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Heya, thanks for the replies.
I _think_ he wants 2 hard drives so he can backup onto one of them.... anyway, this is what comes from OC:
Intel Core i5-4460 3.20GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail
£134.99
Gigabyte H81M-HD3 Intel H81 (Socket 1150) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard
£41.99 inc VAT
Kingston HyperX Blu 16GB (2x8GB) 1600MHz PC3-12800C10 Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C10D3B1/8G x2)
£109.99 inc VAT
Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD
£42.98 inc VAT
£42.98 inc VAT
OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM
£19.99 inc VAT
Gigabyte KM6150 Keyboard and Mouse Set
£9.95 inc VAT
TOTAL £403 ex any delivery charge
1 - It looks like 500g hds are around £36 so I just went with a popular-looking 1tb versions for £43....
2 - I now notice no PSU mentioned in the quote.....
On OC there aren't too many PSUs but I can add....
Corsair Builder Series CX 430w Modular '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (CP-9020058-UK)
£37.99 inc VAT
3. I also notice no tower in the quote..........
I have no idea which tower but lets say we're looking at £50 here for now...
That brings us to
£490
The original build/quoted from a store:
+ Show Spoiler +
Intel i5 4460 quad core processor
Intel H81M chipset motherboard
16Gb (2 x 8Gb) DDR3 1600Mhz memory
2 x 500Gb hard drives
DVD/RW optical drive
Wired keyboard and mouse
No operating system installed
£478 inc VAT
As you can see.... they appear to offer a very good deal.... assuming they remembered that we will need a psu and tower....
What do you think so far? Am I going for too expensive components (e.g. the RAM, hard drives)? Do I need a smaller PSU (Cyro suggested that I will not need a 500W PSU but on OC website they don't seem to get much smaller! I'll have another look..yeah they start around £30 and £38 for modular design so I could cut £8)
I think the next stage is to wait for your initial comments then email my boss with an update and ask what he's doing about a tower case. I'm a bit surprised the "build it yourself" components appear to be substantially more expensive than the store's pre-built quote
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Prebuilts do not mention cases nor power supplies as they will just give you the shittiest case and power supply possible.
CX430 is okay. Probably much better than what will come with the prebuilt.
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for £37 CX430 sounds expensive though, no?
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its the modular version (you can remove excess wires), the standard version is 30 iirc
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
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Hey guys! I'm planning to build a new rig this summer – I'm currently on a Macbook Pro as my gaming computer – and I've been researching how to select parts, but I'm hoping for some pointers. If you have a full build to recommend, or at least some tips on where I might be able to save some money, that'd be much appreciated.
What is your budget?
I'm hoping to build a rig for around $1200-1300. I could spend more, but I'm not quite sure what exactly I'd be paying for at that point – the difference between High and Ultra graphics isn't that important to me; the difference between running a game and running a game while streaming, on the other hand, matters quite a bit.
What is your monitor's native resolution?
I'll be buying a monitor and keyboard for this computer – I wasn't necessarily counting that in the $1200-1300 figure above.
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
I'd like to have the option to play most AAA titles, but ultra high graphics aren't super important. I don't play a lot of first person shooters – I play a lot of Starcraft, Kerbal Space Program, and a few other things that will run on my computer now, although I might step up to more strenuous games if I had a system that could handle it. At least 30 FPS on something like Bioshock Infinite is something I'd shoot for, I think.
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
I'd like to be able to stream. Obviously that means recording, encoding, etc. while running a game at the same time.
Do you intend to overclock?
Unless someone made a powerful argument for why I should, no.
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
Same as overclock, hadn't intended to unless someone gave me a very good reason why I should.
Do you need an operating system?
Yes – like the monitor, wasn't necessarily counting the cost of an operating system in the $1200-1300 figure. I haven't researched buying OS's but my understanding is I can get some discounts because I'm a student?
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
Yes – monitor and keyboard, and no, that's not part of the $1200-1300. I have a mouse, and I suppose I'd want to get a mic and maybe camera for streaming later, but for now that should be fine.
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
Nothing comes to mind, nope.
What country will you be buying your parts in?
United States of America.
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
None to speak of.
Thanks for your help!
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
+ Show Spoiler +On June 23 2014 06:17 ChristianS wrote:
Hey guys! I'm planning to build a new rig this summer – I'm currently on a Macbook Pro as my gaming computer – and I've been researching how to select parts, but I'm hoping for some pointers. If you have a full build to recommend, or at least some tips on where I might be able to save some money, that'd be much appreciated.
