Okay, I really will build a PC this time.

[Wesley]

So I'm selling my iMac and building my own PC. I'm not a tech novice, but I'm not an expert in components and general hardware. You don't need to worry about terminology or anyway. But, like I said, I don't know which graphics card does what off the top of my head.

 

So anyway, looking for some advice and guidance!

 

Building a PC with the purpose of:

 

Multiple hard disk drives for the purpose of dual boot-up/or separate backup. No partitioning, thank you.

 

Dual monitor set-up for 3D animation package, with ability for console to play through one monitor (yes, I'm also asking for advice on the best monitors ).

 

Medium to high end graphics card for PC gaming. Motherboard also have the ability for eventual dual graphics card in the future.

 

Processor adapt for 3D design packages - I'm thinking AMD for their ability of more calculations per second than Intel - in general (waiting for someone to tell me I'm wrong and I deserve to die).

 

RAM, of course, to be able to support multiple demanding applications at once.

 

Nothing fancy for sound, perhaps just on board.

 

Wireless network adapter - with blue tooth included.

 

Motherboard to have enough slots for eventual (if things change) digital TV tuner.

 

Quite fans!

 

So just looking for general guidance and thought really. I don't want to fall into the trap of getting a piece of shit graphics card that "everyone" knows was always a piece of shit. Because, like I said, I don't keep up-to-date with every single model.

 

When I've got some free time I'll post what I've come up with and see what you all think. Also, decent sites? Apart from dabs and ebuyer I can't think of any decent ones.

 

Thanks for taking the time to help!

[thirtynine.]

Surely partitions are just easyer?

[Sanchez]

Need a budget man. Ebuyer time and time again has turned out the cheapest system components for me, so I don't think you need to look further. You can take a look around scan.co.uk as well. If you're looking for a PC under £700 (without monitors) then you want an AMD CPU, otherwise you want an Intel, as a guide.

[Wesley]

Budget isn't really a problem. I have a good 750 to play around with and that's without using any money I have set aside.

[Sanchez]

K so I made this

ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus AiLifestyle nForce 650i SLI/570 SLI Socket 775 8 channel audio

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132812

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Socket 775 (3.0GHz) 1333FSB 6MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139971

Kingston 2gb Kit (2x1gb) Ddr2 800mhz/pc2-6400 Hyperx Memory Non-ecc Low-latency Cl4

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128662

Seasonic M12 600W Modular PSU

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/119766

EVGA 8800GT 512MB GDDR3 256bit Dual DVI PCI-E Graphics Card with Crysis Game

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135736

Samsung HD753LJ 750GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm < Two of these

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139739

 

That totals in at about £550, you might want to consider a Q6600 instead of the E8400 depending on how much you think you would value 4 cores. I don't know if 3d applications have good multi core support yet.

 

Add a scythe CPU fan (someone else would have to specify), about £30, a case of your choosing, another £30.

£610

and monitors.

Overclockers do a very respectable own brand 24" PVA panel monitor for £230, you could get two of those or get a smaller second panel, a 20" would run you about £150, 22"s about £200.

 

Totalling about £1000

 

Well that's just something to start off, I'm sure someone else can do some tweaking.

[Konfucius]

K so I made this

ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus AiLifestyle nForce 650i SLI/570 SLI Socket 775 8 channel audio

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132812

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Socket 775 (3.0GHz) 1333FSB 6MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139971

Kingston 2gb Kit (2x1gb) Ddr2 800mhz/pc2-6400 Hyperx Memory Non-ecc Low-latency Cl4

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128662

Seasonic M12 600W Modular PSU

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/119766

EVGA 8800GT 512MB GDDR3 256bit Dual DVI PCI-E Graphics Card with Crysis Game

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135736

Samsung HD753LJ 750GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm < Two of these

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139739

 

That totals in at about £550, you might want to consider a Q6600 instead of the E8400 depending on how much you think you would value 4 cores. I don't know if 3d applications have good multi core support yet.

 

Add a scythe CPU fan (someone else would have to specify), about £30, a case of your choosing, another £30.

£610

and monitors.

Overclockers do a very respectable own brand 24" PVA panel monitor for £230, you could get two of those or get a smaller second panel, a 20" would run you about £150, 22"s about £200.

