Thinking about building a workstation and gaming PC soon. Probably don't want to spend more than £1500. Only I've no idea what brands, what cards etc to get. I'm seeing all this stuff about DDR3 ram and god knows what graphics card are good these days! All that's certain is a 24" Dell monitor.
Also: Liquid cooling yes or no? Don't think I'll be overclocking so is it really necessary?
No point getting liquid cooling unless you're OCing, modern processors hardly kick out any heat at stock speeds, air is more than sufficient.
Graphics cards, hmm.. the high end ATI and nVidia cards are both pretty decent, last I looked the ATI was just that little bit faster, but if you do any windowed gaming, the performance is quite bad, bug with the card I think.. ATI also uses alot more power, if you're concious about electricity bills, though a few batches of nVidia chips have apparently had quite a poor failure rate.
As for DDR3, the price over performance margins last time I checked wern't really worth it, whether this is the case now or not I'm not so sure.
stick with AMD Chipsets, High End NVidia Graphics card (i'm talking Nvidia 9!) DDR2 memory is more than sufficient, Sata Drives (HDD and DVD) and purchase a decent sound card.
If you are looking for a decent website try ebuyer.co.uk. I buy all my parts from there!!
I dunno, not much a fan of AMD and with the i7 out in Jan... Might be waiting until then or just buy one of these current high-end Core 2 Quads at a cheaper price.
So that's a no to DDR3!
Just been told to get an ATi 4870. Apparently the best card in the world, but isn't out yet. But if it's got this window bug then I might not go for it after all.
Not sure about a soundcard. Not really bothered by them, I've got a Midi to USB cable and a basic line-out to my amp/speakers is all I need.
I got my current PC from PC specialist, however they build it for you and install software too so i guess it's not really what you're looking for.
Although if you look at their website you might get a good idea what parts are available and how much they'll cost separately. (although the price is probably less than retail)
I remember they had a bluray drive option for £500 lol,
Forget AMD totally. It's garbage for the price. Get an Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn; Newegg has some good deals for that. Intel motherboards are quite solid, but ASUS motherboards are better for tweaking and optimizing. Keep Intel and Asus in your mind and you're pretty much set.
Looks like I'm going to have to order this soon, my machines really crapping out now. Got the map, 2 MMF2's open (game and seperate graphics/test coding collection) and some design docs and frig me. Takes like 30 seconds to open a new tab in IE or a good 45 secs for MMF2 to become responsive after editing the Photoshop map file.
Thinking of-
Intel CPU, C2Q 2.5ghz. 3ghz would be overkill I reckon.
8gb DDR2
ATi 4870x2 2gb
Asus motherboard (most likely but I probably won't be tweaking much)
No liquid cooling
Probably keep the old 20" monitor for now. At least that 4870x2 will run everything at its native res
My computer seems to be getting worse these days too :\. Things lock up on windows a lot more than they used to and all kinds of wacky stuff is going on the the second 24" I've got plugged in . I think I need a new computer too...
Anyone got any recommendations for powerful laptops? (Laptop because I've been planning to get one for school and that).
(Thread Hijacked) Well now I'm tossing up between the Lenonvo ThinkPad W500 (15.4") and the Alienware Area-51 m15x... Alienware can be more awesome but it's way overpriced.
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Apocalyptic Coders - 
. I think I need a new computer too...