What is your budget?
I'm hoping to build a rig for around $1200-1300. I could spend more, but I'm not quite sure what exactly I'd be paying for at that point – the difference between High and Ultra graphics isn't that important to me; the difference between running a game and running a game while streaming, on the other hand, matters quite a bit.
What is your monitor's native resolution?
I'll be buying a monitor and keyboard for this computer – I wasn't necessarily counting that in the $1200-1300 figure above.
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
I'd like to have the option to play most AAA titles, but ultra high graphics aren't super important. I don't play a lot of first person shooters – I play a lot of Starcraft, Kerbal Space Program, and a few other things that will run on my computer now, although I might step up to more strenuous games if I had a system that could handle it. At least 30 FPS on something like Bioshock Infinite is something I'd shoot for, I think.
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
I'd like to be able to stream. Obviously that means recording, encoding, etc. while running a game at the same time.
Do you intend to overclock?
Unless someone made a powerful argument for why I should, no.
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
Same as overclock, hadn't intended to unless someone gave me a very good reason why I should.
Do you need an operating system?
Yes – like the monitor, wasn't necessarily counting the cost of an operating system in the $1200-1300 figure. I haven't researched buying OS's but my understanding is I can get some discounts because I'm a student?
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
Yes – monitor and keyboard, and no, that's not part of the $1200-1300. I have a mouse, and I suppose I'd want to get a mic and maybe camera for streaming later, but for now that should be fine.
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
Nothing comes to mind, nope.
What country will you be buying your parts in?
United States of America.
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
None to speak of.
Thanks for your help!
If you're not overclocking and you dont want better than decent settings on a 1080p 60hz screen, there's no need to go to macbook level pricing ;p
I'l maybe throw up a draft build but somebody from US could do it better
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I think he wants an extra HD so he can create an image of the working computer on it and keep it for backup....not sure if this is the best idea but I think that's what he wants to do. I could suggest a usb hard drive as it may be more useful (I doubt he wants to backup 500g of stuff, more like 50g for the convenience of not having to re-install anything if the first drive should break...... )
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I think he'd be better off with a simple mirrored drive (RAID 1 or through Windows) than keeping an image on a secondary internal drive.
If you aren't going to keep the second drive offsite, I don't see much value in using an image over just a mirrored drive.
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why would creating a "mirror" on the same drive be a solution to a worry that a hard drive may fail? (rather than having a 2nd drive on-site)
is it just coz the risk of a hard drive failure is monumentally small (and easy to detect when it starts to fail)?
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That mirror idea feels not so good. Just leave it as a normal drive and use real backup software. That way, you can use things like incremental or differential backups, run those very often, and have some kind of history for all your stuff. That's better if you break your Windows or something else by mistake. A mirror won't protect you against that, but backups will.
That said, something external like a WD MyBook just feels smarter for that. The last time I looked, it also wasn't that expensive compared to a typical internal drive, probably because it's using a cheap 5400 RPM drive inside.
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Hi, my friend needs a budget build. Here are his reqs. Thanks!
What is your budget?
$400-$500 (as low as possible)
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1920x1080
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
Dota 2, L4D2 on high; lower games on medium
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Internet, Microsoft Word
Do you intend to overclock?
Absolutely not
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
No
Do you need an operating system?
No
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
No
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
No preferences
What country will you be buying your parts in?
USA, online stores
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
None
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I was talking about building a mini ATX build earlier. I need some help picking a CPU,GPU and mobo right now.
What would be a good choice for those 3 components considering:
I'm building in a Fractal Design Node 304
http://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/node-series/node-304-black
Looking to play WoW, CS GO, Starcraft 2, Dota 2 at 1080 high settings
Trying to keep costs down.
Not looking to OC or stream, pretty much only gaming.
Edit: I heard a lot of good things about being able to OC the new pentiums on just stock coolers and get some great results for cheap, might not work great in a small chassi though?
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On June 24 2014 04:52 Ropid wrote:
That mirror idea feels not so good. Just leave it as a normal drive and use real backup software. That way, you can use things like incremental or differential backups, run those very often, and have some kind of history for all your stuff. That's better if you break your Windows or something else by mistake. A mirror won't protect you against that, but backups will.
