Advice New PC Advice

[Will]

I've been chatting with Teedles about this, but before I buy it, I thought I'd ask here for some advice.

I'm looking at a Chillblast Fusion Asgard with an upgrade to a GFX 660, coming in at £693.80. The price seems very similar to if I built it myself but with it already built, working and with a warranty. I'll be using it to play Battlefield 3/4, Arma and the like. Good deal, yay or nay?

Edit: Windows 7 or 8? I've not used Windows in a long time.

 

[Syri]

Personally, I'd say that either option has it's ups and downs. If you go with their build, you get the warranty and the ability to just get it delivered, plug in and play. The price is pretty reasonable, BUT only if you stick with their default build. They really sting you on the upgrades.
Building yourself still gets you a warranty on individual parts, just nothing for the system as a whole. You have to put it all together of course, but it doesn't take all that long to build a tower these days, and you know 100% what's gone inside it.
Both options really have a lot of pros and cons. Personally I'd go for building it myself, just for the extra choice in what goes in it and the fact that I just enjoy seeing all those bits come together to make a working PC. It really is down to what you prefer though at the end of the day.
As for Windows 7 or 8, I'd say go for 8 personally. It's not the best Windows out there, but it is the latest, so if you're looking to future-proof, it's the best bet really. If the new start screen and lack of old style start menu really bug you, I'd recommend chucking a couple of quid at Start8, a pretty handy util for Windows 8 that gives you a start menu almost identical to the one in Windows 7, along with some other options for customising it, and also lets you boot straight into the desktop mode.

 

[wolfeeh]

Personally, I'd say that either option has it's ups and downs. If you go with their build, you get the warranty and the ability to just get it delivered, plug in and play. The price is pretty reasonable, BUT only if you stick with their default build. They really sting you on the upgrades.
Building yourself still gets you a warranty on individual parts, just nothing for the system as a whole. You have to put it all together of course, but it doesn't take all that long to build a tower these days, and you know 100% what's gone inside it.
Both options really have a lot of pros and cons. Personally I'd go for building it myself, just for the extra choice in what goes in it and the fact that I just enjoy seeing all those bits come together to make a working PC. It really is down to what you prefer though at the end of the day.
As for Windows 7 or 8, I'd say go for 8 personally. It's not the best Windows out there, but it is the latest, so if you're looking to future-proof, it's the best bet really. If the new start screen and lack of old style start menu really bug you, I'd recommend chucking a couple of quid at Start8, a pretty handy util for Windows 8 that gives you a start menu almost identical to the one in Windows 7, along with some other options for customising it, and also lets you boot straight into the desktop mode.

I concur pretty much with what Syri has said.... pro's and con's of building your own... tbh that spec will play battlefield 3, arma etc, very nicely, and bf 4 should be fine too.... also i'd go with windows 8 too... i'm currently running 7 but an upgrade to 8 is imminent as soon as i can afford a bigger SSD (also something you should really look into getting... the performance difference from SSD's is simply staggering, you would not believe it)

 

[Hawkwind]

680 GTX rather than the 660 GTX > 40% difference in performance. Well worth the extra to future proof the rig. Plus the SSDD, totally agree with Wolfeeh on that point, no better upgrade right now.

I have several of these in my main and they are awesome:
http://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/hype...0413=ENSSDHX&gclid=CIC9rMrvhbcCFUp66wod4FQAUg

 

[pikeh]

If you are worried about building your PC, all I'd say is make sure you get a very good PSU (Seasonic are considering some of the best atm, some names have Seasonic as the OEM, like XFX), its probably one of the most underrated bit of kit that a lot of people skimp on. Also, putting together the components is no harder than any flatpack furniture.

 

[Athan]

Also, putting together the components is no harder than any flatpack furniture.

Just don't do stupid things that raise the risk of static discharge ruining something. You don't need to worry about that when assembling flatpack furniture.

 

[pikeh]

Just don't do stupid things that raise the risk of static discharge ruining something. You don't need to worry about that when assembling flatpack furniture.

Well, turn the bag your mobo comes in inside-out and that's an anti static surface. Also, don't go foot sliding round in socks on a carpet before hand!

 

[leggy]

Nice site Will. I quite fancy a new pre-built rig as I simply can't be arsed building my own these days.

Do any of you use a TV to play PC games? I like the comfort of a living room and hate sitting at a desk to play games now. I was thinking of a wireless keyboard setup and using my TV as the primary display device.

I understand that I'll take a max resolution hit but I'm happy with that. If it becomes a problem I'll use an HDMI enabled monitor as a TV as I don't watched scheduled programming anyway.

 

[DaGaffer]

Fuckin' 'ell...http://www.chillblast.com/Chillblast-Fusion-Leviathan.html

 

[Kryten]

fuck me sideways - £10k on a gaming rig. Impressive but, why. If I'd won the lottery I wouldn't even spend that fucking much!

 

[pikeh]

Theres a chap on the overclockers forums with a 4x titan setup. They are £850 each. Fucking ridiculous. Diminishing returns or what?

 

[Yaka]

yes but his pc didnt cost £10k all in


also using a tv as a monitor you should be ok long as the res don't annoy you. but some tvs are better suited to gaming on pc than others specialy if youre into fps games, my dads shinny samsung is abit iffy but my old panny plasma aint bad but then i am very picky about it.

 

[Lamp]

£10K lol
Might have impressive specs now, but give it 10 years, and your mobile phone will top that.

 

[Overdriven]

Dual Intel Xeon X5690 chips (6 cored) overclocked to 4.6GHz (55Ghz combined total)

OH MY GOD. OVER FIFTY GIGAHERTZ.

...

 

[Athan]

£10K lol
Might have impressive specs now, but give it 10 years, and your mobile phone will top that.

I wouldn't be so sure. Yes, the last 5 decades have shown nice steady growth in the number of transistors we put on things, and also an increase in clock speeds. But look at the latest Intel architecture, Haswell. By all accounts it only performs marginally better than Ivy Bridge, likely due to more optimisations to pipeline/prediction stuff. The real gains are in it using much lower power to do the same work.

Unless someone comes up with a completely different tech that allows parts to get smaller still and also run faster the only major gains we'll now get are from better parallelism. And, no, Quantum Computing would not be the great saviour, assuming we can make useful general quantum computers. Not all problems/algorithms are amenable to speed-ups through QM.

 

[Lamp]

Quantum Computing seems a nightmare. The act of measuring a quantum event changes the result (double slit experiment classic example).

So how do you make a quantum computation without reading it / loading it into a registry? QM is very strange. Almost as if we weren't meant to comprehend it fully.

 

[caLLous]

 

[SFXman]

Turned into a mighty realistic PC advice thread for the OP.

 

[Will]

Turned into a mighty realistic PC advice thread for the OP.

I've been ignoring it for a while.

 

[Scouse]

OH MY GOD. OVER FIFTY GIGAHERTZ.

...

Makes my old Pentium 75 seem a bit outdated