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Thread: Advice on building a new PC

  1. #21
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by pmjd View Post
    ...I know
    Sorry, I missed some posts in the thread, and don't know how.

  2. #22
    Registered User Beowulf's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by bigdjiver View Post
    The optimum heat transfer is metal to metal. Because the metal surfaces are not perfectly flat and smooth there is much less that 100% contact. There should be the minimum amount of heat paste used, just enough to fill the minute gaps, and it should be spread over the whole surface. The big dollop I often find in the middle of the CPU probably separates the surfaces and reduces the heat transfer.
    I use Arctic silver compounds (I like Arctic Silver V.. but that may be overkill.. Arctic silver III is just as good) and I use a pea sized (garden pea .. not marrowfat) and "smear" it out between Headsink head and CPU dye. neither are hugely expensive.. you're only talking a couple of pounds here. I think 3.5g of Arctic silver 5 is about a fiver these days.

    beware.. not all thermal pastes are equal. I was reading an article recently (and if I could find the link again i'd post it here) about a guy who did a test on 5 top silver thermal pastes.. only the arctic silver ones actually contained any silver (and in very high percentages too.. 99.9%)

    I also saw a site as well where the builder SANDED and POLISHED the cpu dye and heatsink heads to a very fine mirrored finish to maximise metal to metal contact !! Not something I would like to try.

    All things in moderation.. use good quality thermal grease.. but don't over do it !

  3. #23
    Registered User RedFox's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Loads of good advice already, so just a few comments:

    Quote Originally Posted by robd View Post
    I presume a well labelled motherboard with a decent manual will help me make the right connections to all the other components...
    Spot on!

    Quote Originally Posted by Beowulf View Post
    Building a PC is child’s play.. just ensure the memory and CPU match what the motherboard supports and if you can play with meccano or lego you can build a PC.
    True - although it gets harder when you plug it in and nothing happens!

    Quote Originally Posted by geoff332 View Post
    I'd take a look around Tom's Hardware : Hardware News, Tests and Reviews. They do good reviews and will also give you instructions on building a machine as well.
    It's certainly on my list of places to go.

    Quote Originally Posted by robd View Post
    I have been doing a lot of reading up about it to try and future proof my selections as far as possible (and within budget) ...
    I've learned from expensive experience that not much is future proof for more than about 12 months! It's a personal choice but I'd tend to err on the side of the budget. One of the advantages of building your own machine is added confidence to upgrade it later.

    As for other issues, noise would be high on my list, as mentioned by a couple of other people. The other would be energy efficiency - this page is a good starting point for this. And if you're using less power you can turn down the fan speed, which also cuts the noise too.

    Good luck.

  4. #24
    Commercial Operator StokeBloke's Avatar
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    Cool Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by RedFox View Post
    If you're using less power you can turn down the fan speed, which also cuts the noise too.
    Nahhh water cooling and over-clocking is the way to go

    Anyway; why would someone who is basically lazy not just buy a ready to go box?

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  5. #25
    Basically lazy robd's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by StokeBloke View Post
    Nahhh water cooling and over-clocking is the way to go
    Well, I may have a dabble at OCing - depends how confident I feel

    So, got a bit ahead of myself and have ordered

    Antec P182 Gunmetal Grey Super Mid Tower Case - No PSU
    Corsair HX Series 520W Modular PSU - ATX12V v2.2 APFC
    ASUS P5K-E/WIFI-AP AiLifestyle Series P35 Socket 775 Socket eSATA 8 channel Audio ATX Motherboard
    Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping (2.4GHz 1066MHz) Socket 775 L2 8MB Cache (2x4MB (4MB per core pair)
    Crucial 2GB kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Ballistix Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL4
    2 * Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ 500GB SATAII Hard Drive 16MB Cache - OEM
    Arctic Cooling AC-FRZ-7P Freezer 7 Pro Socket 775 Processor Cooler
    Razer DeathAdder 1800DPI Gaming Mouse
    XP Home OEM

    all from Ebuyer and a

    BFG Geforce 8800GTS 512MB OC

    from Play.com

    I like the RAID and the WiFi AP on the Mobo - intending to try and set up RAID 1 so when (not if) a HD fails I will not have a big rebuilding job on my hands. Am hoping this will not affect performance too much though.