That said, something external like a WD MyBook just feels smarter for that. The last time I looked, it also wasn't that expensive compared to a typical internal drive, probably because it's using a cheap 5400 RPM drive inside.
The problem you often run into in the small business environment is money. Good programs are not cheap per system (or seat), and good cheap programs are not often friendly enough to the Decider (be they senior managers, owners, or cheapskates). Hell, it took the company I was SysAdmin at losing 3 days of work to a nasty virus infection (replicating worm across the LAN, flooded the switches) before the owner/pres spent money on an antivirus. The operating system on all PCs was (and, keep in mind, this is a Software Engineering company) Windows 98SE - because that's what came on the computers when he bought them. There was one Windows NT 4 server (that was the oldest system in the company). He almost had a heart attack when going for ISO 9000 certification and I told him how much the source control software cost.
TL;dr - Money - that's why no real backup software. No money for software or no money for trusted, competent IT. (No offense to anyone intended - I sure as hell am not (nor was) trusted and my competent qualifications are woefully dated.)
Hey, my external 2TB WD MyPassport Ultra was only $120 and covers me really well for anything I actually care about.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Edit: I heard a lot of good things about being able to OC the new pentiums on just stock coolers and get some great results for cheap, might not work great in a small chassi though?
You can add a lot of voltage to the 2c/2t pentiums before you increase their power consumption so much that they use as much power as the i7 which has twice as many cores and HT. I've heard a normal OC like 4.5@1.3 to be fine on the stock cooler
4790k which ships with stock cooler runs like 4.2ghz @~1.15v or so usually under 4 core high load, you could use like 1.45v on the stock cooler on Pentium if it didn't mean packing the amount of heat into a smaller area. The cores would overheat because of that, but the heatsink itself wouldn't be overwhelmed (comparatively to other cpu's)
It's a fun choice. They seem to be the go-to choice for low threaded games and still run higher threaded stuff alright, if you want a cheap processor. For sc2 i wouldn't use AMD, not sure how dota and cs run on fx6300
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On June 24 2014 03:49 FFGenerations wrote:
why would creating a "mirror" on the same drive be a solution to a worry that a hard drive may fail? (rather than having a 2nd drive on-site)
is it just coz the risk of a hard drive failure is monumentally small (and easy to detect when it starts to fail)?
A mirror provides 100% real-time redundancy against hard drive failure. It does not protect against environmental damage or theft, i.e. if your computer is at your office, the office burns down (all or in part), you've not only lost your data but all your backups. With offsite backups you greatly reduce the chance of catastrophic (permanent) loss of data and in some cases reduce insurance premiums by having multi-site storage.
It's extremely, extremely unlikely for both drives to fail before you can replace one (realistically you should have a spare on hand for this eventuality, but even if you didn't it's highly unlikely for the other one to fail in the ~week it takes to order and ship a new one out). This means that a standard "one drive fails" situation becomes a minor nuisance, not a massive loss of manhours.
However, as mentioned previously, this does not protect you against software errors. Anything you do is written to both drives, so there is no going back to a previous stable state. If this is desirable, images are great. A common practice in IT is to create a base image for workstations (an image being basically a snapshot of a drive, including operating system, installed programs, configurations, etc). You can then apply this image to PCs en masse. Something goes wrong on one? Wipe it and re-image -- quickly and painlessly back to a known, working state.
External storage (generally network storage on its own redundancy setup) should be used with this, so re-imaging a PC doesn't lose any important data. That is, you'd save and access your working files to a networked drive (or at least have them placed there REGULARLY, like every day -- this can be scheduled with most redundancy solutions). Basically you're looking to answer the questions "If I lost everything on my PC today, how fast could I get up and working again? How much time would be lost (through the recovery process plus redoing anything lost)?"
Redundancy, disaster planning/recovery, etc are all huge things in the business/IT world. I'm told Macs have a pretty good application for home use, but Windows you're going to have to go hunting for freeware or buy something. I haven't done too much on the setup side. For simple file/folder mirroring you can use SyncToy (by Microsoft). For images Clonezilla and Acronis spring to mind, but I haven't used either much.
He almost had a heart attack when going for ISO 9000 certification and I told him how much the source control software cost.
Can't just use TortoiseSVN? Didn't see much on ISO 9000 specifically, but we've used it for government (hosted on secure internal servers) and commercial contracts without incident.
