64Digits

Building new computer.

Posted by blue213 on July 18, 2007, 7:53 p.m.

You thar. My 6 year old vaio is getting, errrrr, slightly old now, so I've been told by my parents to come up with a new system which we can then build. So far I've decided on:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (£120)

Motherboard: MSI P6N SLI Platinum (£91)

Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC8000 1GB x 3 (£106*3)

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB (£153)

Graphics: PNY GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (£275)

Power: Antec Neo He 500 (500W, £63)

Case: Gigabyte 3D Aurora 570 (£98)

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate (???)

TOTAL COST: £1118

However, I'm also thinking of using these instead:

Power: FSP Epsilon 700 (700W, £101)

Storage: Hitachit CinemaStar 7K500 250GB x 2 (£46*2)

So, anything else I need?

Thanks,

blue

Comments

Myth 16 years, 10 months ago

Yeah, get Windows XP, faster, better, and cheaper. I know many people that bought Vista. Now they all say that Vista is bad.

Josea 16 years, 10 months ago

Vista sucks man, get XP. I installed Vista in my new pc a few months ago and now I'm stuck with this stupid OS; with Vista you're guaranteed that 90% of your stuff won't work.

Kairos 16 years, 10 months ago

Most, if not all computers selling currently use Vista. Why do they always have to upgrade everything?

Kaz 16 years, 10 months ago

Plus Vista Ultimate is like $400.

blue213 16 years, 10 months ago

I know, I know, I would love to stay with XP but I think Microsoft ends support for it sometime in 2008.

APlusHost 16 years, 10 months ago

Hey blue213 if your in the UK like me a great place for computer parts is either ebuyer.com, good quality and great price.

However you could get the CPU and motherboards and 1 GB of ram in a bundle at http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/ a very large a great company.

This could save you a bit of money and then you could just buy the extra ram from them seperatly. The motherboard bundle has the CPU RAM and Heat sink fitted and tested for 24 hours so you know the product will work out the box.

For example at Novatech you can get http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage?MBB-C2D620

which is Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 and comes with 2048Mb 667Mhz DDR2 240pin

costing £304 instead of £423 of brought sepratly, and as i said the system is tested and comes with a 3 year guarantee along with the guarantee of the individual components.

Also the motherboard has 2 free slots meaning you could easily upgrade to 4 GB of ram. As your saving £123 you could probably get a extra GB with that. Also with the package your getting a faster process the E6600 which is dual 2.4 GHz.

,Ashley

OL 16 years, 10 months ago

Quote:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (£120)

Get the E6600 instead for £138.23.

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/112706

Quote:

Motherboard: MSI P6N SLI Platinum (£91)

At eBuyer that board (or slightly lower end?) is only £70:

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/125281

Quote:

Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC8000 1GB x 3 (£106*3)

Whoa there. 3GB of mem is a little bit more than you need right now, so I'd look into just 2GB. Also, at £106 a stick that is WAY too much. Look at eBuyer's memory section.

You can get something like this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/108447

for £103, that's for two gigs. And they're matched.

Quote:

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB (£153)

I'd never buy a 750GB drive. For the simple reason if the drive fails then that's up to 750GB of data down the drain. If you really need that space, buy two 320GB drives. It's also much faster with two drives aswell. For instance two of these beasties:

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/115418

Or, if you really need a lot of storage, two 500GB drives such as these:

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/113428

Which would still only cost £128. For 1 TB. Make sure you get SATA.

Quote:

Graphics: PNY GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (£275)

Not a bad choice, but I'd go for a brand other than PNY. Such as XFX, EVGA or BFG.

Such as this for £215: http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/120930

Quote:

Power: Antec Neo He 500 (£63)

I presume the 500 means 500watt. In which case, I'd advise you buy something with slightly more power. You'd need around 600watt at least to be safe really.

Quote:

Cables, never use the old set, some motherboards come with a set but with a system like that would be worth getting some decent ones which you can hide to allow maximum air flow.

Well, there are not that many cables that they come with anyway, but the SATA cables you get are mostly fine as naturally SATA is a small and thin cable anyway.

Hope I helped a bit, kthnxbai

blue213 16 years, 10 months ago

Thanks for the tips and comments guys, I'll look into those matters.

APlusHost 16 years, 10 months ago

Well really what you have at the moment is a good spec its just getting it from the best place. Check out the site i gave you, thats really all we can help you with. However as already stated i would get two smaller drives, the ones you have listed for £46 are fine for the job.

If you wanted redundancy and 250GB was enough space you could also put them in Raid 1, or get two 500GB and place them in Raid 1.

Meaning if one hard drive was to crash then data would not be lost and the hard drive can be replaced and the array would be rebuilt.

However for a basic home computer this may be more of a slow down than helpful due to the add length of writing due to having to write to two disk, however reads are faster as double the amount of data can be accessed at once.

NoodleNog 16 years, 10 months ago

Basically, exactly what OL said. [:P]

Oh and I have also had good service from Novatech, I would recommend them.