£650 to spend - Little advice?

Hi guys.

I'm trying to build a new PC over the coming months in preparation for Battlefield 3. My previous machine will not upgrade further and, since I'm currently using an Athlon 6400 Black, I'm having to replace the lot.

I've got £600 to spend ( which means I can get away with about £650 before the wife throws a fit ) and there are certain criteria which apply.

• Quad Core Intel
• Minimum 8gb RAM
• Nvidia GPU

I already have 2 decent hard drives so no need to add them yet but I do want to add a 120gb SSD when I get some more cash. I've also got a very good PSU.

Here's what Ive come up with.


Intel Core i7 2600, S1155, Sandy Bridge, Quad Core, 3.4GHz, GPU 850Mhz, 8MB Cache, 95W, Retail
£223.40

Asus P8Z68-V LE, Intel Z68, S 1155, PCI-E 2.0 (x16), DDR3 2133/2200, SATA 6GB/s, RAID, ATX, VGA
£117.22

8GB (2x4GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Jet Black, PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC, CAS 8-8-8-24, XMP, 1.50V
£64.99

1GB MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II/OC, 40nm, 4200MHz GDDR5, GPU 880MHz, Shader 1760MHz, 384 Cores
£184.27

Sharkoon T9 Value Green Edition ATX Case inc Front USB 3.0/Audio & Cable Management
£47.96

Anyone got any suggestions to make that better without increasing the budget?

If you get the above, you will certainly have a very good system.
For me, i'd probably want to consider issues of design / appeal of the case for asthetic value, which (for me) means something more classic & understated.
Keeping within your general budget, i'd look at the following:
Silverstone SG02B-F Evolution £52
Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 Intel Z68 £107.
However it's very much a personal choice.

Edit: Also, considering the specs of Battlefield 3, it looks like 4 threads may well be sufficient, which would imply possible savings on going for the Core i5 2500K, if you need some wiggle room in the budget.

Save the cash and buy the I5 2500K, unless you are doing mass amounts of video editing/processing then get the I5

Just as a confidence check, what power supply do you currently have?

I'm with modd on this one, drop the 2600 in favour of a 2500k and spend the extra on a Nvidia 570.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jasp

I'm with modd on this one, drop the 2600 in favour of a 2500k and spend the extra on a Nvidia 570.

---

Jasp has hit the nail on the head, its exactly what i did, i went i5 2500k and MSI twin frozr II GTX 570, never looked back.

The only reason I added the I7 was for future proofing. I expect this to run a lot of virtual machines when Im studying but I'll consider dropping down to the i5.

The PSU is a BeQuiet 1000w modular unit. I'm sure it's more than enough.

Still havent got round to buying this system yet. If anything the prices seems to have gone up a little. Anyone got any new suggestions worth looking at?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rylan

... Anyone got any new suggestions worth looking at?

---

'Fraid not, at your budget. i5 2500K / i7 2600K still offer the best all round performance, and there haven't been any new graphics releases. It's been a funny few months for tech...

One of the things that makes me think though is that Intel are set to release a new chipset very shortly. I'm hopeful it will push the price of the I7s down.

Only thing you have to worry about atm is mechanical HDD prices. SSD prices seem to be stable atm though.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rylan

One of the things that makes me think though is that Intel are set to release a new chipset very shortly. I'm hopeful it will push the price of the I7s down.

---

It won't by much if any - the chipset is for a different market segment.

Not really worrying about HDD prices. I have two decent drives which I use in a RAID0 combination at the moment. The tech is lagging behind now but it's not really worth bothering about.

What I'm more likely to do is install the OS on the array till Christmas, get an SSD when I have more cash and reinstall. Then I can use the RAID for storage.

if you're going to be running multiple vm's at a later date I personally would go for the I7. Bang for buck the 560 Ti is one of the best cards out currently so you're on to a winner there as well.

Buy an SSD and then spend whatever you have left...

That's fairly limited advice Eric. The PC is for a combination of study ( which requires a lot of VMs ) and gaming. If you're recommending an SSD as the top priority it's going to hamper every other component.

As I say, I can get an SSD at Christmas when I have more money but I can't take the £120 I'll have spare then and improve the motherboard and CPU.

The question is...are you really going to be hammering the system with VMs so hard that the extra 5-10% performance you get from HT will actually be noticeable?

I doubt it very much....I run a ton of VMs on a regular basis and have HT disabled on my i7.....

Essentially thats where we're at now. It's not about SSD or case any more.

It simply comes down to i5 + 570 or i7 + 560ti.

From all accounts the variation between i5 and i7 is neglible for what I'll need. However, from all other accounts the difference between a 560ti and a 570 is just as negligble.

Incidentally, why have you decided to disable the HT?

HT can play havoc with some titles. BF3 is one of them, another (that I was recently playing) was resident evil 5.

Considering you only get the advantage of HT when you have a lot of concurrent small threads AND the CPU is maxed-out, it's advantages are seen once in a blue moon...to the point where I decided a while ago, that it was being turned off.

If you game, you are going to see infinitely more use from a gfx card upgrade then HT.

Okay.

Thanks! It's just time to spend the cash now.

one thing Illl mention is are you looking to overclock? if so then I'd spend more on the motherboard, the cheap Z68 motherboards have fairly weak VRM's which will not bode well for long term overclocking, they should be fine for running at stock but the sandybridge cpu's start pulling a lot more power when you overclock them.

For overclocking you want to be looking at something like the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4 or Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3P-B3 or Asus P8Z68-V or even the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3