Ok as the tittle says this is my first build and im planning on building a cheap fast gaming computer.

This is what i have so far:



I already have a monitor, keyboards ect so these are no problem.

I was just wondering i anyone had any input if they think is this a good choice or things i could do with changing.

Oh and all the prizes are from www.ebuyer.co.uk and its comes to round about £400.

Also could we keep the computer jiberish low please becaue im a newbie to computer language. hehe well im honest lol.

Thanks inadvance and im awaiting yur replies.

Nathan Foster AKA magic

 

 

 

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Personally I would boost the RAM up to 4GB. Its dropped alarmingly recently down to around £30 for 2GB. Especially if you are gaming and running Vista, the more RAM you have the better. I think that motherboard supports at least 4GB (check though) so go for it if you can afford it.

Go for the NEC Optiarc rather than the Lightscribe. Lightscribe always seemed like a waste of money to me and the NEC drive is the best you will find.

By the looks of it you could generate quite a bit of heat in there. See if you can find a review for that case and check what the airflow is like. Also, if it gets to be an issue, you could always pick up a fan or two (120mm are only a couple of quid each) and fit them to your case.

Finally, check out Novatech, Scan and OCUK for your components. It might be cheaper to get them from multiple places, but remember to check if you are going to get charged for delivery.

Good luck building your PC and feel free to ask for help/guidance.

 

 

 

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Side Note: It would help that you have links to the hardware that way we don't have to guess if their is more then one with the same name and stuff like that.

I have to disagree on getting the 4 gigs because from sites I have reviewed during my course work in my degree it seems most people can't get it more to 3 gigs thats if they tweak it just right. I think the Power supply is a bit inadequate for what you have 500+ would seem a better wattage to have to help balance things out. Usually power supplies that come with case don't last as long and like I mention don't fit with the overall build if you start going for hardware thats used for optimal performance, and also you would like to have a fan built into your power supply as well to keep it cool.

As for your hard drive it seems good enough but with the prices dropping I say you could get a 200-300GB hard drive roughly the same price if you, I would recommend this one just because I know how vista likes to take up a lot of hard drive space.

With using your specs and keeping it within the price range you have this is updated specs I would consider and in no particular order:

Hard Drive

Seagate ST3250310AS 250GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 8MB Cache - OEM

Case

CoolerMaster Centurion 5 Silver Trim With Side Window - NO PSU

Motherboard

ASUS P5K AiLifestyle Series iP35 Socket 775 eSATA 8channel Audio ATX Motherboard

RAM

Corsair 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL5(5-5-5-12) Heat Spreader Lifetime Warranty

Video Card

PowerColor X1950Pro AC2 512MB DDR3 256bit Dual DVI PCI-E Graphics Card

Processor

Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.20GHz Socket 775 800FSB 2MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor

CD-ROM

NEC Optiarc AD-7170S-0S 18x DVD±RW/DL/RAM Serial ATA Silver - OEM

Power Supply

Coolermaster IGreen 500W PSU - 85% Efficiency ATX12V v2.2 120mm Fan

This set up comes to £400.53 before S+H and taxes which would then total £483.01

Now if seems like an ideal set up I would recommend check out these two power supplies http://www.ebuyer.com/product/114931, and http://www.ebuyer.com/product/99138. Both are 550W which would be plenty for what is listed here and it would seem that the second power supply would be more to your liken.

Best part about this set up is that these parts are with in a price range that oyu could easily switch them out for better stuff, just remember hardware needs to be compatible to some extent, meaning that you can't mix Intel with AMD parts so keep that in mind. So hopefully it gives an idea where you stand in building a powerful yet cheap machine, if you want a better idea check out the specs to the computer I built, cost a bit more because I bought a monitor and stuff like that, but it works like it should and I haven't had no problems with it.

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Great computer you got there partner . Soon i hope to buy me self new computer. Well, at least when i gather money to buy one good computer. I'm using Intel Celeron on 666Mhz now, and it is slow, when i come to my friend computer he has many MHz and RAM, and you can play many games. I barely play call of duty 4 on my computer, but on his it flys. We have call of duty 4 clan, so i need to buy new computer fast

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Thanks for the feed back and i was considering getting a biggest PSU so you have just helped me make up my mind lol.

