New PC suggestions

TheBazman

Hi all

I have a dell pc with 512 MB ram - its only a couple of years old but its painfully slow. My main problem is that I can only do one thing at a time eg if I am converting a large file I have to do it overnight. Also I have do restart regularly if I am doing quite a bit on it as it seems to slow down. I am looking for suggestions on what I should buy. 2048MB RAM I would imagine would be needed anyway.

The main requirements would be decent ram, large hard drive, decent dvd burner, and I would use it mostly for converting files, burning cds and dvd's, editing camcorder clips, listening to music

I looked into upgrading the RAM before but to do that for this Dell PC works out too expensive

I have looked at the likes of the Dell XPS but they all seem quite expensive, plus I'm not sure I want to go down the Dell route again

What would you suggest?

Cheers

dazftw

Are you looking to upgrade or buy a new pc?

Whats your budget whatever the answer is?

TheBazman

Prob buy a new pc as I think to upgrade the ram costs around 300-400 euro

My budget would be around the €1000 mark

Cheers

Anti

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ci.asp?sku=10137

its only 76€ over budget, but this thing will have you going for years. You can also bring the price down to under 800 if you drop the graphics card and go for a basic model, but this means that playing games is ruled completly.

joe_chicken

Have a look on Komplett.ie for fully built PCs.

EDIT: beat me to it... damn my slowness

dazftw

I was planning on sending him to komplett.ie for pre built pcs and I posted 1st I win :rolleyes:

TheBazman

Cheers guys - good to see such competitiveness in sharing your knowledge

And a completely ignorant question - Is there much difference between AMD Athlon and Intel Core Duo?

dazftw

afaik core 2 duo beats all amd cpu's

TheBazman

Folks on your recommendations I am prob going to order the following pc (as standard). Just one quick thing - Is there anything that you would recommend as a quick add- on to the spec (anything that I will be kicking myself for not upgrading to down the line)? I am happy enough graphics card wise as I wont be doing that much gaming.

Cheers

http://www.komplett.ie/k/config.asp?ConfigSystemId=10206

TerrorFirmer

The Graphics card you've included in that list is a top of the range DX10 card....You could save about 230 euro by going with an actual 'basic' model card, like the 7300GT, which also has light modest gaming capability.

Also, you could save about 70 more euro by changing to an msi neo-f mobo and a 6400 cpu....if you aren't gaming, then the different won't really be noticable at all. But thats not essential.

I'd just definitely change the card, it's a total waste if you're not gaming.

TheBazman

Cool , appreciate that - its the sort of info I need as most of the lingo/technical aspects are double dutch to me

TerrorFirmer

Yeah, you can bring it down to 900 euro just by changing the 8800 to a 7300GT, and the 6600 to a 6400.

You'll still have plenty of room for upgrading in the future should gaming take a bigger priority but at that, but it would still be very powerful, perfect for what you would want it to do.

Again changing the processor isn't a big deal but it's mainly the graphics card on which you are spending unnecessarily. At least, if you stick with the 6600 it will be faster at encoding and stuff....the 8800 wouldn't really give you any benefits.

DanGerMus

That motherboard has on board graphics so unless you intend on gaming you dont need any extra graphics card. but you will be able to upgrade in the near future if need be. the on board would be on par with a 7300gt i think.
woohoo i rock i saved him 319 quid i win. :P

PS. you could use that money to get a second hard drive and do RAID0 and that would help for what you want to do. and still have more than 200 left over. i rock again

TheBazman

Cheers guys - I have a couple of External HDDs so I think I'm sorted for that. Deffo changing the graphics card on your advice.

SwampThing

Bazman, with ll this money you're saving, I'd spend a few quid more on your PSU. For the sake of €48 put the Tagan 600W in instead of that Fortron.

CheeryFrodo is right about the extra drive(s) as well - if you're encoding movies or moving/processing large files, you'll see a significant performance increase if you do that across more than one physical drive - i.e. move files from one physical disk to another or use a different physical disk for temporary space etc. when encoding video or the likes.

Anyway, it's early and I'm probably not making much sense. I don't want to confuse you. Change the PSU and get one or two more disks (all the same make, model and size for RAID)

TerrorFirmer

happygandalf wrote:

That motherboard has on board graphics so unless you intend on gaming you dont need any extra graphics card. but you will be able to upgrade in the near future if need be. the on board would be on par with a 7300gt i think.
woohoo i rock i saved him 319 quid i win. :P

PS. you could use that money to get a second hard drive and do RAID0 and that would help for what you want to do. and still have more than 200 left over. i rock again

The 7300GT is about 300% better then the Intel onboard...but yes you could just use that if you're not gaming, and upgrade it later if needs be.

TheBazman

Thanks guys - just a couple of further points to clarify

In terms of the Graphics card - I can go for either Club3D 7300GT at -€232, or GeForce 7300GS at -€248. I presume these are fairly similar?

SwampThing - I'll stick in that Tagan 600W at +€48 (again excuse my ignorance but in lay mans terms what exactly does that do ?)

As regards the extra drive - I presume this is exactly that (ie) an internal HDD as opposed to an external HDD - which means that it will be more effecient copying files around the pc? Given the original HDD is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 400GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM, you reckon I should just stick on the exact same additional one at +112.23?

What a service! If only I knew about boards when I bought my last piece of crap.

