PC time Options

[Qrbrrbl]

So ive been thinking of replacing my PC for a while, and now I dont have a choice. My GFX card is kaput. I know the problem, a couple of capacitors have come off, so I now get the long beep - 3 short beeps when trying to start up. Long story short, it would be better value to replace the whole lot than buy a new gfx for my old PC.

Heres what I can butcher from the old:
PSU - 500W Thermaltake number, see no reason to change it.
Monitor - nothing wrong with this
Keyboard/mouse
DVD RW
HDDs
Potentially the case, depending how I feel

SO im looking for the following:
MOBO
GFX
RAM
CASE
CPU

I dont mind spending a bit more for a mobo just to try and futureproof a bit, but apart from that I just want something that will be able to play things at the top end of the games market at the moment.

Ideally i would like to pay sub-£500 (inc. case)

Any recommendations? Im thinking about £100 each for the mobo/cpu, £150 GFX, maybe another £40 RAM with a little leeway for the components and case.

[Qrbrrbl]

Had a hunt on Ebuyer and this is what im looking at. Any opinions? Anything ive missed? Anything I can get cheaper elsewhere?

Intel i5 760 2.8GHz Socket 1156 8MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor £149.99

Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 P55 Socket 1156 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard £89.90

Gigabyte GTX 460 OC 1GB GDDR5 OC Edition Dual DVI HDMI PCI-E Graphics Card With H.A.W.X. 2 Game Voucher £151.99

Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz Memory Kit Unbuffered CL9 £59.08

Tuniq Symmetry Silver Mid Tower Case - No PSU £37.55

£488.51

[MonkeyFiend]

The stuff above seems to be as about as cheap an I5 rig as I can find (although am sure magik5 will start moaning about the Nvidia card instead of ATI)

Just wondering why you decided on the I5 since at the moment the AMD stuff is giving more bang for buck (An AM3 Thuban with 6 cores running at 2.8ghz againts the I5 and it's 4 cores of same speed) - unless you're planning on overclocking etc.,, [Edit: scratch this - have just seen they're around the same price and the I5 is better]

Finally, you're spending £152 on a 460, if you buy a an ugly ugly case (ebuyer have ugly ones starting at £12.50, you'll save £25 on the case), you can then get a GTX 470 from overclockers for £180 - although this is £30 more, you can save £25 by buying an ugly case, so overall will cost you £5 more than the list you've mentioned and the gfx works out around 20-25% more powerful (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_460_SLI/23.html)

Admittedly you'll have a computer that looks hideous, but maybe you could pimp it out with some tinsel and fairy lights or something

[Qrbrrbl]

This is mostly just a straight rip from an overclockers thread. Im very open to suggestions, but this is the kind of ballpark im looking at. Also I dont know how much i will need in the way of cooling for that rig.

[K.]

if ur not planning on OC then cooling will just be stock tbh

the gfx card ur going for 460OC is a very good card from what i have heard

[Qrbrrbl]

So which AMD chip would offer similar performance? Any money savings to be made there? And is the 470 a significant upgrade over the card there?

[MonkeyFiend]

So which AMD chip would offer similar performance? Any money savings to be made there? And is the 470 a significant upgrade over the card there?

On second thought's I retract that about the Thuban, I was basing that more on multi-threaded operations, which is more business processing. If you're setting up a gaming platform primarily then the i5 will be better and they're both around the same price.

As for the 470, there are some 460's that have been obscenely overclocked to be comparable to the 470, such as the Palit one, but these are also obsenely expensive. The performance on a stock 470 over the Gigabyte 460 should be around 20%, based on the benchmarks on the link I posted further up this thread

[Pandora92]

On second thought's I retract that about the Thuban, I was basing that more on multi-threaded operations, which is more business processing. If you're setting up a gaming platform primarily then the i5 will be better and they're both around the same price.

As for the 470, there are some 460's that have been obscenely overclocked to be comparable to the 470, such as the Palit one, but these are also obsenely expensive. The performance on a stock 470 over the Gigabyte 460 should be around 20%, based on the benchmarks on the link I posted further up this thread

You're ignoring the fact though that a 470 is obscenely loud (with the stock cooler), hot, and power hungry, which is why both the 470 and 480 were pretty much a laughing stock when they first came out, whereas the 460 runs reasonably cool and quiet while offering good performance.

