I'm starting to look at a new PC.

 

I want something good but it's not used for gaming so doesn;t have to be top of the range.

 

I've still got all the flat sceen monitors, keyboards, mouse etc at home so only really need the barebone PC.

 

The PC will probably be most stessed when rendering video's but apart from that it's just normal usage.

 

What do you guys think of this set up ?

 

Coolermaster Elite 335 Mid Tower Case, Black, with Coolermaster 460w PSU

RC-335-KKPK-GP - Coolermaster Elite 335 Mid Tower Case, Black, with Coolermaster Elite 460w PSU http://www.scan.co.uk/products/coolermaster-elite-335-mid-tower-case-black-with-coolermaster-elite-460w-psu

 

Samsung 2TB Spinpoint F3EG Hard Drive - HDD

2TB Samsung HD203WI Spinpoint F3EG, EcoGreen, SATA 3Gb/s, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ, OEM

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-samsung-hd203wi-spinpoint-f3eg-ecogreen-sata-3gb-s-32mb-cache-89-ms-ncq-oem

£67.62

 

Corsair Memory Dominator 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz CAS 9 DHX XMP Dual Channel Desktop

CMP8GX3M2A1600C9 - 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC, CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, DHX, 1.65V

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-(2x4gb)-corsair-dominator-ddr3-pc3-12800-(1600)-non-ecc-cas-9-9-9-24-xmp-dhx-165v

£128.22

 

Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H Intel H55 Express 1156 Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H, Intel H55, 1156, PCI-E 2.0 (x16), DDR3 1600/1800/2133, SATA 3Gb/s, VGA, uATX

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigabyte-ga-h55m-ud2h-intel-h55-1156-pci-e-20-(x16)-ddr3-1600-1800-2133-sata-3gb-s-vga-uatx

 

Intel CPU i5 650 Dual Core Processor

BX80616I5650 - Intel Core i5 650, Dual Core Clarkdale 32nm, 3.2GHz, 4MB Cache, 73W, Integrated GPU @ 733MHz, Retail

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-core-i5-650-dual-core-clarkdale-32nm-32ghz-4mb-cache-73w-integrated-gpu-733mhz-retail

 

Sony Optical DVD Writer, AD-7260S-0B, SATA, Black, OEM

Sony AD-7260S-0B 24x DVD±R, 12xDVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RWx6 ,12xRAM SATA, Black, OEM

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/sony-ad-7260s-0b-24x-dvdr-12xdvddl-dvdplusrw-x8-rwx6-12xram-sata-black-oem

 

 

After VAT i added it works out about £450. Is thata good deal or can you reccomend something better?

Hi Stu

 

I would look at a quad core intel processor with as big as a graphics card memory as you can get I believe 4gb cards aren't that expensive now

 

and get about 4gb main mem in the fastest configuration

 

It may be worth buying a computer mag like Computer Pro or Personal Computer World and see who is building to spec and doing Christmas deals

 

That way you could exactly the performance you are looking for

 

Merry Christmas to you and the family

 

Tony

Try this place, get all my stuff from then and always give good advice

 

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/

Hey Stu, hows things?

 

Have you considered a Mac? I picked up a 1 year old imac a while back on ebay for around £600. Never had a mac before but am really impressed with it for home use!

 

Not done it on mine but you can get software to dual boot into windows if needed also :)

 

So much quicker, easier & more reliable than a PC

 

Just a thought

 

Have a good Christmas & keep off the squid legs ;)

Thanks All.

 

Tony the i5 is a quad core :). I'l have a lok at what you suggest and see what I can find.

 

jmwuk, nice site, thanks I've found a nice little package on thee but the wife is trying to convince me to get a touch screen :(

 

Paul, hi mate,long time...

Yeah been thinking about a mac for a bit but they just seem so much more expensive than PC's. I guess I'll dwell on it all over christmas and make a decision. P.S. I'm a sucker for squid legs :)

About the Intel® Core™ i5 Processor

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology◊1

 

Automatically speeds up your processor when your PC needs extra performance—that's smart performance with a speed boost. Available in select models of the Intel® Core™ i5 processor-based systems.

