Anyone know owt about building PCs ?

Sanjøy · Post by **Sanjøy** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 6:52 pm

Staring down the barrel of actually buying a new PC for the first time since Uni.

Looked on the Dell site and the Dell outlet and swaying to self build.

Anyone able to cast their eyes over the following to sanity check for me ?

Cheers

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST3250410AS) Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST3250410AS) £37.99
(£44.64) £37.99
(£44.64)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775) Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775) £14.99
(£17.61) £14.99
(£17.61)
Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (AGP) - Retail Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (AGP) - Retail £89.99
(£105.74) £179.98
(£211.48)
Asus DRW-1814BLT 18x18 DVDÂ±RW Serial ATA Dual Layer Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - Retail Asus DRW-1814BLT 18x18 DVDÂ±RW Serial ATA Dual Layer Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - Retail £19.99
(£23.49) £19.99
(£23.49)
Akasa Serial ATA 45cm DAYGLO Orange Data Cable Akasa Serial ATA 45cm DAYGLO Orange Data Cable £2.99
(£3.51) £5.98
(£7.02)
OcUK Huntkey 550W PSU OcUK Huntkey 550W PSU £34.99
(£41.11) £34.99
(£41.11)
Akasa AK-ZEN-01-WH Zen White Case - No PSU Akasa AK-ZEN-01-WH Zen White Case - No PSU £26.99
(£31.71) £26.99
(£31.71)
Asus P5KC Combo Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 & DDR3 Motherboard Asus P5KC Combo Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 & DDR3 Motherboard £74.99
(£88.11) £74.99
(£88.11)
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - OEM Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - OEM £135.99
(£159.79) £135.99
(£159.79)
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC) GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC) £31.99
(£37.59) £31.99
(£37.59)
Sub Total : £563.88
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £10.95
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £100.60
Total : £675.43

robin · Post by **robin** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 8:09 pm

Buy the memory direct from crucial instead - I have had some random dodgy memory SIMMS/DIMMS in my life, but never once have I had one from Crucial not work in the intended application; seeing as how memory is cheap, you might as well buy good stuff.

Buy two or three of the hard disks and RAID1 them (in s/w if you like - for XP and up that requires server version of O/S; for Linux it's obviously free; for W2K it's in pro, advanced and server; in some cases the MoBo supports RAID1 via a s/w driver and a crappy RAID mobo chipset - it's all much of a muchness in the end). If you can afford three then keep one in the drawer - this buys you time when one fails you can go ahead and plan for a complete replacement of the array for modern disks - by the time the disk fails you won't get the same drive anymore!).

Getting MoBo supported RAID allows you to boot (easily) from RAID into MS rubbish.

I think the CPU is overkill, but if you're going to run Vista, you'll need it

Most MoBos come with all the cables, so you prolly don't need the Dayglo SATA cable unless you're a complete tart.

White case - how Lady Di is that?!?

Your chosen MoBo says it's PCI-e but your graphics card is AGP - you need to check that the MoBo has an AGP slot, or switch to the PCI-e variant of the same graphics card.

Cheers,
Robin

steve_weegie · Post by **steve_weegie** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 8:23 pm

Good spot from robin on the grafix card front - dont buy agp, go for pci express....

All looks fine apart from that - i've got the asus p5b board and rate it very highly. Very stable board even when my 2.4ghz chip is running at 3ghz+

Sanjøy · Post by **Sanjøy** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 8:24 pm

Cheers, will go down the crucial route, usually use them when I cannot be arsed working out what ram a machien takes and it runs its wee prog and tells you what to buy!

I have two wee 320GB nas boxes that I was planning on using for main storage and the system disk will be strictly that, I looked for the "smallest" SATA I could find. I am not going for out right performance so RAID 1 would help game levels load faster but was hoping with enough ram I would not be swapping out so much.

With the CPU I looked at a good few of them and thought this was best bang per buck and had overclocking capability to give it extra lenght of life.

Good spot on the AGP, I thought it as a PCI express.

Sanjøy · Post by **Sanjøy** » Sun Oct 28, 2007 10:35 pm

Almost there, surprised to see Crucial being so much more. £58.72 inc vat.

robin · Post by **robin** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 8:08 am

Yeah, that's so much money for 2GByte of RAM

On the hard disk front it's not a matter of performance or preserving your data, it's a matter of not having to re-install Vista again which knowing MS will be a right PITA 3 years from now when all you have is your original install disk

Cheers,
Robin

Brunty · Post by **Brunty** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:41 am

I recently put a new PC together for gaming.

I went for the Intel E6850 Dual core 3GHz and a XFX nForce 650i Ultra mobo. It has loads of overclocking capabilities, but tbh, I haven't really noticed any difference.

Also worth getting some really good memory.

mattg · Post by **mattg** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:48 am

Sanjoy, good prices at overclockers.co.uk
plus great service

Sanjøy · Post by **Sanjøy** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 2:44 pm

robin wrote:Yeah, that's so much money for 2GByte of RAM

On the hard disk front it's not a matter of performance or preserving your data, it's a matter of not having to re-install Vista again which knowing MS will be a right PITA 3 years from now when all you have is your original install disk

Cheers,
Robin

Who said I was running vista

Richard what were you changing from not to notice the difference ?!

All ordered from OClockers, much cheapness!

Sanjøy · Post by **Sanjøy** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:59 pm

Bad mood, was all excited about my new pc bits and then I get an email at 15:00 telling me it has been dispatched, yipee, then I get one at 4pm telling me that my request to send it to the office was too late and that it id getting send to the billing address.
Ordered at 23:36 changed address at 23:40.

Now one of my cheapo SAN boxes is not seeing the disk, tbh the disk is not getting pwr although the controller unit is and its web interface is responding with no disk found, any thoughts ? Shy of running a separate psu for it it is junked apart from the disk.

I should really direct these mails directlyto Robin shouldn't I ?

mac · Post by **mac** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 11:19 pm

Sanjoy wrote:Bad mood, was all excited about my new pc bits and then I get an email at 15:00 telling me it has been dispatched, yipee, then I get one at 4pm telling me that my request to send it to the office was too late and that it id getting send to the billing address.
Ordered at 23:36 changed address at 23:40.

Now one of my cheapo SAN boxes is not seeing the disk, tbh the disk is not getting pwr although the controller unit is and its web interface is responding with no disk found, any thoughts ? Shy of running a separate psu for it it is junked apart from the disk.

I should really direct these mails directlyto Robin shouldn't I ?

There used to be some guy who advertised on here that should be able to help you. Click Me

Mac

robin · Post by **robin** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 8:52 am

drop off the unit my gaff and i'll take a look ...

robin

Sanjøy · Post by **Sanjøy** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 9:17 am

robin wrote:drop off the unit my gaff and i'll take a look ...

robin

Will take a multimeter home to night and run that over it then drop it off