£800 to Spend

[zak4994]

£600-£800 to Spend

Cousin has £600-£800 to spend maximum on building new PC.

Nothing fancy like liquid cooling, super-special-awesome cases and etc.

Oh and price must include Windows Vista Home Premium.

I know I could do this myself but I'm trying to get ideas to start off with from you guys.

Oh and moderators, feel free to move this thread appropriately.

Monitors, mice, keyboards not required. Internals only and a case.

Just found out that it will not be necessarily used for gaming so wont need some uber special graphics card.

Try to keep it preferably £600-ish and please do not go to Core i7's and high-end graphics cards.

 

[Rastalovich]

Bestest gaming platform ?

Or bestest foundation with possible future upgrades ?

Or work work work ?

 

[zak4994]

With £800 I'm guessing gaming. But obviously it should have work capabilites.

 

[rapidman17]

With 800 you can def get a decent i7 system...

Intel i7 920, D0 stepping ideally if you wana overclock it

Asus p6t, or p6t deluxe v2

Patriot Viper 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800, or if you wana spend a bit more then the Corsair Dominator's 6GB DDR3 PC3-12800C8 (TR3X6G1600C8D)

2 hd4850's in crossfire

cooler: Titan fenrir, TRUE 120 or noctua nh-u12p

Thts the basics i guess... any 750gb or so 7200rpm sata drive should do, and any dvd/rw will be fine unless the guy wants blu ray

 

[zak4994]

Oh and monitors, keyboard, mice not included.

Basically, the innards.

He said he wants it long lasting.

Updating first post.

 

[Rastalovich]

An experimental selection:

EDIT: Balls, didn't realize the upload thing would overwrite the image. Anyway top image is basically the bottom one with AM3 Gigabyte mobo with Phen x4 black ed, Sapphire 4890 & OCZ Vendetta 2 - total price more or less the same.

* In the one case they have a Windows 7 upgrade offer, but showing oos for some reason.

** Didn't see any of the coolers showing AM3, so I'd look into it being the same as AM2 - simply dunno.

Same points as above, although they don't seem to sell a decent 1366 cooler.

 

[Mul.]

Nice spec, Rastalovich. 1+ rep for that.

At £800, the world's your oyster for respectable DIY builds. £800 opens you up to all three major platforms, Core 2 Quad LGA775, AMD Phenom II AM3, Core i7 LGA1366, where this sort of money will buy a top end LGA775 or AM3 rig or a base spec Core i7.

Here's option 1. An AM3 based Phenom II build, very much like the one that Rastalovich has posted but with parts from eBuyer and a couple of different choices that led to the overall price coming in at £734.

No compromises have been made as such and there was money left to even drop a fairly expensive cooler that I recommend very much due to it's noise levels and performance. (Whatever you do, don't bother with the stock cooler)

Option 2, weighing in at your max budget of £800, or rather £1 over. Please don't shoot me

The main compromise in this build is that no money was left over for an aftermarket cooler. Core i7's do run fairly warm and the stock cooler will be a little noisy.

So what does the extra £65 for going i7 get you? The Core i7 is a CPU that excels particularly with multimedia based tasks including media encoding, mostly the things that will take great advantage of the CPU's hyperthreading tech as well. Other than that, it won't play considerably better when playing games and the gap narrows to near enough nothing when gaming upwards of 1680x1050.

Ultimately, I think we really need to know what your friend will use this computer for as the requirements are quite vague. If it won't be used for games much, what else will it be used for? May it even be that a system that's priced in at nearer the £600 mark will be more appropriate?

 

[Socks]

I was looking at the same sort of thing. I was literally just going to start the very same post and i jumped onto this.

This is the rig i came up with, and i think its a bloody good rig for what your looking at...as for the software, im not going to bother cos ill simply run on windows 7 rc for a while....meh. its free and does the job lovely.

I think thats a nice little rig, and will do for a damn long time...All you need to do is find a cheap as chips case and slap it in there...

 

[rapidman17]

Yh Muls second spec is basically what i was saying.... although i think you get better performance using 2 4850's in corssfire... comes to the same price as well, or a fiver so more...

 

[Rastalovich]

(I totally screwed up meh uploads)

At £800, the world's your oyster..

Yeah, I think so, £800 kinda let's u ~almost~ do what u want in so much that u can't buy the best of best there can be in all components, but u have alot of choice - perhaps too much choice

Really really depends on ur intentions after the purchase. All the platforms have great benefits, and whilst some excel over others, they don't exactly lead u to dismiss them outright for major reasons.

The asking what the rig is for is the most important question. My personal opinion is if u want gaming, dump all the cash in the best single gpu u can find and fill out the rest from either cpu camp.

If ur doing some serious work and couldn't care less about gaming, get the better cpu for ur needs and get a midrange+ gpu.