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology◊2

 

Features four-way multi-task processing that allows each core of your processor to work on two tasks at the same time, delivering the performance you need for smart multitasking. You and your PC won't be slowed down, regardless of how many applications you have open at once.

Intel® HD Graphics◊3,◊4

 

Intel® HD Graphics provides superb visual performance for sharper images, richer color, and life-like audio and video.◊3,◊4 Watch movies and Internet videos in high-definition, play popular game titles, and get full support for Microsoft Windows* 7. It's all built in; no need for an extra add-in video card.

You see this mac rubbish about it being more reliable, it just isnt and can't be... Mainly because they are actually the same hardware these days so really there is no reason why you cant make a "PC" run some mac software... You could dual boot them that way.

 

I admit apple products are generally fairly well made and are pretty to look at but good god they are annoying. Like why cant i have a second battery for my iPhone... It lasts a day, what if i'm away without my charger? My previous phones I often had a spare battery for, simply swap it over and we are away. Anyawy not talking about phones...

 

The sole reason for the "security" and "stability" of mac machines is for this reason and this reason alone:

There simply isnt the software or the number of combinations and choice that there is in the PC world, sadly the PC world is targetting with all the might of people who want to affect the most people with their malicious software. Why both affected 5% of the population when you can affect 92%. (Figures are aprox!) Hence the mac system doesnt have to deal with the malicious side of things, and nor does it have anything like the flexibility.

I'm not saying you cannot do stuff on a mac, but where as on a mac there might be 10 pieces of software to do one job, ona PC there could easily be 10,000.

 

THey appear to run faster simply because there is no crap to slow them down, just think of the junk you run on your PC.

 

I do find the mac system dragging back to its routes of unix on occasion as well. My sister ha a Macbook pro and she wanted to delete the items on a pen drive. So she went into the control panel and found a way of doing it. Amazingly the pendrive then showed a max capacity of 4kb (it was a 2gb stick) so she brought it to me and I realised what the thing had actually done. Deleted the files, and the file allocation table. Basically removed the partiton from it. Now I'm not being funny but what kind of home user is normally capable of working that out. My sister is a graphic designer, no idea about formatting/file storage systems or anything like that. - She was planning on buying another pen drive! Stupid system, I admit the user is technically at fault but you would have to be trying dam hard in windows to do something similar!

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/

You see this mac rubbish about it being more reliable, it just isnt and can't be... Mainly because they are actually the same hardware these days so really there is no reason why you cant make a "PC" run some mac software... You could dual boot them that way.

 

I admit apple products are generally fairly well made and are pretty to look at but good god they are annoying. Like why cant i have a second battery for my iPhone... It lasts a day, what if i'm away without my charger? My previous phones I often had a spare battery for, simply swap it over and we are away. Anyawy not talking about phones...

 

The sole reason for the "security" and "stability" of mac machines is for this reason and this reason alone:

There simply isnt the software or the number of combinations and choice that there is in the PC world, sadly the PC world is targetting with all the might of people who want to affect the most people with their malicious software. Why both affected 5% of the population when you can affect 92%. (Figures are aprox!) Hence the mac system doesnt have to deal with the malicious side of things, and nor does it have anything like the flexibility.

I'm not saying you cannot do stuff on a mac, but where as on a mac there might be 10 pieces of software to do one job, ona PC there could easily be 10,000.

 

THey appear to run faster simply because there is no crap to slow them down, just think of the junk you run on your PC.

 

I do find the mac system dragging back to its routes of unix on occasion as well. My sister ha a Macbook pro and she wanted to delete the items on a pen drive. So she went into the control panel and found a way of doing it. Amazingly the pendrive then showed a max capacity of 4kb (it was a 2gb stick) so she brought it to me and I realised what the thing had actually done. Deleted the files, and the file allocation table. Basically removed the partiton from it. Now I'm not being funny but what kind of home user is normally capable of working that out. My sister is a graphic designer, no idea about formatting/file storage systems or anything like that. - She was planning on buying another pen drive! Stupid system, I admit the user is technically at fault but you would have to be trying dam hard in windows to do something similar!

