half decent gaming pc advice needed... ta

[Consignia]

I'm afraid I really can't remember. I know it had a docking port. Maybe I was just unlucky, I wasn't the first owner so maybe it took a battering off them. Desktop-wise, IBM/Lenovo have been fab, so it's not a slight on them as a manufacturer.

[Wilbur]

Not to worry I was just interested. Probably worth mentioning that Tier 1 on a couple of occasions have been out of stock after they've accepted an order on line from me. Both times they offered a higher spec piece of kit for the same price so not really a problem as far as I was concerned.

[Too Many Cochranes]

mook, I'd just like to add: good choice on a Gigabyte motherboard. I've built a few PC's and Gigabyte boards are my favourite brand. :-)

[REVEEN!]

I'd REALLY check out that companies reviews on line before ordering from them as well.......

For me, the pairing of a £260 CPU with a £40 Motherboard was a bit of a give away that they're a bunch of dodgy knobs.

---------------------------------

My old Athlon 5000+ system has served me well these past seven odd years but that's about 80 in human years and like most octogenarians it's becoming ever more eccentric and cranky . Also my almost as equally old xbox 360 has started to occasionally deny the existence of discs in it's dvd drive so I feel after threatening to build a new PC for the last two years the  time has finally come.[nb]In the interests of full disclosure I also happened to recently discover the in the PC version of Skyrim you can get a mod that allows you to shoot spells from your nipples. Oh and that Cities: Skylines looks like the worthy successor to Sim City 4 that I've been waiting the last decade for (but mostly the spell shooting nipples). [/nb]

Sadly I currently can't afford to splash out 'mook money' on a new rig but I can spare around £400ish, so roughly the price of a new gen console (I've seen what Sony & MS have to offer this time around and I'm not even vaguely interested).

After a week or so of exhaustive research I've come up with a build list for a low(ish) budget, hopefully best bang for buck gaming base unit which may be of use to someone here (or not).

(PC component prices tend go up and down like the proverbial Assyrian empire (especially on Amazon) so prices listed will likely have changed again by the time you read this)

Trigger Already Pulled

CPU
£52.92
Intel Pentium G3258 (Dual Core 3.20GHz, Socket H3 LGA-1150)
Yeah it's a pissy little dual core Pentium but it's also an unlocked Haswell K series which means you can easily overclock the living tits out of it (some OC wizards out there have it running stably at 5Ghz +) Overclocked to 4Ghz + it'll apparently easily keep up with (and in some cases out perform) it's bigger i5 and i7 brothers on single core games (which still seems to be most of them at the moment).
Also it's an 1150 socket so when i7's become more reasonably priced you can just drop one right in.

M/BOARD
£56.90
Gigabyte Z97P-D3 Intel LGA1150 Z97 ATX Motherboard
Cheaper (£30-£40) H81 boards now have bios updates that allow you to overclock Haswell K CPU's but rumor has it that Intel could at any time demand that these updates be removed from circulation so I decided not to take the risk. Also this particular board comes with software that allows you to choose a variety of overclocking options with a single click (and subsequent reboot).

RAM
£FREE
Samsung 4x2Gb ddr3 1333Mhz Dimm
Got these from my brother who considered them surplus to requirements. Not the best but should do fine until I can afford something sexier.

HDD
£FREE
WD Blue 500Gb 7200rpm
Again my wee bro somehow (I decided not to ask) ended up with a bunch of brand new OEM 500Gb 7200rpm Hard Drives. I got two, this one and a Seagate barracuda (which has already been half killed by a dodgy CIT brand HDD enclosure).

CASE
£24.95
Zalman Z1 Midi ATX/M-ATX Tower Case - Black
Nothing special but it has everything I need where I want it at a good price.

GRAPHICS CARD
£101.81
Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2GB, GDDR5, PCI-Express 3.0)
Basically, the best spec card my budget could stretch to. I watched it bounce around between £100 and £125 on Tax Dodgers International for several days before I pounced.

Trigger Not Yet Pulled

PSU
£56.66
Antec HCG-520M High Current Gamer Series 520W Modular Power Supply
Modular, built by Seasonic but cheaper than an actual Seasonic and should have ample wattage. What's not to like?
Might get a Seasonic if I spot a good deal but not a Corsair as they're apparently shite now that they're no longer made by Seasonic.

Seasonic.

SSD
£84.99
Samsung 2.5-Inch 250 GB 850 EVO Solid State Drive
I could instead get a 128Gb Sami pro for around the same money or a 240Gb OCZ (Toshiba) for £15 less.
SSD's are a bit of a unknown country for me, need to do a bit more reading up.

CPU COOLER
£20.15
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 92mm Evo Tower Cooler for CPU
Probably going for a TX3 as the 120mm CM  Hyper 212 EVO seems like overkill for this build. The Zalman CNPS5X Performa could be a contender though.

DVD BURNER
£12.99
Samsung 24x Retail SATA DVD Writer
As far as I can tell it's now pretty much an almost dead technology that hasn't been upgraded for yonks so it probably doesn't matter a toss which one you get.
This one says retail so it probably comes in a box rather than a bag.

GRAND TOTAL
£411.37 _{(add another £80-£100 if you don't have a mad brother who occasionally gets you free shit)}

[mook]

seeing as this thread has been bumped and my pc is still getting put together. after reading REVEEN's post would it be worth getting them to change the CPU from "CPU: NEW! Intel Core i5 4690" to the 4690K version as bit of futureproofing? bear in mind i'm just about as un-techy as it is possible be - in short is overclocking an utter ballache or is it within the realms of an idnot such as i?                     

[REVEEN!]

