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need advice on new computer - URGENT!

5K views 31 replies 11 participants last post by  Neddysmith 
#1 ·
hi all, my computer is a bit dated, and ive been meaning to look into getting a new one for a while, but, ive got no idea what to get. i want it for gaming, and needs to support dual monitors.

i randomly stumbled upon catch of the day's sale just now of this computer, and was wondering if its any good?

http://www.catchoftheday.com.au/smallfish_info.php?products_id=52939
 
#2 ·
I talked to coolamon and got him to build a completely awesome machine for home!!
 
#4 · (Edited)
i just upgraded my pc and spent $900 on cpu, motherboard, ram and SSD drive. im pricing up my dad a pc and will cost around 1200-1300 and includes monitor and keyboard. he already has a g500 mouse which is great, i have one too. if you want i can provide more details. but it has a i5, 4 or 8g or ram, gtx560 OC video card, decent power supply ($100 ish) to support SLI (as well as motherboard to support sli) when he wants to upgrade the video card. SLI these days is a great idea if you want more bang for you buck. 2 of my gtx560 oc cards is equivalant to a single gtx590 card which is around 300$ more by time you buy both cards.

also after looking at that pc its already out dated.... the 120g SSD drives are slow compared to the 240g's you cant even run 2 120g's in a raid to keep up with the 240g. the ram is slow. 1333mhz is crap, i have 2400mhz in mine. its great. and as above. the video card is a bit cheap. you want to aim at the 180$+ mark for gaming. and sli in 2-3months time when money permits.
 
#6 ·
thats of no help to me ben...

this pc fits my price range well..

my problem is that i have no idea what components are good and what are crap, ive just been left behind and dont know what im looking at... which is why a ready built system is quite appealing for me... i dunno what to do...
 
#7 ·
the speed of the ram should be fine, it is low end I have that speed on my pc about 120gb of it and I have no issues, the processor is more then enough. 120gb ssd should be plenty only install your operating system and the programs you use most. I would upgrade to a GTX 660 or higher but that should be more then enough for what you want.
 
#9 ·
The word on the street is that if your building a gaming rig, go with an i5 rather than an i7.

I know, it doesn't make sense but the i5 is supposedly better for gaming while the i7 is better if you like having lots of programs running at once.

But I'm only repeating what my PC Guru mate told me. I'm only an intermediate PC guy :p
 
#10 ·
I would personally build my own and go for something like this..

CPU: Intel Core i5 3570 LGA1155 CPU 3.4Ghz 6Mb Cache Ivy Bridge $217.00
Motherboard: Asrock Z77-EXTREME4 Z77 $145.00
Memory: G Skill 8G(2x4G) DDR3 1600Mhz (CL9D-8GBRL) $50.00
Graphics Card: MSI GTX680 Twin Frozr OC 2GB DDR5 $580.00
Hard Drives: Intel SSD 120GB 330 Series SATA III $106.00
Seagate SATA3 3TB 7200RPM Barracuda 64mb Cache $156.00
Case: CoolerMaster RC-692A-KWN5 Advanced Bay Tower Gaming USB3.0 $110.00
Power Supply: Antec HCG-750 750W High Current Gamer 80PLUS Bronze 135mmfan $134.50

Simple system if you dont want to OC it and plent of headroom to SLI in future.
 
#13 ·
ok im a computer tech, 120g of ram is stupid. not even a video editor needs that much. ram is where temp files are stored. so when you open a photo in photoshop the 100mb photo or what not goes into ram. 8g is more than enough. and the speed of the ram dictates how fast it writes the files to it. now no point getting decent ram unless you get a decent hard drive. SSD 240g drives are the smartest way to go and you wont regret it. i have a 120g on my lappy and a 240 on my desktop. i hate the 120 as it always runs out of space. all i really have installed on there is PS and COD....

do not think that having a 1tb drive for storage is the solution either. no point even having a SSD if your programs and files are stored on a slower drive. the files then have to be copied to the ram which is then bottle necked by the slow drive.

the i5 processors are pretty good these days, the only reason the i7 is in my system is because i work on a lot of photos as im currently studying photography. 40mb per image and opening 50+ images at a time through light room gets a bit hectic sometimes. the i7 is only slightly faster in certain applications like video encoding and large file handling. if i was only playing games i would of saved myself the $100+ extra and got a bigger SSD drive.

in saying that i did some research into SSD's before i got the 240. using a raid 0 the drives together were no faster than a single 240 as the chips used on the 240's are dramatically faster. so hence y i got the 240.
 
