Proposed New PC (£1000)

[ik9000]

You need more posts before you can give thanks (25 I think)


Ooo I missed the Seagate Barracude XT, I'd be warrey of that one, does it use the same hybrid thing that the Momentus XT does?
Because there's still massive issues with that.

was about to buy a momentus XT to stick in a laptop - is this not such a good idea?

[ik9000]

One thing to consider is swapping a 2tb hard drive for 2x 1tb drives, you can get a samsung f3 1tb drive for just under £40

and yes it looks like the BarracudaXT isn't one of their hybrid drives . . . just a bit suspicious because the MomentusXT got great reviews when it came out being far faster than normal hard drives, however after a couple of months lots of users noticed they slowed right down back to normal hard drive levels, seems the hybrid flash memory system isn't that good rappidly filling with junk cache data that doesn't get flushed.
Ok I'll admit I'm also probably a bit jaded and have lost trust in seagate.

sorry just seen this - must read to the end before asking questions...

will read up on this and see if I can find out anything. I still trust Seagate, had one in every machine I've owned bar my laptop.

[ik9000]

yup, you're right. The following articles are quite useful:

http://news.techworld.com/operating-...inds-users-up/

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/20/m...-working-to-f/

http://storageeffect.media.seagate.c...seagate-doing/

all describe the problem.

then there's Chip Chick doing a review just 25th February who doesn't even mention the problem...

http://www.chipchick.com/2011/02/sea...xt-review.html

Once they get fixed, and it sounds like Seagate are onto it (some would add still) then there's no reason not to get one. Once they get fixed.... once....

[jim]

You don't need a SATA3 hard disk, it's never going to get close to SATA2 speeds anyway.

SSD, we can have a reasonable discussion about it - standard hard drives, no need whatsoever.

[jonathan_phang]

This is just me, but personally, I would spend a few quid on cable ties and braiding. You are going to have a really great spec PC there so would be a shame to have all your cables all over the place (only judging by pics of the other) - will probably help a little with heat too.

Not being sarcastic or anything, I just have OCD is all...

[gordon861]

You don't need a SATA3 hard disk, it's never going to get close to SATA2 speeds anyway.

SSD, we can have a reasonable discussion about it - standard hard drives, no need whatsoever.

I know what you are saying, but taking a look at Scans list of available 2TB 7200rpm drives you have:

2TB Seagate ST2000VX002 SV35.5, SATA 6Gb/s £95 with no ETA LN37398
2TB Western Digital WD2001FASS Caviar Black, SATA 3Gb/s £125 in stock LN31925
or
2TB Seagate ST32000641AS Barracuda XT, SATA III 6Gb/s £120 in stock LN28969

Both the Seagates have a 5 year warranty and the WD has either a 12 or 60 month depending on what part of the page you read.

So you might not need a SATA3 but when it's cheaper than the SATA2 and there appears to be no disadvantages, why not get it? If the WD was cheaper I'd probably order that one.

Also, I'd rather not go for 2x 1TB instead of 1x 2TB.

[gordon861]

This is just me, but personally, I would spend a few quid on cable ties and braiding. You are going to have a really great spec PC there so would be a shame to have all your cables all over the place (only judging by pics of the other) - will probably help a little with heat too.

Not being sarcastic or anything, I just have OCD is all...

Totally agree, that PC was a mess when I first built it and took those pictures. I was also trying to recycle left over parts from other machines like multiple hard drives. I intend to be a lot more careful from the start this time.

[jim]

So you might not need a SATA3 but when it's cheaper than the SATA2 and there appears to be no disadvantages, why not get it? If the WD was cheaper I'd probably order that one.

Definitely should get it if it's cheaper, just saying that there's no need to spend more.

A HD204UI for example would be cheaper, or an HD203WI.

[gordon861]

Interestingly PCFormat this month has just done a comparision of a bunch of SandyBridge motherboards and rated the Asus P8P67M-Pro.

Stupid thing is, they complained that the board is 'inevitably slightly cramped', so why the hell didn't they use the full sized board?

[Pob255]

Sorry this is all a slight hijack

Once they get fixed, and it sounds like Seagate are onto it (some would add still) then there's no reason not to get one. Once they get fixed.... once....

