New System Time

[Abbadon2001]

Hi all,

Long time snce I have been on the forum, but like Indyjones, its time to build a new system, as mine has been around just about as long as his...

I am looking to spend around £350-400 ish, and will be buying motherboard, processor, cooler for cpu, ram, graphics card, maybe a larger sata hdd, see how it goes.

I need to be able to use some of my current pata drives (I have 2 pata dvd drives, 2 pata hdd 2 sata hdd.)

My case is an all aluminium case I got from scan or ebuyer a number of years ago (its a good sized tower, removeable mobo tray, and hdd caddy/rack.) So i hope it will accomodate whatever board I decide on.

I use the pc for pretty much everything, its got a dv1 to HDMI that goes to my 32inch lcd, it feeds surround to my surround sound setup, I use it to game on the tlc tv, and it functions as my desktop, internet etc....

Advice welcome on component choice, I do favour amd based systems, and also ATI based graphics cards (mainly because had grief using multiple screens with Nvidia in the past), but open to suggestions.

cheers

Andy

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

How good graphics do you need? Do you play the latest games? I'm not in UK but that sounds like a pretty low price for all that and a video card.

Just also wanted to say I'm pro-AMD and pro-ATI also.

 

[indyjones]

Hi all,

Long time snce I have been on the forum, but like Indyjones, its time to build a new system, as mine has been around just about as long as his...

I am looking to spend around £350-400 ish, and will be buying motherboard, processor, cooler for cpu, ram, graphics card, maybe a larger sata hdd, see how it goes.

I need to be able to use some of my current pata drives (I have 2 pata dvd drives, 2 pata hdd 2 sata hdd.)

My case is an all aluminium case I got from scan or ebuyer a number of years ago (its a good sized tower, removeable mobo tray, and hdd caddy/rack.) So i hope it will accommodate whatever board I decide on.

I use the pc for pretty much everything, its got a dv1 to HDMI that goes to my 32inch lcd, it feeds surround to my surround sound setup, I use it to game on the tlc tv, and it functions as my desktop, internet etc....

Advice welcome on component choice, I do favour amd based systems, and also ATI based graphics cards (mainly because had grief using multiple screens with Nvidia in the past), but open to suggestions.

cheers

Andy

Hi mate its been a while!


Right that's a fairly tight budget but we should be able to do something with it.

Now the first snag you will hit is pretty much all modern systems only have one PATA port, this means you are restricted to 2 devices only (unless you get some PATA to SATA converters which can be problematic).
So either you keep your dvd drives (bearing in mind a new one is ~£20 for a SATA one) or your hdd its up to you

Now my opinion is ditch AMD processors. They were cost effective during the athlon XP days, and great during the athlon 64 days, but they are lagging behind intel now by a large margin.
I would recommend going for intel core duo.
GFX cards were Nividia all the way, the 8800 range trashed the competition, however in your price range ATI cards are very competitive and thanks to good pricing by ATI certainly keeps them as an option. In my HTPC I have an ATI 2600XT which I got due to it very good decoding of HD (not that I have a HD telly yet) and thatit can pass sound over HDMI which I thought might be handy. So in your price range I would say ATI 3850? or a 3870 if you could get a good price, failing that there is the Nvidia 8800GT which is a great card.
Finally I would say 2 gig of ram for now (unless you want to run vista then more is recommended) and you might need a new PSU. I don't know if you ever changed the one which came with your case but if you have not you will need a new one.

Hope things are good with you and will speak to you soon

 

[indyjones]

After speaking to you on the phone, try this (all prices are from Scan computers) and feel free to fine tune the parts.

Asus P5K-E/WIFI-AP, iP35, S 775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 1066/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX
£88.82 512MB Sapphire HD3850 PCI-E2.0 (x16), 1656MHz GDDR3, GPU 668MHz, 320 Streams, 2xDVI-I/HDTV, HDCP
£104.56 2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12
£30.13 500 GB Samsung HD502IJ Spinpoint F1, SATA 300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ £45.77 Intel Core 2 Duo, E8200, Wolfdale Core, S775, 2.66 GHz, 1333MHz, 6MB Cache, Retail
£109.26 Pioneer DVR-215SV 20x DVD±R, 10x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, DVD-RAM x12, SATA, Silver, OEM
£19.49 550w Corsair VX Series PSU, ATX, PS/2, 5 year Warranty
£55.21