Noobish Question about Hardware Parts

Oosa is such a great country. I am not recommending Dell, just referencing a good deal.

pparks1 said:

..........I don't forsee a need to replace a CPU like a Q9550 in the next 3 years given how powerful of a CPU it is.........

pparks1 said:

Here is a quick list of some parts that I put together stateside for just about $800 even...you can use it as a reference.....
.............
Total ~$823

That's a great help!
Gives me a good basis and some ideas to work from.

Unfortunately the equivalent list of parts from a good value online supplier in the UK comes to £666 which is $1100
Looks like going for Core 2 Duo would maybe knock about £100 ($165) off that which would bring it closer to the mark.
Could get away with a smaller HDD but that wouldn't make a great deal of difference.

Hmm....needs some more consideration. Not sure whether I'll be building it before or after Christmas (I've already sorted my pre-order copy of Windows 7 !) so maybe by then the exchange rates will have improved or there will be some better deals about.....maybe

Thanks for your time, I'm sure I'll be coming back with more questions in the near future.
Cheers.

Antman said:

Oosa is such a great country. I am not recommending Dell, just referencing a good deal.

Yeah...this is the sort of thing that's available in the UK
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167291
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167292

I've also considered this AMD Phenom 9500 2.2GHz Quad Core, 4GB RAM, 640GB HDD, DVDRW, Card Reader, nVidia GTS250, NO OS (£400=$660)

Main disadvantage I can see is there's no option to add more RAM and probably some of the basic components are lacking in quality.
Suppose it depends how quickly it will become outdated....but if it lasted 2yrs+?

I would much prefer to have a go at building my own system but sadly cost and value for money are factors that have to be taken into account.

Your other option would also to be knocking down the case just a little bit. That Antec 900 is a bit expensive, you can get an Antec 300 for about 50-60% the cost.

And if you have time to wait, the prices and the power levels are simply going to increase...that's the way that it always is.

pparks1 said:

Your other option would also to be knocking down the case just a little bit. That Antec 900 is a bit expensive, you can get an Antec 300 for about 50-60% the cost.

And if you have time to wait, the prices and the power levels are simply going to increase...that's the way that it always is.

Antec 300 looks good (certainly is popular).

I notice Corsair do a 450W HX Modular PSU in UK (not available in N&S America) which is 30% cheaper than the 520W, and with 7yr warranty. I'm guessing this would probably be enough for my needs? (I don't foresee me going for SLI or adding a stack of extra drives)

I could also knock the cost down a bit if I go for a 500GB 16MB cache HDD.

I'm concerned I may regret going for a dual core rather than a quad CPU looking ahead (I believe most games at the moment still only utilize 2 cores but I guess that will change in the near future?).

I'm still keen to do a self build which I'm now doubting will save me much cash but I'll be getting better components, more options to upgrade in the future and more satisfaction.

I can wait a few more months, and in the meantime keep an eye out for discounts too.

Thanks for all the advice, much appreciated.

I have a dual-core at 3.5 GHz and it is fast enought for me. But most of my applications (Matlab, energy simulations) iterate and are single threaded by nature.
I see that when the virusscan works, defragmenting etc. both cores are used. So I think in real life (and W7 certainly does a good job using multiple cores) a quad is good. Especially for games assuming you still run something else (firewall, bittorrent, borwoser, antivir etc.). In the future more software will be multi-core.

My case probably is rare with single threaded applications, MP3 video... all is multi-core. Even with single -threaded applications W7 uses multiple cores better. I talked to the Trane Trace support and they said Vista is 20% faster than XP with their software jsut because the traskmamanger (or whatever) uses multiple cores better in single threaded application. future OS probably will even improve that part.

Sope said:

Yeah...this is the sort of thing that's available in the UK
Zoostorm Advanced Gaming Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer
Zoostorm Gaming Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer

Those are C2D w/DDR2. I linked to i7 w / DDR3. Not the same.

Antman said:

Those are C2D w/DDR2. I linked to i7 w / DDR3. Not the same.

Understood, although I was actually trying to show what is available in UK relative to my price range - sadly (for me) US prices are much better than UK

Antman said:

Oosa is such a great country. I am not recommending Dell, just referencing a good deal.

Out of interest I've just gone and looked for that Dell PC from a discount UK website, I couldn't find an exact match but something very close (i believe) here is priced at £769 which is $1266 US

Still prefer to build my own though, but it shows it's going to be more difficult than I thought to beat some pre-built systems on price v spec.