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On June 24 2014 12:15 Craton wrote:Show nested quote +He almost had a heart attack when going for ISO 9000 certification and I told him how much the source control software cost. Can't just use TortoiseSVN? Didn't see much on ISO 9000 specifically, but we've used it for government (hosted on secure internal servers) and commercial contracts without incident.
At the time, TortoiseSVN didn't exist. Heck, Subversion was only just adding branching. Most of what was being source controlled was binary Word docs documenting testing procedures, protocols, and requirements for contracted projects. We went with Perforce in the end, although how long that stayed after I left I couldn't tell you.
Cost was paramount - although reliability and speed were also strong factors. Also, the backup strategy relied on Iomega 2GB Jazz drives - which was as horrible as you would think it to be.
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i am not sure whether i need to upgrade my whole PC or just mainboard, CPU and RAM !
My current specs are:
AMD athlon || x4 635 @ 4*2,9 Ghz
a new decent cooler , compatible for all CPU
4gd DDR3 RAM 1333mhz
ASUS m4a87td evo Mainboard which can only run AM3 not AM3+ ?!?!?! (google gives no results)
Radeon HD 6870
530 Watt Power Supply
Samsung 840 Evo SSD 120 GB
old tower computer case which is not that good
What is your budget?
Either ~ 250-30 € for mainboard , CPU & RAM
or ~ 500-600 € for new PC without OS , SSD and power supply
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1920*1080 + second monitor : 1280*1024
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
CS:GO at native resolution (1920*1080) and low graphic settings
LoL at native resolution and low graphic settings
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Streaming and watching 2 streams during gaming
Do you intend to overclock?
only if really needed
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
No
Do you need an operating system?
No , I have a 64 bit OS of my choice
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
no
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
no
What country will you be buying your parts in?
germany
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
amazon.de
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On June 24 2014 12:15 Craton wrote:
[...]
Redundancy, disaster planning/recovery, etc are all huge things in the business/IT world. I'm told Macs have a pretty good application for home use, but Windows you're going to have to go hunting for freeware or buy something. I haven't done too much on the setup side. For simple file/folder mirroring you can use SyncToy (by Microsoft). For images Clonezilla and Acronis spring to mind, but I haven't used either much.
[...]
Windows 8 has "File History". It works on all files that are in the user defined Libraries in the Windows Explorer. That will by default include the Documents folder of the user. File History can do for example hourly backups of the files. Performance wise it seems to work well enough even when adding dozens of gigabytes of stuff to a library for it to watch, though I've only seen it work with an SSD as the source and not with a HDD. If the backup target location is gone, for example a network drive that's not accessible or an external drive that's off, it supposedly can cache stuff, will then save the changes when the target drive comes online. I didn't test that.
It seems the Apple Time Machine stuff works easy and automatic like that, except it can do the whole system. I'm not sure if I understood things right, but things like that might be super easy for OS X to do because of the way it works. It seems there's the system file and folder structure, and each program and the user then gets their very own structure that just logically adds on top of that. All of that is contained inside their own folder. This means you don't really have to install a program for example, it just comes with its own lib files somewhere in a sub-folder, doesn't have to copy those libs into the system lib folder. So even if Time Machine would just copy the folders of the programs and the user folders, it would still catch everything that's important. If a machine breaks, you would reinstall the OS and could then in the worst case (if Time Machine doesn't actually image the whole system) simply drag the folder for the user and the various program folders onto that machine and everything will work.
Both File History and Time Machine allow you to browse through the file and folder structure in their archive, while you separately also flip through the date and time of the things you look at. For me, that was in practice neat to revert idiotic mistakes made when editing files, but I guess using a real revision control system would be better for work.
There could be issues with File History. I think it does not copy files that are currently opened for example. There might be some stupid Windows reason for that particular behavior. Meanwhile OS X is Unix and that lets you do anything you want to a file that's open in a program, for example lets you delete it without asking any question, so I bet Time Machine isn't like that. If I've seen that right and File History really has a stupid issue like this, there might be some more. 
Windows 7 also comes with a backup tool. It has a feature to create an image of the system drive, and it also can do a backup of files and folders. That's working like a traditional backup tool, is too slow to run very often like File History. It feels like it's intended for a daily schedule at most. You also can't at all configure when the system image portion of it will create a full backup or when it decides to do an incremental one. This broke the idea to use it daily for me.
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EPT