Well it would be if something had been done, I first read about this last summer when I was considering getting one, it was then 3 months old, 7months on still nothing seems to have changed.
Shouldn't effect the Barracuda XT as that's just a normal hard drive

[ik9000]

Sorry this is all a slight hijack
Well it would be if something had been done, I first read about this last summer when I was considering getting one, it was then 3 months old, 7months on still nothing seems to have changed.
Shouldn't effect the Barracuda XT as that's just a normal hard drive

well in fairness Seagate are now on patch 24. Yes that's not a typo. So they're trying bless 'em. Though it does seem a bit farcical that a problem due to poor cache cleansing and errant power management spin-downs/power ups can't be more easily rectified.

[Ultima2876]

I know what you are saying, but taking a look at Scans list of available 2TB 7200rpm drives you have:

2TB Seagate ST2000VX002 SV35.5, SATA 6Gb/s £95 with no ETA LN37398
2TB Western Digital WD2001FASS Caviar Black, SATA 3Gb/s £125 in stock LN31925
or
2TB Seagate ST32000641AS Barracuda XT, SATA III 6Gb/s £120 in stock LN28969

Both the Seagates have a 5 year warranty and the WD has either a 12 or 60 month depending on what part of the page you read.

So you might not need a SATA3 but when it's cheaper than the SATA2 and there appears to be no disadvantages, why not get it? If the WD was cheaper I'd probably order that one.

Also, I'd rather not go for 2x 1TB instead of 1x 2TB.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-s...ache-89-ms-ncq

Samsung drives are better imo. Better value, better quality and speed than Seagate (these days at least, I used to be a Seagate man a few years ago =/), lower power consumption. People claim that the EcoGreens perform almost as well as those higher end drives. That little performance difference of the drive isn't really going to matter all that much anyway if the OS is on an SSD (especially not £70 worth of difference) - you're talking maybe 1-2 seconds longer loading time in your favourite game... plus you'll save on the leccy bill!

Tbh though my recommendation would've just been to get 2 SpinPoint F3 1tbs and stick them in RAID. Best case of everything then - 2tb, faster than the Caviar Black (thanks to RAID), low cost (about £78 for both drives). It's silly to want one big slow 2tb drive when you can have 2 of them (represented functionally exactly the same) in RAID running so much faster... what do you have specifically against having 2 1tb hard drives and having a faster setup (again though as I said before, it's not gonna make a huge difference either way) for cheaper? Is it setting the RAID up? Cause that takes all of about 5 seconds

[ik9000]

Even if you run two separate drives in non raid it will probably be quicker.
Writing/reading data to/from one big drive with multiple partitions will be slower than writing/reading to two smaller drives with the same partitions distributed between them.

E.g. moving the paging file off the system drive and onto a secondary drive can speed up performance since the computer is not trying to access too many areas of the same disk at once.

[gordon861]

I suppose switching to an 'in theory' slower drive will also help pull the price below the £1k mark as well, it's currently sitting around £1095. If I order it in parts instead of all as one bulk order I can probably save £10-£15 on most of the parts by using the TodayDeals instead of the main pages at Scan.

I did try asking Scan if they do a small discount or some other incentive to get you to buy a full PC at once rather than just pick up the parts as needed, they said no but it was worth a few emails.

[gordon861]

Well all the parts arrived on Friday afternoon, within the quoted delivery hour, and by the evening I had a working PC.

A few issues :
1. When I switch it on from cold it sometimes seems to start powering up and stalls (lights go out again), but when you press the start button again it boots fine. Any ideas what I might have missed?

2. More of an annoyance (and warning). It doesn't appear to be a simple matter to change the default location of the User Profiles in Win7 so by default they all reside in the C-drive (the SSD) which may cause issues if you have a small SSD. It's pretty straight forward to change the locations of most of the sub-areas though so that downloads and pictures are instead stored on the larger drive (worth remembering if building a machine from scratch in future).

3. Beware the heatsink on the memory, it might get in the way of your chosen cooler.

Other than that it all seems to work fine, nice to be able to play the original Crysis with all the settings set to MAX and the game not switching to a slideshow.

Just want to say thanks to all the advice in this thread and elsewhere on the forums.

For completeness here is the final spec:
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64
64GB Crucial RealSSD C300, MLC-Flas
Thermalright MUX-120 Black tower
2GB Gainward GTX 560 Ti Phantom
Asus P8P67 Pro Rev3, Intel P67
Intel Core i5 2500K Unlocked, 1155
8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3
2Tb Samsung HD204UI/Z4, SpinPoint E
Coolermaster CM 690 II Advanced Dom
700W Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold

Total price : £1,028.70 (incl VAT)

[Domestic_Ginger]

Well all the parts arrived on Friday afternoon, within the quoted delivery hour, and by the evening I had a working PC.

Photos Photos Photos!