New Gaming Rig £450 Budget : Suggestions?

[barney_2k]

Hi all!

Have been out of the Desktop loop for a long long time since i bought my Vostro 1500 laptop about 18 months ago!

Gonna build a medium spec PC for gaming (1280 x 1024) as well as i can and a bit of photoshop here and there, I also produce music a lot, will be using the pc for DJing too!

Heres the spec I have so far:



Have heard nothing but praise for the Phenom 720, plus theres the chance of an unlocked core?

Whats everyones thoughts? What could i change to get better performace / futureproofing for my money?

Thanks a lot

Barney

[joel_spencer]

Most people will tell you to change the PSU to a 450w Antec, Seasonic, OCZ or other quality brand. That LG drive is fairly good (I have one), though I believe there's a 24x sony optiarc, bear in mind that using above the discs rated speed will mean an invalidated warranty on your drive if the drive breaks when using overburn.
Otherwise ok, but if you want to game, just get a keyboard separately and get a nice mouse.

[shadowmaster]

CPU = Fine choice, very good cpu for the money and will be very easy to overclock since its a black edition. You will quite easily reach 3.4ghz minimum.

Motherboard= Seems like a good choice. I bought the exact same one for my brother (along with the above cpu) and it works very well. Could not unlock the 4th core though, but thats not a big deal.

Graphics card= 4850 will be perfectly fine at your res (actually even the £15 cheaper 4830 will do fine), but it might be worth going for a 4870 for a little more, you can get them for about £97. Alternatively you could wait till you one day upgrade your monitor and then at the same time change the gfx card. Its completely your choice.

Ram= Seems fine

Hard drive= I dont know much about hd's but I have heard good things about the samsung eco greens so I am sure its fine.

Disk drive= I have an LG and its work great

Case= never heard of it, if you are looking for a sub £40 case then I recommend the Coolermaster Elite 330.

PSU= Arctic power psu don't tend to be of the highest quality so I recommend you change it to a better quality for example- a corsair, enermax, fsp, ocz, etc Something like this will easily power your system.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152509

[Pob255]

Yes Artic power = avoid like a man in rags, with a bell, shouting "Unclean! Unclean!"

As to the case, it's a pritty basic one, don't know what the quality is like (I cannot find any reviews)
For around the same cost consider the Sunbeam 3d strom, the layout is older but they are said to be good quality. (review here http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/S...3DStorm/1.html)
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150296
or
Antec NSK4000II
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/159627
or slightly cheaper
Coolermaster elite 330 (you'll probably want to get a 2nd 120mm fan for the front)
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/127584
or £10 more
Antec 300
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143854

On graphics, If you don't plan on upgrade your monitor any time soon, then go for a 4830 or 4770 anything more is pritty much over kill
if you're using the latest version of photoshop then an nvidia card may be a better idea to make use of the CUDA acceleration
9800gt would be best for that res http://www.ebuyer.com/product/156882
although a gts250 is only a little more http://www.ebuyer.com/product/160711
again anything more is overkill for 1280x1024 res and any of these will still happly cope at 1600x1200 or 1680x1050 (common res for 20"-22" monitors)

here's another couple of decent modular psu's
Corsair HX 450w http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152606
Enermax Modu82+ 425W http://www.ebuyer.com/product/144086

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

To the OP most of their build looks pretty solid apart from the following:

1.)Change the hard disk as it is a 5400rpm model and get this one instead:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1TB-S...ache-89-ms-NCQ

Samsung Ecogreen drives spin at 5400rpm as they are more for media and storage use.

2.)Change the PSU to something like the following:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/127861

3.)Get an HD4870 512mb:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/155497

It will pretty max out any current game at 1280x1024 and hence will give you some extra performance for future titles. For a game like Crysis at maximum settings with AA the last section is even challenging for an HD4830 overclocked to 700mhz(approaching the performance of HD4770 and HD4850) at 1280x800.

[Cheapy]

Mayby have a look at going for a AM3 motherboard like the Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P and some DDR3 memory. Would add probally £30 or £40 onto the price of it but it might last you longer if you dont upgrade often. Just somthing to think about.

[Domestic_Ginger]

550w Corsair VX Series PSU, ATX, PS/2, 5 year Warranty - see specs is £57 in today only, usually £63.