If you're looking for everything for under £500 I would go for:

Case - Antec 300 - Ridiculously reliable and solid case for the price that's also fairly easy to build in as well as having decent cooling and looking nice. - £50

Mobo - Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 - The one you were already going for, a solid motherboard (Gigabyte always is IMO with a neat and convenient layout and a fair amount of features and overclocking potential for it's price, ideally I would rather recommend a Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2, but they're becoming somewhat impossible to find at the minute so don't bother, there's not much difference anyway. - £85

CPU - Core i5 760 - The obvious choice really, at stock speed the equivalently priced AMD looks pretty equal, but unless you plan on running heavily multi-threaded programs or if you're doing any overclocking at all then the i5 is vastly superior, you'll also have an easier time fitting heatsinks for an LGA 1156 socket the right way up on your motherboard, since AM3 sockets tend to clip most heatsinks facing the ground, which doesn't work well with the airflow in 95% of cases (this may seem like a small consideration but it's a consideration nonetheless). - £135

Graphics - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SUPER OC - There's a LOT of choice out there at the minute in the GPU market, there's everything from the ATI 5750 to the GTX 470 within the £100 - £200 price point, but really the 5770's aren't powerful enough for your money so that's them out, and most 470's (all the ones under £200 anyway) run extremely hot and loud, so for my recommendation that's them out (unless that doesn't bother you I guess, but it bothers me), the GTX 460 768mb is a good card but for the little more it costs for a 1gb model you may as well buy yourself a bit of leeway for the future and the extra headroom the memory gives you. This leaves you with the GTX 460 1GB, and the 6850 and 6870, all 3 are really excellent cards and any one of them would be good, but my personal favourite has to be this card from Gigabyte (not a fanboy, honest lol), not only does it have a smorgasbord of extra circuitry and suchlike built in at no extra premium to other cards, but it also runs something like 10-20% more efficiently than stock cards (due to Gigabyte's more efficient components), and extremely cool and quiet. On top of that it's overclocked from 675MHz stock core to 815MHz and the memory is clocked up from 3,600MHz to 4,000MHz effective, which means it has 6870 level performance (even close to GTX 470 level at times) with less power usage, heat, and noise, than even a stock card, there's also a LOT of overclocking headroom if you ever decide to push it further in the future, which makes the £20-£30 premium over a stock card worth it IMO, I'm not even in the market for a new card at the minute and I still find this extremely tempting. If you do want to go for a different GTX 460 1GB or an ATI 6870 then that would be totally your choice and would still almost certainly be a good buy anyway. - £170

RAM - Patriot Viper 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz - Really any good brand DDR3 dual channel 1600MHz RAM is acceptable here since the memory market is pretty much interchangeable nowadays apart from heatsinks and latency timings (given the negligable price difference you should go for 1600MHz rather than 1333MHz for the extra speed it gives you and for the headroom when overclocking), that specific set has impressively low latency for such a decent price, although the voltage is a little high if that bothers you. You could always shop around and find what you think looks best for you, as long as it's a decent brand with decent latency you can't really go wrong, but like I said above I would spring for the little extra for 1600MHz. - £60

Heatsink - Gelid Tranquillo - This will put you over your £500 budget but really really getting an aftermarket heatsink is worth it entirely IMO, not only will it let your CPU run cooler allowing for more overclocking potential, but even if you don't overclock your CPU at all (which would be a shamegiven the overclockability of that mobo and CPU) it will help your system run a lot quieter than with a stock heatsink (and who doesn't like a quiet PC?), and will probably extend the overall life of the CPU from running at a cooler temperature. The heatsink I've chosen there is one that I'm using myself after spending a long time looking and carefully deciding what to buy, it works extremely well with LGA 1156 processors to keep them extremely cool (one of the best air coolers currently on the market for a reasonable price temperature wise), despite being designed more for low noise level than full on cooling, and it also comes with a tube of excellent CG-2 thermal paste that's on-par/better than even Arctic Silver 5, which means you save a few quid from having to buy separate TMI, it's also non-bleeding and non-corrosive. I can pretty much vouch for this cooler since my CPU sits around 22C idle and has never gotten hotter than 40C even after gaming for 10+ hours, and it's also barely audible even though my PC is sat on the desk next to me.
- £25

Total Cost - £525

Obviously I haven't linked all of these parts to one specific retailer, I just did a quick Google to find the cheapest reputable dealer for each (I got lazy at the end rofl), which would understandably cost you a lot more overall in delivery, so if you're gonna go for this then take the list of parts and have a look around for the cheapest overall retailer you want to buy from.

However it's not gonna be "future proof" on the mobo since Intel have an annoying habit of totally replacing the socket and chipset used for every new architecture they release, and the "Sandy Bridge" architecture is coming some time in January. The new architecture is based on a smaller manufacturing process than the current older Nehalems (the 760 being one of them) so should run cooler at comparable speeds, and they're also said to be able to offer 20% more performance clock for clock on "equivalent" current gen models, so it might be worth just replacing the graphics cards now and waiting a little bit for the rest until those are released (AMD are also bringing out bulldozer and llano, but that's a whole other story).

Also if you're looking to spend a bit more for some graphics card oomph, waiting a few weeks would be beneficial if at all possible, since the 6900 series from AMD are coming out this month, which should comfortably best the GTX 470 and GTX 480 if the rumours are anything to go by, and at any rate this should push the overall price of the NVIDIA models down even further (which is incredible, since the GTX 470 originally retailed at £300). Really it's an excellent time to be looking to buy a graphics card.

So that's pretty much my recommendations, feel free to tell me I'm talking shit and totally ignore what I think, since I don't really know all that much, it's just what I would go for given the choice if I was you.