    Re: the comments earlier in the thread about thermal paste it appears that the stock Intel cooler comes with thermal paste already attached as does the aftermarket Freezer 7 Pro I have opted for.

    Decided on XP rather than Vista as
    * Vista has no real 'must have' features over XP IMO
    * performance is still reputed to be better in the former
    * I also have a couple of peripherals that don't seem to have Vista drivers yet.
    I figure that if XP suddenly stops meeting my needs or Vista suddenly acquires some feature that I really want then I have no probs with wiping and doing a fresh install and/or dual booting. I wondered about trying to use my existing XP OEM on the new Mobo but don't think MS would allow it to activate - seems you are allowed to upgrade pretty much everything but your Mobo

  6. #26
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by robd View Post
    Well, I may have a dabble at OCing - depends how confident I feel
    Get it all set up first then OC a bit at a time.

    So, got a bit ahead of myself and have ordered..
    Sounds like decent brands to me, I've not bought many components recently to see what current best value for money is, but it sounds ok
    A decent gaming moouse is a must if you play games, Ive got a logitech laser myself Is this mainly a games machine then ? Although I would agree with XP over Vista regardless, except i would pick Xp Pro for the encryption and server stuff ([uel=http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx]here[/url])

    BFG Geforce 8800GTS 512MB OC
    I've sworn by ATI for years, but please give us a futuremark score when you get this all setup. You could consider a better soundcard rather than onboard, something like a creative f4tality - free up quite a bit of cpu and onboard mem in games.

    I like the RAID and the WiFi AP on the Mobo - intending to try and set up RAID 1 so when (not if) a HD fails I will not have a big rebuilding job on my hands. Am hoping this will not affect performance too much though.
    Not sure how much of a hit you'll take but if you were to stripe rather than mirror you would actually get a benefit, especially when playing games that access disks fairly often. (even more so if you were to get raptor drives, but they're not cheap)

    Re: the comments earlier in the thread about thermal paste it appears that the stock Intel cooler comes with thermal paste already attached as does the aftermarket Freezer 7 Pro I have opted for.
    I was never convinced that attached paste tabs and the like were the most efficient, but you can try and see.

    I wondered about trying to use my existing XP OEM on the new Mobo but don't think MS would allow it to activate - seems you are allowed to upgrade pretty much everything but your Mobo
    I think a sob story of my "motherboard died due to a power surge" or such like may work, but in general, yes i've heard that too - they are not too eager to allow for an mb change.

  7. #27
    Basically lazy robd's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    Is this mainly a games machine then ? Although I would agree with XP over Vista regardless, except i would pick Xp Pro for the encryption and server stuff ([uel=http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx]here[/url])
    Well, I can't deny that the ability to get more than 15fps in Far Cry (yes, I know it's ancient ) and Quake 4 were factors in my decision.

    Thought about the XP Pro stuff but I have been running Pro at home for 6 years or so now and have never used the encryption. It's not going onto a network so the Domain/GP stuff is superfluous too. Of the list at that URL the only thing I want is the security tab so that I can set folder/file permissions and I have seen a number of tips online as to how to get that to work in XP Home


    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    I've sworn by ATI for years, but please give us a futuremark score when you get this all setup. You could consider a better soundcard rather than onboard, something like a creative f4tality - free up quite a bit of cpu and onboard mem in games.
    I've got an Audigy SE here that I will try with it. As for Nvidia/ATI I just went with the one that seemed to have the better reviews and ATI isn't that company at the moment.

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    Not sure how much of a hit you'll take but if you were to stripe rather than mirror you would actually get a benefit, especially when playing games that access disks fairly often. (even more so if you were to get raptor drives, but they're not cheap)
    Raptors a bit beyond the budget. Striping worries me in terms of a disk failure and what I would need to put back in the array (an identical disk in terms of capacity, etc?) though given that HDDs will have moved on significantly by the time it becomes a problem (hopefully) maybe I shouldn't worry about that.

    I think a sob story of my "motherboard died due to a power surge" or such like may work, but in general, yes i've heard that too
    I reckon MS will have heard that one a few times

  8. #28
    Registered User Beowulf's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    Get it all set up first then OC a bit at a time.


    get it running stable then slowly crank it up little by little.. if you get to the point where you find it's "less than stable" just go back a step or two.

