Advice on Shopping Cart Please!

altich88 · Post by **altich88** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:28 am

Hi guys,
As you cans ee I'm after a gaming PC, and would like to keep it as quiet as possible. Feel free to change anything you think could make it quieter. The below basket comes to around Â£840, but feel free to stretch this to accomodate different bits!
Many thanks.

mark19891989 · Post by **mark19891989** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:52 am

im not sure about your choice of hard drive, i have read that the F1 is rather loud,

have a look at an F3, which is 70quid for 1.5tb which is probably way more then you need .

Haych · Post by **Haych** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:27 pm

Not sure where you're planning to buy your components from, but it pays to do a little shopping around when you're building a rig. If I may, I'd suggest the Asus VH242H as an alternative monitor. It's 23.6", ideal for gaming, has consistently received good reviews on Newegg, and can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk for just over Â£187 at the moment.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-VH242H-Gam ... 693&sr=1-3

Unless I've been misinformed, you may not actually need to buy a quad core for gaming. I'm planning on building a gaming rig myself next summer, but as my budget is tight I'm having to do as much research as possible to get best value for money. From what I can gather, a quad will offer no significant gains when it comes to gaming. At present, it's all about the GPU and very little else. I had planned to buy a Phenom II 955 BE, or a PII 720 BE at the very least, but when I discovered they're not going to improve things gaming wise, I settled on a PII 550 BE which is only a dual core, but can be easily overclocked on air from 3.1ghz to at least 3.5ghz by a total newbie (like me

). While games will eventually start to take advantage of quads a lot more - GTA IV is pretty much the only one that does so at the moment- it may not be for a while yet as a lot of developers can't be assed with the additional programming they'd need to do, and quads still only make up a small part of the market. If you plan on doing heavy multitasking, using very CPU intensive programs or doing a lot of video/music encoding, then a quad is what you'll need. Otherwise, you may be as well to just get a decent dual core.

Obviously, I stand to be corrected on what I know about quads, and it's totally up to you what you buy in the end.

If you haven't already, you may want to have a look on Ebuyer.com and see what they have. I know you can get the same PSU on there for about Â£71, plus they do free shipping with all orders over Â£50.

http://www.ebuyer.com/

hybrid2d4x4 · Post by **hybrid2d4x4** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:03 pm

I disagree about the quad comment above. Personally, I keep the CPU+mobo a lot longer than vid cards, so buying a more futureproof CPU is tops on my list of priorities. While a X2 is good enough today, 2-3 years from now the OP will drop in a better vid card and he's golden again, while you will probably be forced to upgrade the entire platform if you go dual.

On the vid card side, I personally wouldn't ever consider the 4890 from a noise perspective. The 4870/90 are real power hogs even at idle. I know that they're at an attractive price compared to the 5xx0 series, but even a cheapskate like me would pass on it if I was building today. Tough call on that one...

Finally, I'd get a single-platter 500GB HDD over a 320. The price difference is probably very small.

Haych · Post by **Haych** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:43 pm

@hybrid2d4x4

I don't disagree with your comment regarding quads. But considering how fast things are advancing, in 2-3 years when I do buy a quad, even AMD should have managed to get power efficiency down a lot better. Which would mean I'm buying a better quad than those available now, and as they would have become more of the norm than they are now, they may be a little cheaper. Heck, it's wholly possible that 2-3 years from now we'll be using CPU's with more than four cores. Additionally, DDR3 may have been better developed with lower latencies than are presently available for the budget conscious user. So I've really no issue with upgrading again in the not-too-distant future. But that's me.

I concur with your stance on the video card, and if the OP is prepared to stump up the cash, they could very easily get a 5850 for around Â£200 over here. It's just a question of availability with them at the moment.

jackylman · Post by **jackylman** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 7:07 am

I'd suggest the Asus VH242H as an alternative monitor. It's 23.6", ideal for gaming, has consistently received good reviews on Newegg, and can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk for just over Â£187 at the moment.

The Dell monitor use an IPS panel, whereas the Asus one uses a TN panel.
TN panels are cheaper/size and have better response times for gaming, but the color reproduction, viewing angles, and overall image quality are usually noticeably inferior to IPS or PVA-based panels.