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Help me choose a new desktop pc for SL (based in UK)

Emma Krokus

By Emma Krokus,
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Emma Krokus

Emma Krokus

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I'd love to have a custom built pc but have no experience, live in a rural place and am unsure about the local computer shop.

My budget is around £1,500 - the looks or size of the desktop are of no particular concern.

Monitor, keyboard and mouse aren't needed.

 

Preferences:

Solid state drive - around 100 gb

500 gb ordinary hard drive

better than GTX 660 graphics card

cd / dvd drive

& good technical support 

 

Please help me find a pc that will run SL really well. If you have the pc you are recommending, tell me about your experience with it. 

 

Thank you :)

Emma

 

 

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steph Arnott

steph Arnott

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£800.00 is enough. A Gigabyte sniper is around £150.00 a second hand 1 year guaranteed top range graphics hardware is around for £120.00. Power supply 450w to 750w £60.00, case well I never spend more than £50.00. Solid state hard drive, never got one so do not know. CD/DVD drives £30.00  Tech support that is included with the Gigabyte board. 4Gb ram £80 to £120

ADDED: Intel chip about £150, water cooler £150.00 to £190.00

£800.00 should be no problem.

BTW Allways use an anti static strap, they about £15.00

If you can not build it, i still woul buy the parts and pay for someone to put it together, or at least give a list and compare the prices of parts they want to charge you and if they getting parts thru trade they still make a profit at £800.

 

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Orca Flotta

Orca Flotta

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Emma Krokus wrote:

 live in a rural place and am unsure about the local computer shop.

My budget is around £1,500 - the looks or size of the desktop are of no particular concern.

Monitor, keyboard and mouse aren't needed.

Well, when you write "rural" in the UK, it's not really rural like many USA citizens define rural. I bet the next major city isn't more than  2 hours away from your home. I'd check the local shop anyway, simply for the reason it's local, so better support than having to schlepp your box thru the whole country. They might not have particularly the bestest prices but should be able to get you everything and assemble the machine for  you.

£ 1500 = € 1800. That's PLENTY! I paid around € 1000 for my pc (without keyboard, mouse and screen but with Win 7) like 4 years ago. I almost never shut it down, and that thing is still running like on the first day. Super reliable. Ok, I'd never run Windows again but that has nothing to do with the hardware. Oh, and every 3-6 months I open up the box and give it a good cleaning.

So, yes, for your budget you should get a 128-256 GB SSD, 1 TB hdd, a very good motherboard(I recommend Gigabyte), a beefy i5 or i7 processor and a GTX 670/680/770/780. Dont'g go for the reference card but chose wisely one of the board partner's cards: MSI, EVGA, Zotac, Asus, Gigabyte and others spring to mind.

For a power unit 500 watts should do the trick, those uberbig 1000 watts and more bricks are just nonsense. Also you won't need any watercooling mumbojumbo. Decent quality fans are plenty good enough if you don't overclock (and why would you?) I'm living in South Africa these days and it's often very hot here. Still I'm only using the standard fans that came with CPU, GPU, PSU and the box. Never had a single case of overheating.

For both, CPU and GPU, don't let them sell you ATI crap. Intel/nVidia is the combo for SL. And don't let them sell you a seperate sound card, nowadays integrated soundchips on the mobo are super quality. Mine does 7.1 surround, which I never use. In fact you won't need any of the stuff the big brand manufacturers are putting into their machines. Keep it simple, robust and stable.

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Jennifer Boyle

Jennifer Boyle

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In the past, both Dell and HP let you "build your own PC" on the Web and then they built it to order.  A few years ago we boght an HP laptop that we ordered that way.  It came 10 days after we ordered directly from Shanghai via FedEx.  I think that's a very good way to do it because it lets you see what the tradeoffs are .

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Dillon Levenque

Dillon Levenque

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I won't offer advice because you've got plenty already, but if the main thing you want the PC to be good at is SL, you're over-budgeted, and isn't THAT a good thing? If you're a designer or engineer or running a server or something than you might need to spend that much or more, but if SL and a good PC are your goals, you are in like Flynn.

If I had your [non]problem, I think I'd go for really good on everything but the graphics adaptor. On that I'd go for absolute best available that will work with SL, expense be damned. It's going to be outdone by the model that comes out three months later anyway, you might as well get the best one there is.  Plus you can throw the extra money in the Graphics Budget and a year and a half from now update. Just like you planned it. :-)

 

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Sassy Romano

Sassy Romano

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Alienware is provided via Dell and the prices on their site include in the home support for hardware for the first year.

 

The problem here is that you will get lots of opinion but I also agree with Dillon, any good base box with i5 our i7 processor Will be just fine. SSD is about £1 per GB at the moment and hard drives are about £30 per TB. Water cooling isn't necessary unless you are into extreme overclocking. I would buy a good power supply though, personally I disagree that 500W is enough when a high end graphics card is rated at needing 300W.

 

Good overall PC with a great graphics card.