SwampThing

Baz, the PSU is the Power Supply Unit. It's what distributes power throughout the PC - to the motherboard, the hard drives, graphics card (if needed).

Invariably, the higher the spec'd machine and the more drives etc. you have, the higher your power requirment will be, hence there are different wattage PSU's - yours being 600W. An under-powered PSU will cause all sorts of difficult to diagnose issues.

On top of the wattage is quality. Poor quality PSU don't supply steady voltages and can casue no end of trouble. Tagan are a very good brand, so your safe enough with that one.

TheBazman

Coolio

DanGerMus

i stand corrected on the gfx performance. but the point was (even at 3x the performance) it's wasted money when gfx card isnt needed at all. and if it is needed then a 7300gt is wasted money cos it's basically sh1te. falling some where between bottom end graphics and a blank screen. i'd say leave out the gfx card all together and if in the future you find you actually need it, buy a good one then.

Re: RAID go to www.raid.com click on the raid.edu button and you'll know then what we're on about. RAID really needs identicle disks. hence the suggestion to but a second one. make sure they're both SATA aswell.

SwampThing

happygandalf wrote:

and if it is needed then a 7300gt is wasted money cos it's basically sh1te. falling some where between bottom end graphics and a blank screen.

very funny! I did have a wee chortle to myself

TerrorFirmer

The 7300GT is much better then the GS. The 7300GT is more or less the same as the 6600GT, actually, it's better - so again, it's totally wrong to call it bottom of the barrel. Obviously hardly high end, but it will play CS Source, Battlefield 2, etc at high settings, so depending on what you play, even as a gamer the 7300GT can do the job if you're not looking to the future games wise right now.

Quote from review on 7300GT:

Well... The 7300GT has beaten the popular 6600GT in all of our games. It seems that NVIDIA did very well with this "low budget" GPU. Inno3D did a great job on this card, it’s not loud or expensive. It is Overclocker friendly and simply the best low budget card out there right now. Finally a decent low end card, users will like this solution. Currently, ATI doesn’t have a solution for this, it will be interesting to see their reaction to this GPU. I remember how much money I spent on my old 9800XT. I also remember my 6600GT experience, and it’s hard to believe that such a low budget card can beat many of the older mid-end cards. A lot of consumers are purchasing these low budget cards for simple workstation, or office use. I wouldn’t recommend the 7300GT for office use, unless they are running games on their workstations. Speaking of games, you can find below some screenshots we took with this card, for an image quality point of reference.

Bottom line is, if you’re looking for a cheap and worthwhile upgrade, and you already have the motherboard, you should consider buying the 7300GT. Just make sure your getting the GDDR3 256MB version. Both NVIDIA and Inno3D did a great job on this product, therefore we are compelled to give it our Gold medal award. Again, don’t be confused by the name, the 7300GT is the lite version of the 7600 in reality.

Obviously, happygandalf has never used one....

DirkVoodoo

Baz,

Stay away from Fortron!!!!

Buy one of the OCZ, seasonics or tagans listed there. I would go with a seasonic S12 myself, never heard anything negative about them.

TheBazman

Thanks guys I'm almost sorted

Can you tell me if these Komplett pc's have modems in them? Will I be able to set up an internet connection easily enough (given I am still in dial up land).

Also is there a way to get more usb connections (not hugely important as I have an external USB adapter anyway)?

Cheers

TerrorFirmer

You can buy a pci usb card fairly easily, and regarding the modem, it won't come with any pc, you'll have to buy a 56k modem seperately. Although, personally I've a fair few here myself, and they'll never see use again, so I can give you one if you want....

TheBazman

Cheers Havoc

I'll touch base on the modem again if/when I get the pc. Most of the 56k modems I see for sale are internal - I presume these would be handy enough to install. I'm surprised that pcs dont come with a modem installed as standard as any pc I have bought in the past had one. Manafacturers must assume that everyone can get broadband!

DanGerMus

Fair enough on the GT i went a bit over board suggesting it was the bottom of the barrel, at least not all versions. But i exagerated to make a point. i think it's bad practice to buy something to suit only what your using it for now. You should always give yourself some room to play with. It will save you having to upgrade just in case you do decide you want to play something new in the next few months. And the difference in price between a 7600 and 7300 is fairly small. Also note that there doesn't seem to be any ddr3 7300 models on komplett which is what your quote advises to buy. And i remember reading a review that mentioned that point as well and that the ddr3 made a very big difference.

TheBazman

Guys

I also want MS office on the pc - preferably with word, excel, outlook and powerpoint . I presume I need to add the
Microsoft Office 2007 Standard English, CD: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook
at €499 - seems a bit toppy!

The standard MS Vista Premium that it comes with is just the operating system and doesnt include any of these I presume?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/choose.mspx?wt_svl=10033VHa3&mg_id=10033VHb3

Cheers

TheBazman

Right

I am just about to order the following - could someone just have a quick scan to make sure that there isnt glaringly obvious that I'm missing or anything that conflicts with something else?

Cheers for all the help along the way

http://www.komplett.ie/k/config.aspx?ConfigSystemId=10206

plonk

Change your otherboard you have a 945 chipset picked. Change it to a p965 chipset

TheBazman

Cheers Plonk - does it matter which one? I presume this will do the trick

ABIT IB9, P965, Socket-775, GbLAN, ATX, 4xSATAII, DDR2, PCI-Ex16