 

LOL! Perhaps I should have said I personally find it so much quicker, easier & more reliable than a PC :surrender::biggrin:

 

I like the way things just work with my mac - I plug a new printer in & it works, no faffing about setting up drivers etc, it just works.

 

I love how all the software works, everything you need for home apps etc works really nicely IMO.

 

To me things do appear to much quicker - opening web pages etc is much better than my windows machines.

 

& that aluminium body & the quality of the display is just superb!

 

just my experience :tongue_smilie:

Lol sorry been in a bad mood today, irritating customers and colleagues. I know what you mean, in some areas they can be simpler but its often only down to their being certani bist of hardware that work with them.

 

I like the idea of plug and play, but windows 7 is much like that and it works well I'm told, here I am preeching the case for windows still stuck in 2001 with XP... LOL

You see this mac rubbish about it being more reliable, it just isnt and can't be... Mainly because they are actually the same hardware these days so really there is no reason why you cant make a "PC" run some mac software... You could dual boot them that way.

 

I admit apple products are generally fairly well made and are pretty to look at but good god they are annoying. Like why cant i have a second battery for my iPhone... It lasts a day, what if i'm away without my charger? My previous phones I often had a spare battery for, simply swap it over and we are away. Anyawy not talking about phones...

 

The sole reason for the "security" and "stability" of mac machines is for this reason and this reason alone:

There simply isnt the software or the number of combinations and choice that there is in the PC world, sadly the PC world is targetting with all the might of people who want to affect the most people with their malicious software. Why both affected 5% of the population when you can affect 92%. (Figures are aprox!) Hence the mac system doesnt have to deal with the malicious side of things, and nor does it have anything like the flexibility.

I'm not saying you cannot do stuff on a mac, but where as on a mac there might be 10 pieces of software to do one job, ona PC there could easily be 10,000.

 

THey appear to run faster simply because there is no crap to slow them down, just think of the junk you run on your PC.

 

I do find the mac system dragging back to its routes of unix on occasion as well. My sister ha a Macbook pro and she wanted to delete the items on a pen drive. So she went into the control panel and found a way of doing it. Amazingly the pendrive then showed a max capacity of 4kb (it was a 2gb stick) so she brought it to me and I realised what the thing had actually done. Deleted the files, and the file allocation table. Basically removed the partiton from it. Now I'm not being funny but what kind of home user is normally capable of working that out. My sister is a graphic designer, no idea about formatting/file storage systems or anything like that. - She was planning on buying another pen drive! Stupid system, I admit the user is technically at fault but you would have to be trying dam hard in windows to do something similar!

 

Agree, pretty much 100%.

 

Also, remember that viruses started on Macs when they used floppy disks as the transport medium. Macs are considerably more reliable nowadays, since OSX which is basically a pretty front end on top of Linux, prior to that their internal architecture was a mess to say the least.

 

Anyway, I'm not a Mac fan (or a Macintrash as my colleagues in the US called them), as far as I'm concerned it's a triumph of form over function - or fashionware !

i have got rid of all my windows pc's and gone mac, as for being reliable, they are but wouldn't say they are more reliable because all electrical items can brake, as for the OS vista killed windows for me it is the biggest POS there is. it looks good but cant do 5hit, macs osx is a million times better but as said its a lot like ubuntu just cleaned up and easier to use, win 7 is better but still doesn't touch macs osx. i have built gaming pc's for over 10 years and getting my i7 quad core mac has put an end to all that and i do have windows on it too, aswell as linux ubunutu and run all 3 at the same time with no affect on my mac at all and windows loads in 9 secionds from start up, i have had a macbook for the last 4 years and was impressed but the new i7 macs blow me away, look at all your options not just down one road and see what suits you and your needs

