Purchasing a new computer

Hey Fakku, you seem to be a bunch of technologically
capable young fellers. I'm looking to build myself a good computer setup
for gaming. I've got about a $1000 budget, but I can always add on later.
Any recommendations?

well... since you said gaming, Im assuming your focusing a bit on the graphics card.

Im sure if you went to Newegg and did some searching for each major component, youd have a pretty good machine for under $1000.

Pretty much for gaming, focus the most on your video card, CPU, and RAM, in that order. Make sure your motheboard doesnt bottleneck anything you might have. Most new motherboards with an FSB of 2600MHz shouldnt be bottlenecking anything as far as I know.


Ive got some basic stuff down.. though its ultimately your choice if you want any of them.

Dont be surprised if there's an incompatibility between some of these parts. There shouldnt be, but Im really tired right now so just check to make sure. Or I will when I wake up.

Hard Drive
Motherboard
Video Card
PSU
RAM
CPU

You really dont need more than 4 or 6GB of RAM unless you plan to run a LOT of stuff at the same time.

So far, all the parts Ive given you add up to $865.

Youve got a quad-core CPU at 2.6GHz, a GTX285, a motherboard with 2 PCI-E 2.0 slots in case you the need to go SLI, and you have a PSU that should have enough wattage to cater to said expansion. Only downside of the motherboard is that it has no PCI-E x8slot so there a couple things you cant put it but most things that go in an x8 slot arent all that special.

You may have to sacrifice some power if you're also going to buy a monitor, mouse, extra HDD, etc if you still want to stay under $1000.

NOTE: I would be especially careful when picking out your case. If you get a graphics card like the GTX285, make sure your case has enough room for the card because that card is massive compared to some. I almost didnt have enough room for my 260 when I bought my last desktop case.

Besides, bigger cases are better for expansion :/

Hope this helped out

Looks like pretty good specs for a budget machine.
IMO avoid the Zalman psu and get a Corsair HX-620.

Actually.... going wit a GTX 260 would probably be a much better solution than the 285, considering its almost half the price of a 285, and you can easily overclock it to make it faster than a stock 285.

If you're going to overclock anything make sure you use Arctic Silver 5 as your thermal compound. Its the best, imo.


Actually come to think of t if you're building a comp from scratch youll need this stuff anyway unless you want your CPU and GPU to explode after 5 minutes of use.

Thanks, this has given me a general idea of what I want to get.
I honestly don't have any idea of how to overclock, so I don't
think I'll have to worry about that. I plan to re-use my old keyboard and mouse since they work just fine. New speakers are in order, as is some wireless cards for internet. TV tuner for the hell of it. Any suggestions for other future add-ons?

off the top of my head right now I can think only of another video card for SLI/Crossfire.

Besides if you get any of the cards mentioned above you dont really need to overclock unless you want tu play Crysis better :/

Maybe if you really feel like spending money and showing off you can get some some LEDs to make it glow :D

The price of SSD (Solid State Drives or Solid State Device) are coming down. Essentially, these are hard disk drives that do not have spinning heads but are more like RAM and/or flash memory. Because of the lack of moving heads, they have incredible read times, and will load an OS and applications much more quickly. I think that many games have improved performance with SSD, but it depends on many factors. Traditional HDD are incredibly cheap now, and most folks will tell you that it is a good idea to run at least 2 if not more drives for increased performance. Therefore an SSD combined with a standard HDD will give you both peformance (for the SSD OS drive) and space (for the HDD data drive). There are some good 64GB drives available at NewEgg and if you are going to be an early adopter with Windows 7, then you will see even more benefits. However, they will require a little more TLC during the initial setup and you should be prepared to spend some time on the forums to learn a few tricks to get the incredible performance these drives are reporting.