It's not really a matter of futureproofing as all the CPU's in your options list drop into the same 1150 socket so you're futureproofed no matter which one you choose (at least until Intel decides it's time for a new socket).
This is about a performance - cost trade off, an overclocked K will run games at higher fps and everything will generally run much quicker but it will require more expensive components and consume more power and so cost more to run (and the CPU's life expectancy will decrease a bit).

While there is still a skill to overclocking, these days it's really just going into the bios and changing some numbers to different numbers.
Looking at your build list I see your getting the same board as me so you'll get the easy tune software that does the overclocking for you.
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4958#ov (Scroll down to easy tune).

The faster a CPU runs the more heat it generates and the more cores it has the more heat it generates so you would also have to add a more powerful aftermarket CPU cooler to deal with the big increase in heat. From the spec options you have, the Zalman CNPS10X would probably be the minimum you could get away with. Also bigger fans running faster generally equals more noise and these tower air coolers are massive things so case size can become an issue as well though the corsair case you've selected should be big enough. I noticed it also has radiator mounts so you could also go the liquid cooled route which should be a bit quieter.




Looking at your build list that no name 500w power supply is a real weak link and should changed even if you don't upgrade the CPU.
These cheapo PSU's are inefficient to run, can cause a lot of system stability problems and have a nasty habit of randomly exploding in a shower of sparks often taking several other components with them (not to mention the possibility of burning down your house).

For a non K build you'll want a 450-500w that's at least 80 plus bronze certified (efficiency rating) gold is better, then I think it goes platinum and titanium but they're mucho deniro.
For an overclocked K build you'd be better off going up to at least 650-750w (again 80 plus bronze being the minimum rating).
(Also if you're never going to mess about inside the case then there's no point in spending more on a modular PSU).

As it stands your getting a perfectly good, up to date PC (if you change the PSU) which currently should be able to handle anything you can throw at it.
Upgrading to a K build will give you a faster and more versatile PC that will likely end up costing you a few hundred quid more.

Remember you can always have it upgraded at a latter date when the better kit gets cheaper.

[mook]

thank you... i called the company making the thing an hour after making my previous post and they said pretty much what you said. the chap from the techy dept. there suggested i upgrade the PSU, so i did from the bog standard to:

PRICE   
          PSU: 550W Corsair VS                                  £23.30

he reckons that will be enough to power the graphics card for the sort of games i like to play at pretty settings.

anyway, thanks again.








                                             

[Too Many Cochranes]

If you're after future proofing then a K version of the processor will sell for a bit more on eBay if you decide to change it in a year or two. I just assumed that you weren't comfortable with overclocking or fitting a different cooler than the standard Intel one.

It is worth the extra £15 ~ £20 for a K if you're happy doing a bit of fiddling. I was just saying that if you're going to be running it at standard speed there's no difference.

[Too Many Cochranes]

Oh aye, on the subject of changing CPU's and fans I'll add:

Instead of paying a tenner for a tiny tube of Arctic Silver heat sink compound (the paste that squishes between your CPU and fan) then consider a massive tube of Dow Corning heat sink compound that'll last you years:

http://uk.farnell.com/dow-corning/2265931/heat-sink-compound-tube-100g-dc340/dp/101685

I've used this on a few builds that haven't been overclocked and it works a treat. I use it on my own PC's when changing a heatsink or CPU. I'm not sure if it's OK for extreme overclocking, as I've not tried it but one tube of this shit lasts 100 times longer than a piddly 5ml overpriced tube of premium stuff.

Anyone that's worked in the building or industrial trade will have come across Dow Corning products before. Proven to make decent stuff an all that.

It's great being sober and rambling about crap like this at such an hour.

[mook]

hello again, a little bit 'o' bumpage.


just looking for a bit of info about importing my steam games to the new pc. the ssd isn't big enough to hold them all, so i guess it's best put the ones i play the most on the ssd and the rest on the mechanical drive. um... how do i do that? i've found some info about linking the drives with something called "mlink", but that was for windows7, i can't find anything i understand for win8.1.

as for getting the games on the new'un, is it easier just to just re-download everything straight from (we've got a fairly quick infinity connection) steam, or use a external drive to carry them over?

thanks.

[Ignatius_S]

hello again, a little bit 'o' bumpage.


just looking for a bit of info about importing my steam games to the new pc. the ssd isn't big enough to hold them all, so i guess it's best put the ones i play the most on the ssd and the rest on the mechanical drive. um... how do i do that? i've found some info about linking the drives with something called "mlink", but that was for windows7, i can't find anything i understand for win8.1.

as for getting the games on the new'un, is it easier just to just re-download everything straight from (we've got a fairly quick infinity connection) steam, or use a external drive to carry them over?

thanks.

Personally, I've tended to just install from new. When installing a game, there's an option to choose the save location – so you'll be able to decide where to put each game. I suspect mlink that you've found was invented prior to Steam letting you do this (it used to be all one location or nothing, IIRC).

If your old library is on an external drive, then you could move the location for Steam content to it using: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

FWIW, I would use the former way – just download what I need. However, something that you should check if the games support steam cloud services. If they do, then your save data should automatically download when installing the game (although, I think some games have had this function added after release, so if you played prior to that update, there wouldn't be anything to transfer – assuming I'm not talking out my hat!) If they don't (and most will, I suspect) you can use a game save manager to transfer them – just google it. Obviously, that depends about if you care about saves.

If you've played games with mods, if they were installed via Steam, they should also be downloaded automatically; if they weren't, then obviously not.

[mook]

marvellous, thank you...

i've think i've sussed the save game transfer thing, mind, if i doesn't work it's no big'un. thanks again.

[Thursday]

Mate, you're not going to be able to run Bloodborne on that new pc. You fucked it.