I think i may have a look around on the market still but you have gave me a lot of help and when i find some other things ill post up a link and then you can tell me if its an ok buy or not hehe

Ill be back in touch and thanks again

Magic

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Yeah thats the problem with computer hardware, you have so many brands and different set ups you don't know which pieces to get and what not. I think I spent a total of3-4 hours getting my computer part together, made some mistakes along the way. Of course I had a budget and yeah I could have made it less but I want a descent computer that mimicks the more expensive ones as well.

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I was looking at some of your components and if you could bump up some price tags, you can squeeze a bit more performance and capability of your build.

For instance, I would recommend adding a bit more (about £25) to snag the E6550. The performance gain that I see is not in the pidly .13 GHz gain, but in the fact that the E6550 has double the L2 cache (4MB vs. 2MB). And we know how important that can be.

I also looked at the graphics card and I wonder if you would appreciate the performance boost in gaming with an ATI HD series card. (I figured you would want to stick with ATI for this build so I didn't look at NVIDIA.) Either the Sapphire or PowerColor HD 3850 will be a noticeable boost for less than £15. The important thing to pick out when choosing a video card is the GPU and not necessarily the amount of VRAM that's on it (although it does help with memory-resident renders, such as textures).

One more thing to figure out is how much space are you really going to take up on that hard drive. 250GB is probably daunting now, but you could future-proof by a bit by throwing in another HD of the same or snagging up the Samsung Spinpoint 500GB for about £20 more. Advantage of having two hard drives is that you can configure a mirror RAID just in case one fails, and if you go with the Samsung, it comes with 16MB as opposed to the 8MB.

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Good Eye that would in fact better a better Processor to have just on the fact it has just a bit more including a increase bus speed, some more feature added into. Of course if you can get a Processors that taps both L1, L2 and if your lucky L3, you would even be better off since you have more room to play with in memory.

Well with the graphics card anything in 256MB-512MBis good since it won't tap into RAM that much, but the best way to find out a good graphics card is through bench mark reviews, and so if you can narrow down the number of graphics card to 2-3 then go some benchmark reviews and see what they say about them. Of course if wanted to you can drop in two graphic cards for optimal performance, but in order to do that you would have to go for a motherboard that is geared more towards gaming, and then you would have to bump up your power supply to at least 600W for that.

As for the hard drive I was thinking of dropping in a 500GB hard drive but with the case I picked for the set up has 4 hard drive bays. I would know that because I have the very same case, and since he didn't mention what he planned to use the computer for 500GB would seem a bit much, thus the reason he could drop in another hard drive later on.

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I use Tom's Hardware for this AWESOME VGA chart that compares just about every GPU out there running a set amount of different games at different resolutions and settings. Which would lead to how I came up with recommending an HD series video card.

You can also take a look at their monthly feature of the best video cards for the cash. They just posted this now... literally. (It wasn't there when I checked this morning.)

I would not jump to dual video cards, just simply because you don't get the best bang for the buck that way. A Crossfire configuration will only boost performance up to 40% (correct me if I'm wrong)... and that would be the peak boost. Between having to purchase a compatible mobo, the two cards, and a power supply to support them, not to mention the heat build-up, I would have to strongly recommend a single card.

I mentioned the possibility of 500GB simply because people currently save movies, music, hi-resolution photos, and of course, have programs that for some reason nowadays take an astronomical amount of space. I myself have already filled up 80GB on my laptop and a 250GB external. (My laptop only has my programs and games, and the external holds my documents, music, movies, and downloaded programs.) Then again, nothing is stopping this configuration to be updated in the future with another hard drive.

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I would bump the processor to a core 2 Q6600. In the US it is 266 USD, I don't know if they sell them in your country though, the price should be around 150£.
The ASUS motherboard is a great decision, I'll have to say
Oh, and make sure your graphics card and monitor are compatible, some newer cards use DVI, and you might need a convertor.

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