Building a custom PC

[Woodz]

A friend of mine has tasked me to build him a PC with a £300 budget but the PC has to have a Motherboard, CPU, RAM and an SSD. he already has an Antec Nine Hundred Two V3 gaming case and an old but still packs the punch BFG Tech GTX 280 Graphics Card so i had a quick look on

http://www.overclockers.co.uk

and put together a system build..

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-355-AM
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-143-CR
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-068-AK
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-019-CR

BTW the RAM is just cool lol,

let me know what you think guys.. total price is £285.28 including VAT @ 20%

 

[EMS]

64Gb drive...thats not going to last very long before its full...might as well got a 64Gb USB stick and a HDD, used the USB as the boot..but hey what would I know

 

[Woodz]

I would install the OS on the SSD and he has 2 1TB HDD so he can use them as storage..with just an OS on an SSD it would boot up and be ready to do whatever tasks in under 18 seconds
say you was moving a large file like a folder with 10gb of films in to another hdd it would say moving files at say 40-90mb/s and have an estimated time left with the amount of files left to move, an SSD writes them files to the new place between 160-200mb/s so its a massive speed boost to moving files to another drive

 

[kirk1701®]

64Gb drive...thats not going to last very long before its full...might as well got a 64Gb USB stick and a HDD, used the USB as the boot..but hey what would I know

SSD
Just for the OS because its super fast

Add a second SATA drive for data as big as you want

I went with the 120 SSD drive myself, recommend the micron very very muck but heads up woodz; something I didn't know till a year later happened to me, you have to go into the advanced power settings and select these hard drives to never turn off.

 

[nevyn68]

With my Windows folder being 29Gb after a couple of years the 60Gb would probably be just fine.

 

[Katzenfreund]

Unless you already have a good proportion of the components, I doubt that building a computer yourself is going to work out cheaper than buying one ready.

In any case, if one tried to build a car from spare parts, it would cost over a million.

 

[EMS]

he has 2 1TB HDD so he can use them as storage

Ah well that makes it clearer then ..yep sounds pretty good

 

[Woodz]

but heads up woodz; something I didn't know till a year later happened to me, you have to go into the advanced power settings and select these hard drives to never turn off.

Thanks kirk i didn't know that

Unless you already have a good proportion of the components, I doubt that building a computer yourself is going to work out cheaper than buying one ready.

In any case, if one tried to build a car from spare parts, it would cost over a million.

It works a little bit different depending on where you can get the parts from and what you have available right away, the pc components that i have selected are top of the range components and are more than capable of managing as much as you can throw at it and the motherboard can handle 8-core cpu's which are literally brand new

A more detailed look at the motherboard ill be getting him -

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=970%20Extreme3%20R2.0

I could swap out the cpu for an AMD Piledriver FX-8 Eight Core 8350 Black Edition 4.00GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - which is the only 8 core desktop processor available anywhere which will bump up the price to £323.92 inc 20% VAT and delivery

that setup will push the motherboard to it's max potential cpu wise and he wont have to replace the system for years, he can spend £350 max so he should be ok with this

 

[EMS]

like my 8350 then......

 

[Woodz]

you got one ems ? how are they, thinking of getting one myself lol

 

[kirk1701®]

Here yu go woodz, this was the e-mail then they sent me the firmware update in another e-mail.

Hello Joe,

Thank you for contacting Cruial. The behavior you are describing is consistent with deleted cells not being cleaned from your drive. This can result in reduced performance or even complete lack of response from the SSD.

There is a feature built into our SSDs called Active Garbage Collection. Letting Active Garbage Collection run on the drive for an extended period will clean these cells and restore the SSD to a healthy state.

To do this on your PC or Laptop, you will need to let the SSD idle for 6 to 8 hours.

In a PC, simply disconnect the SATA cable from your SSD and only leave the power cable connected. After switching your PC on, the SSD will be in an idle state but still have power so Garbage Collection can function. Leave the PC powered for the 6-8 hours.

In a laptop, power on with the SSD installed and enter your system BIOS (please refer to your system manufacturer’s documentation on how to access the BIOS.) Leave the laptop in the BIOS menu for the 6-8 hours.

Following this process, your drives functionality and performance should be restored.

To prevent the SSD performance degrading again, you can make adjustments to your power settings:

- Go to Control Panel
- Go to Hardware and Sound
- Go to Power Options
- Select Change Plan Settings
- Select Change Advanced Settings
- Make sure the 'hard disk' field is set to ‘never’ (Laptop users select 'battery and power adapter').

If you have further questions, please visit the Crucial Community at crucial.com/help.

 

[EMS]

my 8 core AMD 8350 works very well...resting temp is less than 20 centigrade, handles games very well and everything else thats been thrown at it so far...although, I do all my encoding/recoding on one of the other pcs now...otherwise it just takes up processes that don't really need to be done on this one

 

[bmark240]

Try this site:

http://www.scan.co.uk/

also Novatech are pretty good as well:

http://www.novatech.co.uk

I have an 8150 octocore and is very good as well.

 

[Woodz]

thanks for all your input guys, appreciate it

 

[kirk1701®]

I started finishing up my upgrade this week

New monitor, I still been using my 4:3 ratio :lotpot:

Came yesterday:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824116478

Still need a video card upgrade "I think"
And going to see how the internal speakers work on this monitor before I decide on using the onboard sound or new sound card and speakers.