**EDIT** I could also go get benchmarks and reviews if you wanted, I was just too lazy to post them all the first time around, especially since I never really trust reviews from just one site, and always read 3 or 4 at least to get an overall verdict.

[Chisel]

I would second the comments about the 470's and 480's, I've got an Nvidia 470 and it's nice and all but it's crazy loud when it's pushed and I've had to spend many hours getting custom fan control software to work because of overheating issues as well mostly because Nvidia default temperature settings seem to leave the fan at low until the core reaches 90C plus and then start cooling and it doesn't like the high temps. I've manually got mine ramping up from 60C and it's much more stable now, but it's been tough getting it that way and there's still the noise level issue as it's got such a small fan on the stock model and I'm not sure I fancy ripping the cooling off a rather pricey card. The 460 I have heard much better things about with it's bigger slower fan being the main bonus.

Everything else looks pretty good and is very similar to what I'm running and that's all been fine with everything I've thrown at it so far with no overclocking at all and stock cooling on the CPU.

[McJaffa]

I reckon for the CPU/motherboard he is looking at a 470 or above would be overkill. The CPU would throttle the FPS on a lot of games. You say you want a rig that will max out most current games so depending on what resolution you run your monitor I reckon you will manage it on most games with that setup. You can't futureproof with the motherboard anyway as you don't know which way it is going to fall with future sockets for faster CPUs, so I upgraded my rig last weekend to a i7/1366 system so I would have the best performance rather than worrying about future upgrades as I have experienced the fact that it doesn't always make upgrading just one component practical or economical.
The best bet is to try and get something fairly balanced, the parts you are suggesting seem to be OK in that respect and are fairly standard bits so should be well supported.
One thing I have discovered too though is not to skimp on the case, getting a quality constructed & designed one makes a lot of difference from a nice & shiny one that may not be designed as well. Check some reviews but I went from a cheapo unbranded case to a quality one and dropped system temperatures dramatically with the same components. You might also want to check the Scan 'today only' section though as they regularly do bundle deals for rigs very like that Right now they are offering the same CPU with a Asus motherboard for £207.96 so a few quid cheaper than the ebuyer gigabyte/i5 760 price.

[MonkeyFiend]

Fair comments on the 470/480's - I've heard they run very hot and are noisy little buggers, but personally I'd go with performance/power over noise/heat (but that's probably more an OCD-like deisire to try and get stuff as fast as possible). As a future upgrade it's a lot easier to replace the stock fan/heatsink on a 470 than it would be to make a 460 be a 470. Just depends on your tolerance of noise, power consumption and heat.

Personal preference really - my computers are in the living room and are often on even when not using them (downloading, compiling etc.,) so mine needed to be quiet, hence opting for a reserator on the cpu and one on the gfx, the motherboard mounted to the wall, convection takes care of the rest of the components without need for additional fans = silent. But if you only use a PC for gaming and when gaming are using speakers/headphones, then does a little bit of fan noise really detract from the experience?

Also in my house a 470 would be an advantage, my central heating is broken beyond repair

[Edit: also a 470 wouldn't be throttled by that cpu/mobo - especially in future games that are likely to be developed for the wonderful world of consoles and ported to pc (not happy, but I can't change this). Console game ports tend to hit the gfx hard: BC2 being a prime example of extreme GPU usage and low CPU usage.]

[McJaffa]

I agree with the noise v performance comments. I am also in favour of performance over aesthetics, so a plain grey box (my Antec P183 that is well built and keeps my system easy to access and seriously cooled) wins for me over a shiny one with perspex window panel and coloured strobe lights showing off the internals.
However I noticed a different outcome with BC2 and other ports. My graphics card is a GTX275OC and I had a core2duo system clocked to 3.2GHz. It was OK at lower settings on most games. I have kept the video card but replaced the mobo/cpu with i7 950 and I can now max out all settings on games like BC2. I see the same results in F1 2010 which is another port and with Arma 2 (which is admittedly a CPU muncher) so it seems that if a GTX275 can keep up with the likes of BC2 then I am sure a 460 would be more than capable. I was maybe wrong to say the GFX card would be throttled by the CPU as that is probably wrong, more like you would be unlikely to gain as much per-pound with a more expensive card. As cost is an issue I would say he might have been better off keeping to the 460 and spending any extra few quids on the core components.
Everyone has different views on the best hardware setups but most people have to consider how to get the most from their limited funds so it is bang per buck that counts. Having a very expensive graphics card on a midrange motherboard/cpu is in my opinion a bit of a waste and the kind of setup he is looking at seems fairly balanced so I personally would not go for a more expensive range card.

[Cabletwitch]

I still recommend the Antec 1200 as a prime choice for a case, as its bomb proof, excellent for air cooling, and will last forever. I don't plan to use anything else unless it somehow evaporates or becomes a pile of corrosion on the floor as its pretty much capable of taking any hardware going, and still having plenty of room to hold up to 12 HDDS, or 9 HDDs and 3 5.25" drives.

As a satisfied user, I highly recommend it. Nuff said.