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[Raven]

Pretty good. The SSD wont be any use though, Win 7 won't fit on it.

Get yourself a 60gig SSD and you will be fine.

Edit. You could also get better ram - 1600mhz. It is so cheap at the moment. I have 16gig of this http://www.ebuyer.com/264750-g-skil...mory-kit-cl9-9-9-9-24-1-5v-f3-12800cl9d-8gbxl its smashing.

Edit of an edit. Don't bother buying it ready made. Get the components cheap

 

[Lamp]

I thought about buying all separates, but I'd have no idea whether they'd all be compatible, or how to connect everything up without short-circuiting it, breaking it, or using a soldering iron. Nah. Too complicated. I'd prefer to let a pro build it for me...I just need a better site with more options. PC Specialist seem OK, but they don't have the best components. The search goes on...

 

[Raven]

Whats your budget? Overclockers have some ready made machines, sometimes they are pretty decent.

For some daft reason, none of them seem to have a decent amount of ram. Even to a complete novice this is easy to fit though.

 

[pikeh]

I thought about buying all separates, but I'd have no idea whether they'd all be compatible, or how to connect everything up without short-circuiting it, breaking it, or using a soldering iron. Nah. Too complicated. I'd prefer to let a pro build it for me...I just need a better site with more options. PC Specialist seem OK, but they don't have the best components. The search goes on...

It's pretty much a case of joing cable a to slot a and so on. I've built two of my own with advice from these forums, with which bits to buy etc!

 

[Lamp]

Budget: £1600

I can't believe PC Specialist only do a 20GB SSD! Thats crazy. How can they sell Win7 and such a shite SSD ??!

Can you recommend any other sites?

 

[Raven]

Well to put it another way, the PC I built before Christmas was a little bit better than the spec you posted above, not including an operating system, large storage drive, case and power supply, as I already had them. It came to approx £550. Add another £200 and that's about what it would cost.

Have a look in the tech section there are plenty of threads about it.

PC building really is very simple these days, you can't put them together wrong. The hardest part is probably connecting the case lights and power/reset buttons to the motherboard. Despite building my own PCs for 10 years, I always seem to plug them in wrong. Once its put together, bung in the win 7 disk and it does the rest for you.

http://www.ebuyer.com/
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/
http://www.dabs.com/
http://www.scan.co.uk/

In order of preference. Been a customer of Ebuyer for 10 years, never once had a problem.

 

[caLLous]

Seriously, OcUK.

The part that worries me the most is usually thermal paste application and mounting the heatsink. I pretty much exclusively use Asus boards nowadays and they have the Q-connector (or whatever it's called), which makes LED\button connections a cinch.

 

[Lamp]

fuck that - I'm not soldering heat sinks & sticking paste everywhere LOL...knowing me I'll end up breaking it or electrocuting myself. Found a site - http://www.computerplanet.co.uk/custom/intel_h67_p67/step1.html - will see what kind of an i5 set up they have. Cheers lads, but building PCs - not for faint-hearted technical idiots like me.

 

[caLLous]

You don't have to solder anything. If you get a Lian-Li case you probably won't even need a screwdriver.

 

[Raven]

Out of interest I have put together a machine for £1600 on ebuyer. Excuse the formatting!

I think you could get away with dropping the power supply as the case comes with onem someone with more knowledge would have to have a look at the power requirements. So £1450 - I imagine you could find someone to put it together for £100 or so, it takes about half an hour.
Qty Description QuickFind Stock Price Total
Coolermaster CM690 II Lite with Coolermaster GX 650W PSU *Special Offer Bundle* 220862 29 in stock £103.73 £103.73
Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z Z68 Socket 1155 8 Channel HD Audio mATX Motherboard 270696 2 in stock £150.60 £150.60
Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor 252535 196 in stock £245.57 £245.57

OCZ 120GB Agility 3 SSD - SATA-III - Read 525MB/s Write 500MB/s 85,000 IOPS 268244 79 in stock £125.00 £125.00

2x Seagate 1TB 3.5" Barracuda SATA-III 6Gb/s Hard Drive - 7200RPM 32MB Cache 252858 > 25 in stock £90.46 £180.92
OCZ ZX Series 850W 80+ GOLD PSU Fully Modular PSU 265709 118 in stock £109.98 £109.98
Samsung SH-222AB 22x DVD±RW DL & RAM SATA Optical Drive - OEM Black 268621 > 200 in stock £11.98 £11.98
2 x Sapphire HD 6950 2GB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card 338548 67 in stock £217.80 £435.60
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional w/SP1 - Licence and media - 1 PC - OEM - DVD - 64-bit - English 259867 7 in stock £103.77 £103.77
G-Skill 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz RipjawsX X79 Memory Kit CL9 1.5V 319757 24 in stock £72.39 £72.39

Save Cart​

Cart total inc vat: £1539.54

Edit. While it would be nice to have that sort of cash spare for a PC, I really don't think it's necessary, as mentioned. Mine would be about £700 to build all in and it will probably do for at least 2 more years. We probably wont see much of a jump in requirements until the next consoles are out.

 

[Lamp]

well, computerplanet sucks...picked a motherboard with 5 PCI slots, then it tells me I have selected devices with 3 PCI slots and that my 5 -slot motherboard isn't good enough ! They don't even offer mb's with PCI-E slots. Crazy

 

[caLLous]

Can't argue with that, no harm going for an ATX board if you have no need for the mATX form factor though. Like, the
Asus P8Z68-V GEN3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard for £144.98. I would probably go for 4x4gb Corsair Vengeance.

