Proposed New PC (£1000)

[ik9000]

+1 on the photo request

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?

i had the opposite problem - resuming from sleep sometimes caused it to hang. This is a problem with some systems and windows 7 hybrid sleep mode. Mine was solved by going to control panel -> power options -> disable hybrid sleep. This resumes the sleep and hibernate options which will be familiar to XP users.

Also, have you installed both 4-pin connectors to give 8-pin total to the motherboard by the CPU? Asus manuals suggest you can use either 4 or 8, and tend to come half pre-capped to imply you only need 4, but the manual hints using all 8 might help in some situations. If you've not done this already see if this makes a difference.

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).

no, it is simple if you have instructions. See this link: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how...ia_storage_ssd if you've been using your pc for a while and installed lots of stuff going through the registry takes a bit longer, but it is simple - I could do it so it must be.

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

yep - had this problem too. Fortunately the XMS3 memory i got just fit beneath the cooler's fan, but I had to remove it to get the RAM in. RAM with bigger heat spreaders might be more problematic...

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)

Nice rig. What monitor you using?

[ik9000]

ps if you have trouble uploading pics you can embed images into your posts by uploading them to imageshack http://imageshack.us/ click on the photo once uploaded and there'll be a box on the right of the screen with a text string you can copy and paste into the forum post which automatically grabs the photo from the imageshack website.

[gordon861]

I'll take a look at moving the User Profiles later, but it looks fairly straight forward.

I have a pair of 1920 x 1600 24inch monitors connected to the PC so lots of screen area to mess with.

I have a few pics at home and a Photobucket account so will add some later.