Mainframeguy

long time no post - after about five years withh zero disposable income soon I shall have some (yay!).

immediately I find I feel a powerful urge to build myself a somewhat more state of the art desktop and I am so out of date I thought I should come here for tips - the only item I could possibly salvage from the past is a 650W Tagan PSU I think...

I'll care about the case (convenience and aesthetics) and am curious about whether my old HD is worth considering with the new 4k sector ones coming on the market... the other considerationo is a pet bug bear of mine - which is the ambient sound of the computer.

I am not a gamer but do love a tidy snappy rig.

Any suggestions you lot would care to throw my way? What's new, what's a must have? Budget is £1k through to 1.5k tops...

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Bman

I'd upgrade the PSU as well, well depending on what you get.

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falconguard

Hiya MFG! what is the old hard drive? Cases well you are asking for opinions so I am sure they will vary.

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Steevo

I love my 5870, 1070 core 1330 mem on water. When I think about it I touch myself.

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ming

Intel core i7 ftw!

Don't worry about the new 4k sector HDDs, the manufacturers are just setting the minimum allocation to 4k to reduce file fragmentation. You can format your existing HDD to 4k (when you install a clean copy of Windows).

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American Zombie

Actually the 4k will matter if you have a system with XP on it.

In order for XP to use drives formatted with the new 4k size the drive will have to emulate the old 512B sectors. This will not matter for reads but for writes you will see about a 10% decrease in performance because the emulation will have to basically write all 1's and 0's twice.

LordOfLA

overclockers.co.uk have some nice discounted core i7 bundles. You could pair one of those with the tagan psu and a radeon 4000 series and you'd be golden for < £1k

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