Heavy file usage, get the best hard drives etc

i7 still concerns me with it's future.

 

[noobieocer]

socks spec seems good. but i would replace psu with a 600w one and gpu with a 4870 1gb. £40 cheaper for gpu and only a few frames off.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=19126&page=9

powerdraw around 244w on a 920 i7 and 4870. psu most effiecient around 50% load so a 600w will be what i recomend.

and with the saved money you can buy a half decent case to house it in.

edit i just noticed socks spec dont have a hdd lol. so i will buy cheaper ram this stuff is from ocuk and theres a cheaper set of tripple channel ram for £30 i think.

then you can buy a hdd with money save from that lol

edit::

there you go

 

[Mul.]

The issue here is that as far as games are concerned, the Phenom II rig that I spec'd would be quicker purely due to it having a faster graphics card.

I too would like to know what the system will be used for as no one can really claim that their spec check is the most suitable without knowing that!

 

[Freak]

AM2 coolers will fit an AM3 chip ;D

 

[Rastalovich]

AM2 coolers will fit an AM3 chip ;D

Yet another pat on the back for AMD, no freakin needless changing of mounting holes ! Leaving u to either buy a new cooler (£30/40) or hoping the one u have comes out with a bracket (£10).

 

[noobieocer]

Yet another pat on the back for AMD, no freakin needless changing of mounting holes ! Leaving u to either buy a new cooler (£30/40) or hoping the one u have comes out with a bracket (£10).

but that advantage does require that he actually has a decent am2 cooler to begin with lol.

 

[Rastalovich]

OCZ Vendetta 2 ftw !

 

[Mul.]

i just confirmed the issue is 71 which is august issue. i think i get them early as i subscribed to them.

test on grid 1920 x 1200 res with 4x aa, 16xaf

core i7 920 @ 3.7ghz

4870 min fps: 58

4870 avg fps: 75

4890 min fps: 66

4890 avg fps: 83

e5200 @ 2.5ghz

4870 min fps: 32

4870 avg fps: 38

4890 min fps: 39

4890 avg fps: 44

so frames almost doubled. comparing dual with oct core. but then again dual core wasnt oc, but i oced my e2180 from 1.8 to 3.2ghz and i only found a few extra frames. so in the edn its upto you but i think core i7 is worth extra hundred.

__________________

Continuing the discussion from the other thread, I'm not so sure how that confirms that i7 is the best choice. It has certainly established that an E5200 will perform a little more than half as quick as a Core i7 920 but how can that be correlated to the AMD? We know that Phenom II is slightly slower than Core 2 Quad clock for clock, which it compensates for in clockspeed. £149 will buy you a 3.20GHz Phenom II X4 955.

This will depend heavily upon the resolution of the game and the game that's being played but the difference simply isn't there between an i7 920 and Phenom II X4 955 in most games.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-x4-955,2278-9.html

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/pii955/8.html

http://www.techspot.com/review/162-amd-phenom2-x4-955/page11.html

The results are there and as I say, the difference really isn't as black and white as many paint it.

Ultimately it still comes down to this, which remains unanswered

I too would like to know what the system will be used for as no one can really claim that their spec check is the most suitable without knowing that!

i7 would be my choice if he does a lot of media encoding or anything heavily multithreaded as this is where the platform truly shines. Gaming is not it's strongest point compared to how it does elsewhere but it holds up comparably against the Phenom, with the exception of heavily multithreaded games like World in Conflict. If he doesn't do much in either, £800 is too high a budget in the first place and a more modest AM3 system would be a better choice.

 

[Rastalovich]

Whatever happened to those rumors of them using "coding" to allow AMD cpus to interact better with AMD gpus ? i.e. beneficial to the gaming aspect fps in the main.

 

[Mul.]

To me those claims were marketing speil from the beginning. Whenever AMD touted the capabilities of their platforms, it had little to do with how the equipment interacted with each other but more to do with how cost effective it were and the performance that it delivered at a given price. This was first apparent with their later entry level solutions that incorporated the 780G chipset, the onboard HD 3200 and an entry level Athlon 64 X2 CPU. Regardless of the fact that the Athlon 64 X2 was as good as defeated by Core 2 Duo, AMD had made up for it with it's 780G chipset which ran circles around Intel's (at the time) G31/G33/G35 competition and as a result making the AMD the quicker system for the money. Better interaction though? Definitely not.

They kept the ball rolling with the 790GX and then the release of Phenom II which gave rise to the Dragon platform. When you can get 790GX boards from £70 that overclock, perform well and offer full 8x/8x crossfire support, paired with CPU's that beat the competition in their respective price brackets, their platforms were immediate winners. Again, little to do with interaction but more to do with improved tech and competitive pricing.

 

[zak4994]

Hmm...

Guys just found out he wants the computer for the sake of having one for daily use and the average stuffages. So going to things like i7 is overkill imo.