other. For the sake of the difference in cost I just can't understand why they would do this. Leaves room for improvement though I guess

To answer - 6x 2GB as it's an early i7 system with triple channel (i7 920, ASUS P6T SE) .

I've seen just how fast SSD's are - I just couldn't be bothered with the re-install of windows, applications blah blah - I used to do a rebuild maybe every 6 months or so, but just can't be arsed with it anymore, but the launch of Win 8 is a good opportunity to do a small spot of tweaking and improving, and with 240GB SSDs around £100 or so it seems like a good time to make the leap.

 

[ScottM]

[quote="Eric_S":3letwy5t]I have a first gen i7 I'm thinking of sprucing up.

Thinking about going down the SSD route when I reinstall with Windows 8, and perhaps get a more beefy graphics card to replace the nVidia 260 I currently have, maybe with a 660 or 670. Still has 12GB ram which should be plenty enough for the time being, although with prices of 4GB sticks being quite low is is tempting to go to 24GB just because you can!

To be fair I don't do much on this other than play flight simulator occasionally but sometimes you just need to tinker!

SSD is an unbelievable upgrade. I recently got a new laptop, bit of a monster with an i7 processor 6gb DDR3 etc. Not long after buying I treated myself to a corsair SSD and it's just ridiculous how fast things load, mostly windows. It's literally a 10 second boot up for me... no exaggerating.

Just FYI, 12GB isn't an ideal quantity of ram to have. From that I can surmise that you either have 3 channels filled with the same RAM or you have 4 channels filled with different RAM. It's always best to fill the channels as equally as you can in order to promote the efficiency of the dual channel interface.

This was one of my minor gripes with this laptop. It has 4GB in one channel and 2GB in the other. For the sake of the difference in cost I just can't understand why they would do this. Leaves room for improvement though I guess

To answer - 6x 2GB as it's an early i7 system with triple channel (i7 920, ASUS P6T SE) .

I've seen just how fast SSD's are - I just couldn't be bothered with the re-install of windows, applications blah blah - I used to do a rebuild maybe every 6 months or so, but just can't be arsed with it anymore, but the launch of Win 8 is a good opportunity to do a small spot of tweaking and improving, and with 240GB SSDs around £100 or so it seems like a good time to make the leap.[/quote:3letwy5t]


Ahh, that one of the boards with 6 dimms? I kinda skipped that generation so I've never even looked into triple kits. Didn't seem to be much of a fuss made over it with the new i7 ivy architecture, is it redundant now?

I got a corsair 256gb for my laptop for around £140 IIRC. Steep for the space but it really is incredible how well it works.

I just bought a momentus XT hybrid for my new system. Might be something to look into. It's very slightly behind SSD on the benchmark tests, ie around 2 seconds on a boot etc (check out youtube) but obviously has the advantage of having plenty of space (750gb) and all for £120. I honestly don't think I would notice the difference given the benchmarks. One thing to bare in mind is that the hybrids learn from your use, so using it as a system drive is ideal as it will keep 8gb of your most used file structure in the SSD part of the memory leading to fast loads etc. Very clever stuff.

Oh, of course it's entirely up to you but I wouldn't recommend jumping into win8 just now. It's very similar to Win7 and it's generally best to wait for at least the first SP so that you know the creases are ironed out. For a bit of messing around though it could be fun. If you have a touchscreen monitor then I would definitely take the plunge as it looks ideal with the tile environment.

 

[Eric_S]

Ah - I should say - my company is a Microsoft Partner, so we've been using Win 8 for a few months now so we're fairly happy with it and the way it performs. It's not perfect by any means, and the new interface has it's quirks but startup and shutdown are blazingly quick compared to Win 7. As you say, having a touchscreen or tablet will really bring it to life, but as a desktop OS it's not too bad at all.

 

[critty]

Ah - I should say - my company is a Microsoft Partner, so we've been using Win 8 for a few months now so we're fairly happy with it and the way it performs. It's not perfect by any means, and the new interface has it's quirks but startup and shutdown are blazingly quick compared to Win 7. As you say, having a touchscreen or tablet will really bring it to life, but as a desktop OS it's not too bad at all.

I am not an early adopter of new OS's, hell my Amiga is still on Workbench 3.1 because I find 3.5/3.9 has issues with some of my hardware lol, and I had skipped Vista to go to windows 7 from XP so I doubt I will be jumping to Windows 8 till the "quirks" are out of it. This is because I use Windows to play games with. I don't do very much else on it as all my desktop stuff is handled by my Linux partition. And lets be honest if there is even slight issues with a driver it can throw a game right off.

Plus I am not a fan of the Metro UI. I have used a Windows phone with it and my XBOX 360 has it and I am just not a fan.

 

[Eric_S]

Well, I bought a Samsung 256GB SSD (£140) and did the upgrade yesterday. Took about 15 mins to install (via USB) and another 20 mins or so to get all my other bits and bobs on.

Metro is ok; it isn't perfect and to be fair, Win 7 is a fantastic OS.

The NVidia drive install took a big dump the first time I tried to install it but went smoothly on the 2nd attempt. iTunes installed without a hitch (and that software really is the Devils work!).

 

[critty]

SSD's are great. Linux install was stupidly quick and boot times are very snappy. Certainly better speeds out of it on linux than Windows. Although Windows isn't exactly snail paced.

I think Microsoft are taking a big risk going from the more "traditional" environment they started with Win 95. Though it's a gamble that could pay off with the waves of new touch enabled devices coming out. Time will tell much like it did when Ubuntu went to Unity for the UI.

Give me workbench or Windows 3.11 lol.

 

[beermaker]

.....my head hurts reading this! when my computer goes bonkers, I call my friend who works in IT forensics at trading standards and say "Ritch! It's broken! Fix it please and I'll give you beer!" :thumb:

 

[critty]

Funnily enough thats how most of my family get their IT issues solved. Except they can't pay me with beer anymore as I supply my own lol.

Thing to remember with a computer is that it's a box with electricity running through it. And you make it as complicated as you want it to be.