 

Totalling about £1000

 

Well that's just something to start off, I'm sure someone else can do some tweaking.

 

You have good taste.

 

Although I'd go for the GeForce 8800 GTS G92 512 MB or a 9800 something.

Fans: Scythe S-Flex 120mm I suppose unless you want to keep the stock cooler.

And get 4 GB of RAM if you can afford it. You'll upgrade eventually anyways

If you plan on getting more than two internal harddrives I recommend you get a big case. That way you can keep an empty slot between every drive which helps keeping drive temperatures low.

[DCK]

If you're going for heavy duty stuff, I'd add to Sanchez's setup another 2 GB of RAM (total of 4 GB) and probably a Core 2 Quad or Phenom X4.

 

As for monitors, Samsungs are great. Two 1920x1200 24" screens are costly, but probably heavenly PCing too.

 

All of that is going to cost you near 2000-ish though.

[MoogleViper]

What OS will you be using?

[McPhee]

I would hold off building for now, new ATi cards just around the corner, new nVidia ones coming towards the end of the year and a new Intel socket type in the autumn.

 

Not the best time to be buying or building a computer really, too much change going on over the next few months

[Hellfire]

Well, to be honest McPhee it's always the same thing, there are always new things coming out and change going on, but yeah, I'd wait a few months and see what's gonna happen. By a few, I really mean a few, because a guy can't be holding things off forever.

Anyway, if you're going for it now, Sanchez seems to have made good recommendations, the EVGA 8800GT is a good choice, but I'd buy more RAM.

[McPhee]

Yeah, things are changing all the time, but these aren't the normal (minor) changes that happen every few months. The sort of changes that Intel are making at the end of this year only occur once every 2 years though. Nehalem is a whole new processor architecture, new CPUs and motherboards (neither of which will work with the current Core components) and DD3 RAM will be standard. In English: Pentium 4 was replaced by Core, which was a HUGE step up. Nehalem is Core's replacement. That's the sort of change that is less than 6 months away.

 

If you plan on keeping your system up to date with components then buying a Core right now would be a waste of money. Come upgrade time you'd have 2 choices, get a minimal performance boost by moving from one Core processor to another or spend hundreds upgrading to Nehalem.

[Wesley]

The problem is that I need a PC ready for when I go to university. I understand what you're explaining, but, as I said, when I'm at university I don't want to be spending this kind of money on a PC and, of course, when I sell my iMac at the end of the year it will be worth less.

 

So, although you speak wise words, I am having to go ahead now.

[DCK]

In English: Pentium 4 was replaced by Core, which was a HUGE step up. Nehalem is Core's replacement. That's the sort of change that is less than 6 months away.

Isn't the Nehalem supposed to be 'just' the Core 3? I mean, it's a big improvement, but it's not a NetBurst <> Core improvement...

 

Still worth waiting for though.

[Wesley]

So what does everyone think of this:

 

 

That's without the extra RAM, same type, I'm going to get, the extra hard disk, same type, wireless network adapter and second monitor. Trying to keep the initial cost down as low as possible. Maybe thinking of not buying the monitor right away and simply using my TV.

[DCK]

You might want to spend a few pounds on 1066 MHz memory, it's probably important if you do graphics work (like you're suggesting with you iMac and dual monitor wishes ).

 

Will you be running Vista? Or Linux or a hacked Mac OS X?

[Konfucius]

So what does everyone think of this:

 

 

That's without the extra RAM, same type, I'm going to get

 

If you get more of the same RAM you'll be using up all of your RAM slots. Sure normally when upgrading you'll swap out all of your RAM but still I'd consider 2x2GB.

[Wesley]

You might want to spend a few pounds on 1066 MHz memory, it's probably important if you do graphics work (like you're suggesting with you iMac and dual monitor wishes ).

 

Will you be running Vista? Or Linux or a hacked Mac OS X?

 

I'll be running Vista.

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/119223 How about this for RAM?

[McPhee]

You'd be well advised to buy a better power supply as well.

 

Personally i'd look at a better quality case and keyboard, there's no substitute for good build quality.

 

Are you looking for a quiet system? Because there's a few parts you could swap around to make your system quieter (i.e. near silent)

[Wesley]

You'd be well advised to buy a better power supply as well.