i have got rid of all my windows pc's and gone mac, as for being reliable, they are but wouldn't say they are more reliable because all electrical items can brake, as for the OS vista killed windows for me it is the biggest POS there is. it looks good but cant do 5hit, macs osx is a million times better but as said its a lot like ubuntu just cleaned up and easier to use, win 7 is better but still doesn't touch macs osx. i have built gaming pc's for over 10 years and getting my i7 quad core mac has put an end to all that and i do have windows on it too, aswell as linux ubunutu and run all 3 at the same time with no affect on my mac at all and windows loads in 9 secionds from start up, i have had a macbook for the last 4 years and was impressed but the new i7 macs blow me away, look at all your options not just down one road and see what suits you and your needs

 

windows vista is a good operating system, i cant see why people complain about it. It was supposed to be designed from the ground up - as project longhorn but it wasn't, instead they had a rethink and started with windows xp and worked from there. the biggest problem with windows vista, was when it was launched no one had drivers available for it, even though there was a beta for ages.

 

Then we had companies like Creative, who saw fit to stop supporting older sound cards by not providing drivers for windows vista and tried to cash in on vista by saying that there older cards didn't run when they did and that to get a creative experience with in windows they would need to upgrade the sound cards to the new X-Fi range (even though they used just modified drivers of the Sound blaster drivers and could run the older cards).

 

Vista always ran how it was supposed to and to be honest my experience with it was a good one. my problems with vista came from 3rd party companies for failing to use the beta time to get drivers sorted out and not with vista its self.

 

Then people couldn't get to grips with vista asking everything all the time, when in reality the reason that it was implemented was for the sake of the end user, having got so many complaints from people because they were stupid enough to delete the contents of there windows system32 folder under windows xp, Microsoft added a system where by it wouldn't allow you too, a system that windows 7 still has in place but is more "hidden"

 

Then there was the miss conception that vista was a system hog. when all vista was now doing, was something mac's had been doing for ages. yet when Microsoft did it, it was a system hog, when apple did it, it was innovation.

 

Vista stores in memory your most used programs, and then when you select that program again, it actually does speed up the loading times, as it doesn't have to rip the program from your HD to the ram to get everything running, something mac's OS had been doing for a long time. why have ram sitting in your machine empty half the time being waisted like xp does?, when you could put it too good use and have it store your most opened programs.

 

I also loved the arguments for "vista is slower than XP", there was test done on vista machines vs xp machines, and to be perfectly honest although vista was slower, it was by very small amounts, something that unless you were sitting there with a stop watch and timing everything, the normal user wasn't going to notice.

 

As for the user control that asks you to do everything. i welcomed it, no more stealth installs of programs from websites as vista always asked, and if you thought it was taking too long, you could aways turn it off but at the expense of your security.

 

My only gripe with vista was in the early months it was virtually impossible to get the damn thing to network with a windows xp machine. but once the service pack came out, that issue was fixed.

Edited December 22, 201015 yr by vodkashots

imo vista would take all you ever put into it (spec wise) and waste the fooking lot. my uncle had a shop selling recon laptops and pc's and the amount he had in sold to him, people sold just because vista was crap was a joke. everyone i have ever known that had a vista laptop said the same the longer you had it the slower the thing got until the thing is unusable, i had the 64 bit in my rig and ended up removed and xp put back in as done with all the computers sold to my uncle. i have been told that some like vista but if it was that great why has windows 7 already replaced it and they went back to xp to make it, and as for the tests xp vs vista yes it is faster but do the same test after a month or 2 and see what happens there is way to much rubbish in it that needs to be turned off to speed it up, i loved vista for the first month or so then it got to be a joke, this could be down to 3rd party support but the speed that microsoft have ditched the software speaks for itself