 

Just like clothes, all the parts are made in the same factories anyway and branded accordingly so there's really not that much in it.

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steph Arnott

steph Arnott

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"disagree that 500W"

The stability of the power supply is far more important than the wattage, 500W is about right but a 750W that is cheap design is liable to wreak the other supplied components.  I am just saying quality is paramount with power supplies.

"Just like clothes, all the parts are made in the same factories anyway and branded accordingly so there's really not that much in it."

In some respect this is true, but if you visit the factories you soon realize that the cheaper versions have a lot of substandard components that the factory wants rid of without losing component costs. China is atrocious on that part. Any old rubbish gets put in cheap stuff. For the sake of £30  it really is a false saving.

Water cooler, true not really needed, but if one is going to build, one may as well be done with it and install.

As for RAM I never found them at £1.00 per G, I have to look harder. 4G as far as I am concerned is minimum, 16G be more than enough for domestic use.

 

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Czari Zenovka

Czari Zenovka

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Hi Emma :)

I can relate to your situation since about six months ago I was seeking advice/information about purchasing a new PC.  My stats are lower than what you want and can afford but these are the stats on my new (as of six months ago) PC:

CPU: Intel® Core i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz (3400.07 MHz)
Memory: 8137 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 660/PCIe/SSE2
Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.3165
OpenGL Version: 4.4.0

I went to two small PC shops in my town to get prices on building a PC for me as that is how I had my former PC built and then went to the same shop (in another city that is now closed) to upgrade components.  I was not satisfied with the components quoted vs the price so I then began looking online based on recommendations I had received from kind people in the forums.  One person suggested an online PC company that I had never heard of that offers custom building of PCs.  That was where I found the PC just right for me based on a balance of components that would run SL well but still be within my budget.  

The company is Directron.  I offer it to you as another avenue to check out.  My PC arrived in perfect condition, extremely well packaged, and with all the packages and information of each component in my PC, including the packaging that the RAM came in.  I give this company 5++++++ gold stars!!!

I did purchase my graphics card from TigerDirect and, after I discovered they have a brick and mortar store in my area, later purchased a better power supply from them as well.

Good luck with your PC selection!  For awhile I was so confused about where to buy the PC and putting together the right components, but after I received it and got it set up, I am THRILLED with it.

 

 

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Emma Krokus

Emma Krokus

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Hi Orca,

thanks for your helpful reply.

You're right - my nearest town isn't that far away. I don't have any recommendations for computer shops even in that town though.

So, my preference is to find a reputable company that will build a pc for me.

And I sure don't have any idea about what this thing should cost!! So people's comments on that are much needed :)

 

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Sassy Romano

Sassy Romano

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Just to be pedantic, both quality and power are important

 

It's no use having the world's highest quality power supply if the rating of it is being exceeded and the component is under excessive stress.

 

It needs to be adequately specified both for now and ideally future upgrades AND be of suitable quality.

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Orca Flotta

Orca Flotta

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Emma Krokus wrote:

it's hard for me to know what is absolutely necessary and what are frills.

Oké, easy task, challenge accepted.:matte-motes-nerdy:

 

What you absolutely need:

- a case (d'uh)

- power supply 500+ watts

- motherboard (no "gaming" stuff) of decent quality

- Processor

- Graphics card (nVidia GTX 6xx or 7xx series, models upwards of x6x)

- RAM DDR3, 8 - 16 GB

- hard drive 1 TB 7.200 RPM

- cooling solution. Aftermarket fans are often much more sufficient and quiter than the stuff that comes with the original parts

 

Nice to have:

- SSD

 

Frills:

- sound card

- integrated wifi adapter/modem/router

 

And here comes the crux: not all online shopping sites supply you with a compatibility service, that's why I prefer to purchase from a brick and mortar store. Because the guys there can tell you exactly if your rather biggish GTX 680 will fit into the nice stylish case you chose for your build.

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Kwakkelde Kwak

Kwakkelde Kwak

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Orca Flotta wrote:

What you absolutely need:

- a case (d'uh)

- power supply 500+ watts

- motherboard (no "gaming" stuff) of decent quality

- Processor

- Graphics card (nVidia GTX 6xx or 7xx series, models upwards of x6x)

- RAM DDR3, 8 - 16 GB

- hard drive 1 TB 7.200 RPM

- cooling solution. Aftermarket fans are often much more sufficient and quiter than the stuff that comes with the original parts

 

Nice to have:

- SSD

 

Frills
:

- sound card

- integrated wifi adapter/modem/router

Pretty much what I'd suggest, just a few details and pointers....

- Some cases come with a power supply, so be careful not to buy one of those plus a separate power supply.

- If you get a beefy graphics card, 500 is most likely below the recommended wattage. I'd suggest 600W. You can look at the graphics card's manufacturer's site for reference.

- For a processor, don't spend extra money on an i7. Unless you want to do some serious video editing or 3d modelling, an i5 will do just fine, you won't notice any difference in SL.

- 8GB of RAM is plenty.

- Avoid 32-bit operating systems.

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