And a sexy Lian-Li case.

What do you need 3 slots for? Unless you are doing some SLI\Crossfire-type thing. You don't need an external soundcard if that's your concern and all networking stuff should be onboard the mobo (with the exception of wifi maybe).

Ooomph, OcUK have memory sets with 8gb sticks in now.. they didn't a few weeks ago. 32gb for my next build please!

 

[Lamp]

That looks a lovely spec, Raven...but I would have no idea how to stick it all together.

I mean how is an idiot like me supposed to build this? lol

Thanks anyway dude - much appreciated tho

 

[caLLous]

Well I wouldn't bother with a watercooling system for a start. That takes out all the fancy hoses and most of that front-panel gubbins. You started off by saying "mid-range" I think so you have no need to worry about high-spec cooling systems.

I mean how is an idiot like me supposed to build this? lol

Very carefully.

 

[Lamp]

ok ... wasn't sure whether I needed water cooling or not. Thats cleared that up then

 

[caLLous]

I've never used water-cooling, never felt the need to. Air-cooling cools a "standard" PC with no problems, if you're into mad overclocking and chasing high benchmark scores that's something else entirely but your average stock PC will do just fine with a couple of fans and a decent heatsink on the CPU.

 

[Raven]

I looked at water cooling a few years ago and decided to not bother. It wasn't necessary then and it certainly isn't now. I know its safe but I just have a major problem with water and expensive PC components

 

[caLLous]

Cruise ship runs aground in Italy

Jeezy Chreezy, when I read that this morning it was listing by 20°. Looks like it fell over a bit more.

Pretty shocking that something like that can happen in today's day and age, especially with fatalities.

 

[Shagrat]

water cooling and electrical components in the same box always scares me so I steer well clear

 

[Raven]

A mate of mine works on ships like that, interesting reading his facebook comments about it. There is no way that should have happened, not with all the safety systems in place. It's either catastrophic failure of systems or gross incompetence.

 

[caLLous]

It seems that they were planning to sail for a day before getting around to giving any info about evacuating. :\

And yes to slight concerns about water-cooling, it's also added weight that I don't need when I move it (which happens sometimes). When I'm especially bored, sometimes I strip it all back down and clean and reseat everything, and draining the water system would make that a real bore methinks.

 

[pikeh]

fuck that - I'm not soldering heat sinks & sticking paste everywhere LOL...knowing me I'll end up breaking it or electrocuting myself. Found a site - http://www.computerplanet.co.uk/custom/intel_h67_p67/step1.html - will see what kind of an i5 set up they have. Cheers lads, but building PCs - not for faint-hearted technical idiots like me.

You don't have to. The processors come with the paste already on them, you just need to peel off the glue and place it correctly. Seriously, its really easy and you'll save a shit-ton of money.

 

[Access Denied]

Tbh, for the money a decent watercooling system costs you can get a bloody good case that has multiple fans in all the right places and a Fenrir or similar Heatsink/Fan arrangement for your CPU.

 

[Lamp]

Getting confused between a "hard drive" and a "data hard drive". What one's the regular hard drive, and which one is the SSD?

 

[Raven]

Solid State Drive

Not sure why they are listed as "data hard drive" and "hard drive"

Unless they mean boot drive and storage drive.

Your boot drive would be the SSD, enough room for windows at least. If you have the budget, a slightly larger one where you can fit a couple of games on would be a bonus.

A second drive to put your porn and games on.

 

[caLLous]

Odd categories... A Data Hard Drive and a Hard Drive (the top two sections in both lists) are the same thing afaik... I guess they put Data in front to suggest that it's for storage and not performance? An SSD is a Solid State Drive (the bottom 2 sections).

 

[Lamp]

Hmm...ok...

So for "Hard Drive", I'll plug in a 120GB SATA III SSD
and for "Data Hard Drive", I'll choose, say, a 2TB SATA III single hard drive

...think thats right...

 

[caLLous]

Yeah, if you want to use their cryptic categorising system. You can just call anything mechanical a "Hard Drive" and anything solid-state an "SSD", though.

 

[Access Denied]

I'm drooling, anyone wanna give me £2800?

Case
ANTEC NINE HUNDRED TWO V3 - UK, The Ultimate Gaming Case, Evolved

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor Extreme i7-3960X (3.3GHz) 15MB Cache

Motherboard
ASUS® RAMPAGE IV EXTREME: INTEL X79, SOCKET 2011, R.O.G

Memory (RAM)
16GB KINGSTON HYPERX GENESIS QUAD-DDR3 1600MHz X.M.P(4 x 4GB KIT)

Graphics Card
1.5GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 580 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready

2nd Graphics Card
1.5GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 580 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
120GB INTEL® 510 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 450MB/sR | 210MB/sW)

2nd Hard Disk
2TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD2002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Power Supply
CORSAIR 1050W PRO SERIES™ HX1050-80 PLUS® SILVER MODULAR (£159)

Processor Cooling
TITAN FENRIR EVO EXTREME HEATPIPE CPU COOLER (£39)

Fan Controller
NZXT Sentry 2 Fan Controller with upto 5 Fitted Case Fans

 

[caLLous]

If you want to go a bit more nuts you could get a couple of the new 7970's...

I would imagine there are much better ways of spending £2800 on a PC than that list. I've never tried though.