Make sure you are buying revision 2 of the mobo (770-UD3) otherwise you will not be able to unlock the fourth core as REV1 does not have ACC; I think you have Rev 1 in there. You can tell by comparing the compatable ram with Gigabytes website. (someone pointed that out to me in another thread).

The HSF is meant to be okay on the X3; its the same as you get for the X4s (I think). Just incase you do run with 4 cores.

[scaryjim]

ThermalTake cases in general are pretty well built, one of my former employers had a server built into a TT Shark and it was very easy to work with. Can't comment on that particular case, but I don't see any problems with it. As everyone else has said, for the love of <deity> get a better PSU. If you want a shot at unlocking that extra core, this Gigabyte MA790X UD3P motherboard would be a better choice (unfortunately ebuyer don't seem to stock it, but you can get free delivery from Scan anyway!) - it's a bit more expensive but supports full Crossfire X and has the SB750 southbridge. If you'll be doing music production etc. I assume you already have appropriate dedicated sound hardware for that purpose?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

550w Corsair VX Series PSU, ATX, PS/2, 5 year Warranty - see specs is £57 in today only, usually £63.

Make sure you are buying revision 2 of the mobo (770-UD3) otherwise you will not be able to unlock the fourth core as REV1 does not have ACC; I think you have Rev 1 in there. You can tell by comparing the compatable ram with Gigabytes website. (someone pointed that out to me in another thread).

The HSF is meant to be okay on the X3; its the same as you get for the X4s (I think). Just incase you do run with 4 cores.

Scan has both versions available. This is the version the OP should get:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigab...D3-Motherboard

If the OP can get this DDR3 AM3 motherboard it will be even better:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/GIGAB...770T-UD3P-MOBO

It has gotten fantastic reviews and is as good as many 790 chipset based motherboards!!

[barney_2k]

Yes Artic power = avoid like a man in rags, with a bell, shouting "Unclean! Unclean!"

That is a quote of the week

I think im going to reduce my budget to 400 quid and try and base my system around this article from tomshardware...

This means a Core 2 Duo, probably an E7500

I'm just working on a spec now, ill post it up so you can all help me out in a minute!

Thanks for all the advice so far, been brilliant!

[barney_2k]

I assume you already have appropriate dedicated sound hardware for that purpose?

Yes ive already got a dedicated soundcard for this!

[scaryjim]

Yes ive already got a dedicated soundcard for this!

OK, just checking

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That is a quote of the week

I think im going to reduce my budget to 400 quid and try and base my system around this article from tomshardware...

This means a Core 2 Duo, probably an E7500

I'm just working on a spec now, ill post it up so you can all help me out in a minute!

Thanks for all the advice so far, been brilliant!

Why are you going for an E7500 when the X3 720 is the same price!!?? With more and more games like FarCry2,ARMA II,Bioshock,GTAIV and World In Conflict supporting triple and quad core processors it makes sense to go for a triple core.

Toms Hardware has some very poor reviews at time. If anything this review compares the X3 720,E7500 and Q6600:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpu...ii-x3-720-be/6

Also a 770 based motherboard especially the GA-MA770T-UD3P one is an extremely good overclocking motherboard:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/985/1/

http://www.guru3d.com/article/gigaby...rboard-review/

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...=347&Itemid=69

Also if you want to save money a Phenom II X2 550 for around £75 is better IMHO.

Phenom II X2 550 reviews:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpu...n-cpu-review/1

http://www.guru3d.com/article/athlon...550-be-review/

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=3572&p=9

Also with the X3 720 and X2 550 there is a chance of unlocking them to quad cores too with 790 and 770 based motherboards which have either the SB710 or SB750 southbridge.

[marksct]

Im no expert, but I would defo go with cat here. dont go backwards to core2duo

the phenon x3 720 is great value I think, and im going to get it in a month or so for my new pc, which has a similar budget to yours

[sammorris]

The E7500 will be a faster CPU for most tasks and games, but it does have a couple of shortcomings:
Higher price
Lack of third core for future 3-core supported applications.
For the time being, the E7500 is still likely to be the better performer unless you encode video, but its longevity is questionable.

[scaryjim]

Don't the E7000s also lack hardware virtualisation technology? OK, I accept that's going to be very low on most people's list of required features, but it's a nice extra (and it's implemented on all of AMDs new 45nm processors including the new Sempron 100 single cores...)