New build advice (help me avoid studying)

[iftiq]

Hello all,

It's been about four years and I'm thinking of building a new computer. My current set up is a Core2Duo E6600 with 4GB ram which I'm going to give to my sister. I have a bit of money to spend (~£1,000) but ideally would like some left afterwards too. At the moment I am leaning towards an i5 Sandy Bridge based machine. This is based on the sophisticated calculus of thinking that Sandy Bridge is the "future" but i7 is too "premium-y" for my needs.

Mostly I use my computer for web browsing, video conferencing, video watching and lots of Excel. I also use Mathematica and Stata a fair bit to do some mathematical modelling and data analysis. The computer games I play are fairly old- think Civilisation V and Counter Strike.

The last consideration is that it needs to be able to support three displays. At the moment I have two graphics cards one of which drives two 19' LCD screens via DVI and another drives a TV via HDMI which carries sound as well. I'd really like for the new set up to accommodate this (particularly being able to send sound down the HDMI to the TV).

It would be great if it could be really quiet.

The set up I've come up with thus far is:

CPU: i5-2400S- I've gone for the "S" version because I'm hoping this means a quieter fan?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel...che-65w-retail

Mobo: Asus P8H61-M PRO- This has an HDMI output but does it carry sound? Does anyone know?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel...che-65w-retail

Memory: Corsair XMS3 8GB DDR3 1600 (2x4GB)- The board above only has two memory slots. I'm hoping 8GB is enough as I've got 4GB at the moment which seems to do the trick.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-(...-9-9-9-27-165v

Hard Disk 1: Intel 120GB 320 Series SSD- This is an extravagance I suppose, but I've heard exciting things about SSDs.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/120gb...te-130mb-s-oem

Hard Disk 2: WD 2TB Caviar 6GB/s- Also an extravagance? It doesn't seem much more expensive than the SATA II drives and the board has a SATA III interface, so I figure why not?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-w...bsata-6gb-s-35

PSU: 650W Corsair HX Series- Is 650W enough?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/650w-...-12v-120mm-fan

Case: AKASA Raptor- Seems the least offensive looking one. I'd like something conservative, any suggestions?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/akasa...g-case-w-o-psu

I'm planning to use the ATI Radeon 4850 which I have at the moment. It has two DVI outputs which run my two LCD panels. I'm hoping that I can use the GPU on the i5 and the HDMI port on the motherboard to run the TV with sound as well. If anyone could confirm that this is possible I'd appreciate it tremendously.

This all comes to ~£700, which seems alright. Do you guys think I'll notice a significant improvement over my current set up? Is there anything I'm missing or have I made a serious boo-boo somewhere?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD Bulldozer is being released next month so it should help reduce prices a bit IMHO.

[jim]

650W is way more than you're going to need, 500 or so would be ample and still give you headroom.

6GB/s on a mechanical hard drive is pointless, I would only bother if it was really negligible price difference. You can get 2TB drives far cheaper than that, so I wouldn't bother.

As for memory, I would check your current usage - if you aren't going over 4GB at the moment (I never have in the entire time I've had my PC), then why bother forking out for 8GB? Might as well wait until you really need it, and buy it then... it's not difficult to swap in and out.

[Betty_Swallocks]

The extra ram would give an element of futureproofing though. I mean it wasn't all that long ago when we were saying that 4Gb wasn't necessary and 2Gb was quite sufficient.
Memory isn't all that expensive so I'd get the full 8 now. It's always better to get memory modules in matched pairs and buying them together is the only way of doing that.

[iftiq]

Thanks for the advice.

There seems to be a whole range of 2TB drives out there. I'm guessing that the 2TB Western Digital IntelliPower one (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-w...64mb-cache-8ms) will be sufficient for my purposes and much cheaper than the SATA III one I had chosen before.

As for RAM I've gone for 8GB mostly because it didn't seem to cost a lot more- so I'm pretty happy to keep that as it is.

Any advice on the graphics card and sound over HDMI?

[Queelis]

If you use a discrete GPU you won't be able to use the Sandy Bridge GPU, it'll be disabled. I think one option is just to go P67 and 2500K and overclock the hell out of it (or leave the overclocking for later), the other being looking up whether the Z68 chipset allows for using both discrete and integrated GPUs. If not - in the nearest future motherboards with the Lucid Hydra chips should be popping up, and they should (that's the idea) allow you to use different GPUs, possibly the integrated while idle and discrete when you run a 3D application (similar to Nvidia Optimus, which is getting a desktop version as well).