 

Personally i'd look at a better quality case and keyboard, there's no substitute for good build quality.

 

Are you looking for a quiet system? Because there's a few parts you could swap around to make your system quieter (i.e. near silent)

 

What power supply do you suggest? The keyboard isn't really a big deal I was just going to wait for my next payday for a better keyboard. What's up with the case?

 

And I am indeed looking for a quieter system. What could be changed?

 

Also, what do I need to go about fans and heatsinks, I don't have enough do I. I need one dedicated for the GPU, right?

 

Also, monitor has gone down in price. I'm going to be buying in the next few days. Does everything fit nicely as it is, using that RAM i posted instead of the old one?

[Ten10]

Because you've got a retail version of your processor you don't need to worry about a heatsink and fan as this should be included. You might consider getting a small exhaust fan if you want but your system will still be fine without one.

[DCK]

I'll be running Vista.

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/119223 How about this for RAM?

Vista idle sucks up 800MB at its bare minimum on my laptop, and with Winamp and Firefox it takes over 1 GB. If you're doing production work I can seriously recommend 4 GB. 4 GB of PC8500 will be expensive, so you might want to go for 4 GB PC6400 for budget reasons. Bandwidth is important, but size will give you more breathing space.

[Hellfire]

I recommend not using Vista :P

[McPhee]

Vista idle sucks up 800MB at its bare minimum on my laptop, and with Winamp and Firefox it takes over 1 GB. If you're doing production work I can seriously recommend 4 GB. 4 GB of PC8500 will be expensive, so you might want to go for 4 GB PC6400 for budget reasons. Bandwidth is important, but size will give you more breathing space.

 

Vista scales itself depending on how much RAM the system has and what applications are open. You can run the same number of programs simultaniously in Vista as you can in XP because as the RAM fills up Vista starts caching to the Hard Drive instead of the RAM. XP just caches to the hard drive, which is a lot slower.

 

With the price of RAM dropping all the time it's a lot more sensible to buy 2GB and upgrade to 4GB if you need it. Most people find that they don't.

 

Best to play it safe on the OS though, buy Vista x64 so you have the option of upgrading to 4GB if you did need it.

[DCK]

Vista scales itself depending on how much RAM the system has and what applications are open. You can run the same number of programs simultaniously in Vista as you can in XP because as the RAM fills up Vista starts caching to the Hard Drive instead of the RAM. XP just caches to the hard drive, which is a lot slower.

Don't get me wrong, I love Vista, but I don't see why they should use half my ram when no on-screen applications are running, when Ubuntu can manage on several hundreds MB less, and not touching the swap partition ever. But you're probably right.

 

Anyway, you should use Vista, as with all the RAM you'd need a 64-bit OS, and Vista 64 is definitely a better choice than XP-64.

 

You might also want to consider using Windows Server 2008 as your OS, if you want to tweak a lot. You can make it look like Vista, and retain compability with nearly everything, on a lighter OS.

[Wesley]

Vista idle sucks up 800MB at its bare minimum on my laptop, and with Winamp and Firefox it takes over 1 GB. If you're doing production work I can seriously recommend 4 GB. 4 GB of PC8500 will be expensive, so you might want to go for 4 GB PC6400 for budget reasons. Bandwidth is important, but size will give you more breathing space.

 

I was going to go for 2GB for now, but upgrade to 4 later on. I'll stick with the PC8500 though, I can afford it.

 

Vista scales itself depending on how much RAM the system has and what applications are open. You can run the same number of programs simultaniously in Vista as you can in XP because as the RAM fills up Vista starts caching to the Hard Drive instead of the RAM. XP just caches to the hard drive, which is a lot slower.

 

With the price of RAM dropping all the time it's a lot more sensible to buy 2GB and upgrade to 4GB if you need it. Most people find that they don't.

 

Best to play it safe on the OS though, buy Vista x64 so you have the option of upgrading to 4GB if you did need it.

 

I was already going to go for the 64 bit version. I didn't realise Vista scaled depending on the RAM. I'll definately just go with 2GB now then.

 

So I'll be buying it all in around 3 days. Does everyone think it's okay (everything the same except new RAM)? No major flaws? McPhee mentioned better case and PSU but I don't know which ones are better than those.