    Just out of curiosity.. I had a look at what pre-builts were out there and popped past Alienware's website.

    not going into the spec here but let us just say you can get one heck of a lot of machine.. .. .. .. .. for £5,500 ex vat !

    and no.. not planning spending anything even remotely approaching that .. I'll stick to my home build / gradual upgrade of every component in my current PC

  9. #29
    Registered User David Franklin's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    I've sworn at ATI for years,
    Fixed that for you. (In truth, I don't think there's much to choose between them really).

    Not sure how much of a hit you'll take but if you were to stripe rather than mirror you would actually get a benefit, especially when playing games that access disks fairly often. (even more so if you were to get raptor drives, but they're not cheap)
    Striping improves bandwidth, but tends to make latency worse. It looks good on benchmarks, but unless you need broadcast master quality HD playback, I'm unconvinced it's really worth it.

    The raptor I have in my "production HD machine" is noisy as hell; I can't say I've noticed a practical speed difference either. (But that machine is "odd": I have it so I have a machine the same spec as a customer would use, but as I'm 90% using it for SW development rather than actual real-time graphics, it doesn't get to shine, really).

    Pity SSD drives are still so expensive; they do really seem to make a difference when used as a system disk (IO bandwidth isn't improved, but latency is something like 100x better).

    As far as mirroring goes: every time I've lost data on a disk, it's been due to some kind of SW problem, so mirroring wouldn't have helped. External 1TB drive to back up to seems a better plan.

    Edit: Even with XP, I think I'd go for 4GB of RAM these days. Worth knowing that many people find it's harder to overclock with 4 1GB sticks as opposed to 2x2GB, so just adding another 2GB later may not work as well as you'd hope.

  10. #30
    Basically lazy robd's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by David Franklin View Post
    Edit: Even with XP, I think I'd go for 4GB of RAM these days. Worth knowing that many people find it's harder to overclock with 4 1GB sticks as opposed to 2x2GB, so just adding another 2GB later may not work as well as you'd hope.
    Yes, was wondering about this. In the end I stuck with memory from the ASUS QVL as I'd seen a few comments mentioning that the Mobo I chose was a bit particular about memory. The QVL didn't have any brands listed at DDR2-800 that allowed for a 4GB configuration. The QVL may well have been updated but I couldn't find it on ASUS website (which isn't the best organised ) I want to get the machine up and running then if necessary I can play with memory configurations.

  11. #31
    Registered User Beowulf's Avatar
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by robd View Post
    2 * Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ 500GB SATAII Hard Drive 16MB Cache
    Nice drives.. I've used Samsung Spinrite drives in the past (and in my current PC) and they're fast and quiet. Am looking at Samsung again for my upgrade / new Build.. which may not be as imminent as I would like

    of course, my requirements are not so much for game play and frame rate and more number crunching. I only have the one game (WoW) and it's not that demanding

    however I do (should I say did) a lot of Audio processing, photograph editing, graphics rendering and heavy mathematics. I might fancy getting a graphics card later later that supports HD output and a blu ray Rom drive.. perhaps. but it's not a main feature I require.

  12. #32
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Quote Originally Posted by Beowulf View Post
    however I do (should I say did) a lot of Audio processing, photograph editing, graphics rendering and heavy mathematics. I might fancy getting a graphics card later later that supports HD output and a blu ray Rom drive.. perhaps. but it's not a main feature I require.
    They're getting cheaper blu-ray/hd drives - only £80. Can't see the need for one myself, DVDs do for now. If only you could download HD content without DRM legally, its so annoying that it is so easy to get illegally - ho hum - maybe one day

  13. #33
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    Re: Advice on building a new PC

    Well, am writing this from the new PC. Build went well after using the 'wrong' screws for the Mobo and having to replace them all in place .

    No overclocking yet as want to ensure it's stable at standard settings but all seems OK./ RAID isn't happening - I could install Windows on a RAID volume but it just blue screened on me each time at the XP login screen so I scrapped it and decided I will just ghost the main disk to the spare disk periodically.

    Far Cry is flying but I did get my arse kicked severely as soon as I ventured online multiplayer

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