Edited December 22, 201015 yr by dipone

imo vista would take all you ever put into it (spec wise) and waste the fooking lot. my uncle had a shop selling recon laptops and pc's and the amount he had in sold to him, people sold just because vista was crap was a joke. everyone i have ever known that had a vista laptop said the same the longer you had it the slower the thing got until the thing is unusable, i had the 64 bit in my rig and ended up removed and xp put back in as done with all the computers sold to my uncle. i have been told that some like vista but if it was that great why has windows 7 already replaced it and they went back to xp to make it, and as for the tests xp vs vista yes it is faster but do the same test after a month or 2 and see what happens there is way to much rubbish in it that needs to be turned off to speed it up, i loved vista for the first month or so then it got to be a joke, this could be down to 3rd party support but the speed that microsoft have ditched the software speaks for itself

 

i ran it from beta, through to RC1 up until about 3 weeks ago. never had a problem with it slowing down. system maintenance once a week is all it needs. click the safety tab in IE, and delete browsing history, set it to run a defrag one night and leave it to do it, and do a check disk every now and then.

 

If you have a problem with it slowing down, then sorry but it must be something your doing with it that i am not. I've put vista on a lot of customers PC's as part of my business and I've yet to have people come back due to problems with the OS.

 

75% of all PC problems are user related the other 25% are software / hardware.

 

For the past 2 years I've never used a virus scanner either. those things hog your system a lot, another system hog is Windows live messenger. if you want proof of that, turn off "auto start when system starts" in windows live messenger and see how much fast ANY OS starts up.

 

For the past 2 years I've never used a virus scanner either. those things hog your system a lot, another system hog is Windows live messenger. if you want proof of that, turn off "auto start when system starts" in windows live messenger and see how much fast ANY OS starts up.

 

might have hit the nail on the head there you cant buy a pc these days without someone trying to ram an anti-virus down your gob

Blimey, Surely not Mac VS Windows lol! how original! lol. ahh well here we go......

 

im a windows user and allways have been, i have had very little mac experience so cant really make any educated comments about any of the mac OS. but what i do know is that each has its benefits and you should deffinately choose the best one to suit your individual needs. and as far as i can see it for the home user the windows route is the only way to go, and this is only because windows is sooooooooo popular and therefore better suited to your everyday user for many reasons. this is probrably only down to marketing, same as betamax and vhs. betamax was blatently the better system but vhs was marketed better.

 

and as for the vista issue, i never had any bother! but i did have a fairly high power system so resources werent an issue. i did have a few issues with compatibility like everyone else in the early days, but was fine after that.

but in my oppinion you cant beat 64 bit W7

 

Blimey, Surely not Mac VS Windows lol! how original! lol. ahh well here we go......

 

im a windows user and allways have been, i have had very little mac experience so cant really make any educated comments about any of the mac OS. but what i do know is that each has its benefits and you should deffinately choose the best one to suit your individual needs. and as far as i can see it for the home user the windows route is the only way to go, and this is only because windows is sooooooooo popular and therefore better suited to your everyday user for many reasons. this is probrably only down to marketing, same as betamax and vhs. betamax was blatently the better system but vhs was marketed better.

 

and as for the vista issue, i never had any bother! but i did have a fairly high power system so resources werent an issue. i did have a few issues with compatibility like everyone else in the early days, but was fine after that.

but in my oppinion you cant beat 64 bit W7

 

 

Dont get me wrong, im not anti mac they have there uses (especially in films and tv shows), i just like more than one button on my mouse.

i just like more than one button on my mouse.

 

lol, that sounds like its gotta be a euphemism for something lol

Dont get me wrong, im not anti mac they have there uses (especially in films and tv shows), i just like more than one button on my mouse.

 

LOL! My mac mouse has left & right, a 4 way scroll ball & side buttons to scroll through open apps! :whistling:

LOL! My mac mouse has left & right, a 4 way scroll ball & side buttons to scroll through open apps! :whistling:

 

You mean they finally realised that its better having more than one button on the mouse? sounds like they are trying to PC-fy it lol :cool3:

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Here's where we are at now -> .