Graphics cards are a very personal choice for many gamers, and you will have almost as many opinions as models. NewEgg runs specials from time to time on various components, so if you aren't too picky, it might be best to grab up whatever card d'jour is on sale in the medium to medium-high price range. There are others who offer competitive pricing, but generally speaking NewEgg is a good bet to gather all your components in one place. Most everyone is happy with their customer service and they excel at low prices b/c they don't offer technical support of any kind. They just offer low prices on popular electronics.

Graphics cards can be combined (SLI/Crossfire as others have mentioned) so if you are happy with the one you purchase, you can add on a 2nd 6 months later for possibly 50% of the cost of the original. However, you should make certain that your motherboard and power supply support the technology you want to implement. (Either SLI or Crossfire) Rather than go on an extended explanation, I'll wait to see if you know/understand about SLI/Crossfire first.

Many people like to take one shot and be done with builds until the next one a few years later. However, if you plan things correctly and get devices as they cross a certain value/price point, you can rotate components out and save as much as 20%. This can be time consuming, but for some it is part of the fun. FWIW, you can also save 20-30% (on average) by waiting for the black friday sales events, but if you don't have the time to wait, then I'm sure there is always someone around who builds for that price range as it is common. (In fact, NewEgg will do combo deals with Proc/RAM/MB or Proc/MB or RAM/MB with $1000 being the Medium range rig). Also, the forums of NewEgg, Tom's Hardware and others will often have system builds for $xxxx posts. But I tend to be a little wary of any blog that gets free hardware which could bias their opinion. Good luck and be sure to ask any more specific ? you might have..

@xenor
As far as I know, SLI/Crossfire in a nutshell is combining
two or more video cards together to do the video processing.
SSD's are a bit too expensive for me at the moment, unless I buy one
exclusively for the OS (which I plan to torrent anyway)
An SSD I was looking at

I like Catfish's setup, although I'd probably go with This CPU instead.

As for thermal compound, I honestly have no idea where it goes
Cooling Fan

Thanks again for all the help. I've looked into building my own
Desktop in the past, but I was overwhelmed by the vast amount of choices.

I was going to choose that CPU, its insanely fast but I was trying to give you a little bit of extra money to spend for other stuff.

As for the thermal compound, it goes in between the heatsink and processor (that goes for CPU and GPU).

If you plan to put on any yourself make sure you do a bit of research before you do. The most you want to put on for a processor is a small dab in the middle, maybe a little bigger than the size of a grain of rice.

If you dont plan to OC, and there's already something there to transfer heat then I wouldnt worry about it.

If you're going to use an ssd drive on a torrent box then it is wasted.
The main reason you get ssds is to get stupid performance, also avoid low end ssds are they're no faster than hard drives.
*Can't wait for his Intel X25-M to come in*
Thanks again for all the help. I've looked into building my own
Desktop in the past, but I was overwhelmed by the vast amount of choices.

I think he meant he was going to torrent/download the OS, not buy. I agree with you 100% - SSDs are not meant for lots of read/writes (i.e. torrent, P2P, video recording, etc..) and would not make sense as a Data drive on a HTPC or something.

$200 is about the cheapest I would look at in the SSD market. Another year and they will be even more reasonably priced. However, when you get tired of waiting for system response (as I have on my laptop) then you might consider one. All in all, if you're looking for a budget machine, SSD might still be a little bit out of range. However, one thing most people overlook is the fact that disk I/O ends up being the bottleneck on most peoples systems. Many times (depending on the task, of course) you will find that $80 processor is more than enough for most of your needs while an SSD will improve the peformance b/c disk I/O becomes the bottle-neck. In this day and age of dual/quad core processors, >1GHz FSB and RAM, disk I/O is really whats slowing computers down. But a couple of disks in RAID 0 on many MBs built in HDD controllers will give adequate performance.

I agree with you mate the average users' needs can be fulfilled by relatively cheap cpus that are not trashy to use.
I think SSDs would work very well for content/archive servers that only have data written to the drives once or twice then just read from most of the time.
This is assuming that SSD drive becomes more affordable and larger than his avenue would become viable for servers. Plus the smaller size of the SSDs mean that you can have a higher density of drives.