£800 to spend - non gaming system - updated

[Nick F]

I'll looking to get rid of my mac mini due to it taking 30 seconds - 1 minute to process a RAW picture which is doing my head in!

I've got a budget of £800 (£900 if its worth it) and want to build a super quick PC. Here's the important bit - I won't need a great graphics card because I won't be playing games. That's what my 360's for!

I already have a monitor and a 300GB external HD but would still like to try and have at east 1TB.

Remember speed is the most important factor here!

Let me know what you think!

[CrazyMonkey]

I saw some 400gig Seagates in the bargain section for £50.

2 of these +External and youve passed the 1TB piece of pie.

Would have to be C2D, some good RAM (2G's?)

Or do you want it to be SFF? As the Mac Mini is small?

[Nick F]

Full size machine is fine, 2GB would also be good and I'm pretty sure that Core2D is a must!

[MadduckUK]

yeah core2 is a must. especially with £800-900 when a good chunk doesnt need to go on the graphics card, what proggy are you using?

[Nick F]

Will be using lots of Photoshop and other office applications.

Pc will be doing lots of post processing and one day it will be used for work on Video.

I need to have the system setup though so that it fully supports Vista and I will be able to update the Gfx card at any time if I decide to sell my 360.

[moogle]

right now I have a gaming pc in my basket at £798, it's not a tip top smashing gaming pc but the graphics card is decent for games. don't know if you plan on overclocking but the parts i chose are for overclocking.

E6400 - £134 @ Scan on Today Only
2GB Corsair Dominator Ram £170 @ Scan Today Only
750W Xclio Modular PSU £70 @ Scan Today Only
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste £5 @ Scan
512MB MSI 7900GTO Silent £140 @ Scan Today Only
Asus P5B-E Plus £94 @ Scan

Don't know if you want 1TB more HD space or 1TB combined with your 300GB one so I'll list best components.
Could get 2 of these
500 Gb Samsung HD501LJ Spinpoint T £95 @ Scan
or get 1 of that and 2 of these in RAID-0 for faster read speeds.
250 Gb Samsung SP2504C SpinPoint P120 £46 @ Scan

Which comes to £800 and under depending on the choices, although this is excluding a case/fans/cd-rom/cpu-heatsink.
The case I chose was an Antec 900 which is a gamers case, but you could get the P180 which offers similiar cooling. Other things like Clunk would say is get a E4300 and then you'd have £20 off the price. If you want speed on a E4300 you'll have to overclock and the best heatsink I've seen reviewed is the Thermalright Ultra 120, it will need its own 120mm fan but it cools alot! I only see MicroDirect have these so I'm going to add this to the Request post in Scan forums. As for the thermal paste Scan have the good Arctic Silver which now the second best, as I have seen a new thermal liquid which beats it, but Scan doesnt stock it so I'll go add that too. It's called Coollaboratory liquid pro and it cools better than AS5.

[Clunk]

E6600 (I think the extra cache might serve you well with your photoshop stuff).
Any PC2-6400 ram or above (4-4-4-xx maybe)- cheapest, and its getting cheaper.
7600GT - great card for the money.
Corsair PSU 520w.

Get some good cooling for the cpu and graphics and you have yourself a silent and fast system there

Not sure whats good at the moment with hard drives, last one I bought was a samsung 400gb and its very quiet and pretty nippy.

[moogle]

E6600 (I think the extra cache might serve you well with your photoshop stuff).
Any PC2-6400 ram or above (4-4-4-xx maybe)- cheapest, and its getting cheaper.
7600GT - great card for the money.
Corsair PSU 520w.

Get some good cooling for the cpu and graphics and you have yourself a silent and fast system there

Not sure whats good at the moment with hard drives, last one I bought was a samsung 400gb and its very quiet and pretty nippy.

, i thought you'd preach the e4300
If you want to save like £50 on the ram then get the Geil Ultra 2GB from microdirect, as for the graphics I'd still say spend that extra £40 on the 7900GTO ( GTX in disguise )

Tomshardware says the samsungs are good
http://tomshardware.co.uk/storage/ch...2=674&chart=31
they are in the top range in mostly all of those tests.

[Clunk]

The E4300 is great for the money, but the overclock isnt guaranteed and it has 2meg cache.

The 7900gto is pointless if he isnt gaming, in fact the 7600gt is probably overkill, but much cheaper.

[moogle]

The E4300 is great for the money, but the overclock isnt guaranteed and it has 2meg cache.

The 7900gto is pointless if he isnt gaming, in fact the 7600gt is probably overkill, but much cheaper.

yea, the cache only makes a diff in video encoding and that stuff, as for the 7600gt, there is no other cheaper alternative I guess, 7300gt isnt that much lower and the graphics diff would be massive. I guess im just in love with the 7900

[kempez]

Also a 7600GT can be bought with an HDMI out on it for a bit of future-proofing.

Agreed on the E6600, deffo need 2gb RAM and perhaps factor in a decent cooler and give it a mild overclock?

[MadduckUK]

i did a quick build on scan and 4GB RAM is doable for the £900..sticking with an E6600 and 2x500GB Hdd's...this is depending on your take on operating systems tho (as in directhex would disagree)

[Nick F]

I think 4GB might be slighlty overkill at the moment, the motorboard will need to support this much Ram though.

What's MDMI?

[dbh]

Think he means HDMI.

[moogle]

I think 4GB might be slighlty overkill at the moment, the motorboard will need to support this much Ram though.

What's MDMI?

2GB + Vista + Photoshop = Almost full. When I had Vista I used a tweaking tool to run the Windows Core Files all in ram, because it said I had enough and it would increase speed. But with Vista on Full ( Graphics wise ) I had firefox + photoshop + msn and the sidebar widget showed i was at 97% usage of my ram. You can always buy more ram at a later date for a cheaper price.

[kempez]

Photoshop + Vista with 2gb RAM isn't really a problem imo

And yes HDMI