#16 ·
Yes great windows can support more ram. But in a gaming computer u don't need more than 16g. Tell me whAt you would need it for in a gaming Pc? Servers are different from gaming pc's and different from design pc's. There all different and do different things. We're talking about gaming pc's here.
 
#18 ·
There's not a lot of code difference between 2008 Server and Windows 7 and memory management is handled almost identically. have you taken into account the amount of system board RAM required when using a video card of 4gb as vast amounts are shadowed to system ram. Running a pair or 4Gb cards in SLI or CrossFire requires approx 8gb os system ram alone for full performance. So for a single highend video card you're looking at 2Gb for the O/S, 2GB for the first process then a further 4 GB for video card for a total of 8GB and that's before you fire up much else and you'll still be paging to the HDD.

You're right that for a gaming PC 16Gg is plenty, I run 12Gb on my destop, 16g in the Mac and 32 to 64 in my servers depending on what they are doing.

Best bang for buck is to install a large amount of physical memory then create a ram drive to hold the pagefile or use a 120Gb SSD for system, 32GB SSD for pagefile and a SATA 3 for APP's. Installing apps on SSD isn't worth the cost cause once the executable loads into RAM not much is access on the drive and SATA 3 has good bandwidth. This is for a Windows box, Linux, Mac are a different deal.
 
#19 ·
Video editing is more down to RAW processing power rather then memory. We built a system for Pixar some years back using 140 blade servers runing Linux so rendering could be distributed accross the farm. the blades were nothing special apart from fast CPU and just 16GB of RAM.

NVidia & ATI are capable of having the GPU used to process data for rendering video. I think NVidia still holds the record for the fastest SQL server using code that offloaded RAW processing power to the GPU. GPU are far more efficient processing raw data but that's about all they can do. Current crop of CPU's does far more then just process data so they are a compromise between performance and function. One of the reasons why you don't see Xeon or Itanium processors in PC's.
 
#21 ·
thanks for the advice....

so i spoke to a mate of mine, and he recommended the following setup..

Asus sabertooth x79 motherboard
intel i7 3820 CPU
noctua NH-d14 CPU cooler
sandisk 120gb SSD
corsair tx-750W PSU
G.skill ripjaws Z series 16gb ram
Geforge GTX 670 video card

$1703 delivered




plpease give me some feedback. :)
 
#23 ·
Ripjaw raw is great, that's what I got. And the 240g drive will save u a lot of stuffing around. There pretty cheap so do the upgrade. Also the stock coolers on the CPU are fine. They don't run hot these day. So don't bother with the after market fan. Iv only ever installed one water cooling kit and that was on an old amd back in 2000 when they use to run at 80-90 degrees.

The i5 will be more than enough for gaming. I even thought about it for my editing as there wasn't a whole lot of difference. Downgrading the CPU and upgrading the ssd will give you more speed improvements

Go bluray reader DVD burner combo. There cheap as
 
#28 ·
Ok I am in agreement with revo-5390 you dont really need an i7 that is just forking out extra cash for something you will probably never utilize properly. Upgrading the SSD if you can afford to would also be a good idea. and honestly who watches blu-ray on their PC's the likelihood of burning to blu-ray is also very slim..
 
#26 ·
Just make sure that none of your vents on your case are blocked, I remember going to a LAN with my friends and was wondering wtf was wrong with my PC it kept ****ting itself barely working until I found out my intake fans were blocked.
 
#27 ·
Could not agree more with this... plus on my computer i have to remove the fan to vacuum all the dust that gets jammed against the cpu heatsink fans... fan does sh!t once the dust is packed on and blocks the air flow.
 
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