Gaming and Photo PC

gblades

gblades

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Gareth
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I currently have a 4 year old Dell laptop and although it has a dedicated graphics card its only a mobile version and its struggling playing some less graphics intensive games and mostly it seems to be the CPU maxing out.

So I am looking to replace my very old desktop as I tend to use my ipad for general web browsing. I think the spec I would want is :-
SSD HDD and additional standard one.
i5 processor. I dont think I need the i7 but its generally about £60 more. so may be worth it.
16GB of memory. A lot of systems come with 8GB but its easy and cheap to upgrade.
I am not sure about the graphics card. It has been a while since I shopped around for one of these so not sure how much speed I really need.

I have been looking at http://www.novatech.co.uk/pc/gaming/
The NT133 for £690 excluding the operating system looks ok. The NT132 is £180 more for the i7 processor and better graphics card.

Any comments or suggestions of others to look at?

Thanks
 
Spend a little while delving back though this section of the forum. There have been quite a few similar threads over the past months... along with links to other suppliers and suggestions.

Past opinion was that there is not much benefit from i7 over i5 and to make sure you have a quality branded power supply with a decent rating like 700W+. SSD is definitely worth having for the O/S. 128GB should be enough but I have a few games installed with lots of downloaded maps and didn't want to mess with settings to move the data... so I have a 256GB which cost less than the 128 it replaced.

You'll also need a decent IPS monitor for photo work and big enough to enjoy the gaming graphics.

as I said... have a browse back.
 
Would you be willing to build your own? I just did it and so glad for doing so as I know every single item inside - feels good too! lol
 
I don't mind building my own and that is what I did with my current desktop. I am not sure you get a better deal doing it that way any more. I am not going to be over clocking or water cooling it so don't need any specific components.
 
I'm sure you're already aware of the importance of knowing the quality of the components in the case over a pre-built machine but there are also, erm 'additional' financial benefits to a home build as opposed to buying a complete machine - if you have the right contacts of course ;)
 
Things like minecraft but I may well use it to play newer games instead of using the Xbox.
 
Build your own, best way. quality case and PSU are important, these pre-built machines all use cheapest case possible.

you'll want something like:
i5 3750k
z77 motherboard
16GB of low profile RAM
GTX 660 Ti
Samsung 830 SSD (128GB preferred)
2TB HDD for your photos
Corsair Ax series PSU
Fractal Design R3 case



I have a very similar machine because I am also into PC gaming. it's all last generation, but still more than fast enough, especially the top of the line graphics card.
i5 2400
z68 motherboard
16GB RAM
GTX 580
Crucial M4 128GB
2TB HDD
Corsair Ax850
Silverstone FT02 case

note the massive over spec on my case and PSU. those are most important part of your PC, and prebuilt systems go very cheap on them because they are not headline specs. it's like in camera terms, 600D vs 7D, same sensor, but 7D will last a lot longer.
 
This is what I have specked up so far :-

Chillblast Fusion Scout
Cooler Master CM-690 II Lite Dominator Case
Intel Core i5 3570K Processor Overclocked to up to 4.5GHz
Akasa Nero 3 Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste
Asus P8Z77-V LX Motherboard
16GB Corsair PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 Memory (2 x 8GB sticks)
Chillblast NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2048MB Graphics Card
120GB Corsair Force 3 Solid State Drive
1000GB 7200RPM Hard Disk - 6Gbps
Sony 24x DVD-RW Drive
Corsair CX 750W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified PSU
17 in 1 3.5" Internal Card Reader
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

I have a separate NAS for storing files so 1TB should be plenty for storing the extra programs.

I have an external blue-ray writer aswell so I can just have that connected rather than buy an additional drive.

The price came to about £1070. Thats a little more than the i7 based prebuilt units but these are better branded components
 
gblades said:
This is what I have specked up so far :-

Chillblast Fusion Scout
Cooler Master CM-690 II Lite Dominator Case
Intel Core i5 3570K Processor Overclocked to up to 4.5GHz
Akasa Nero 3 Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste
Asus P8Z77-V LX Motherboard
16GB Corsair PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 Memory (2 x 8GB sticks)
Chillblast NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2048MB Graphics Card
120GB Corsair Force 3 Solid State Drive
1000GB 7200RPM Hard Disk - 6Gbps
Sony 24x DVD-RW Drive
Corsair CX 750W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified PSU
17 in 1 3.5" Internal Card Reader
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

I have a separate NAS for storing files so 1TB should be plenty for storing the extra programs.

I have an external blue-ray writer aswell so I can just have that connected rather than buy an additional drive.

The price came to about £1070. Thats a little more than the i7 based prebuilt units but these are better branded components
Click to expand...

i just spec'd a similar (pretty much identical) for £844 all in on Scan, didnt include case as thats a personal choice.

http://i1125.photobucket.com/albums/l600/fallenlightphot/Clipboard01.jpg

(thrown together in 2 mins so theres probably room for shopping around swapping bits to get the price down, also double check its all definitely compatible.. like i say, thrown together..)
 
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My friend recently had to RMA a Corsair force 3 SSD so personally I'd choose a different brand.
 
im not convinced about SSD's, are they really worth the extra $$$? and with online gaming (if you do any of that) makes no difference. faster application load/close and file saving is basically all it improves isnt it?

however does sound a nice build, one id be perfectly happy with anyway. the GTX 660 may be overkill for minecraft but if your gonna use pc for gaming more than xbox its worth it, but personally if your more a console gamer id maybe get a cheaper card. good luck with your build tho...
 
here is my specs that i built myself 2 months ago, its plenty fast, powerful and eats any game you throw at it,

custom nvidia cooler master case (excellent airflow which is very important)
asus p8z77-vpro board.
socket 1155 intel i7-3770k overclocked to 4.3ghz
corsair h60 cooler
corsair dominator DDR3 Ram 16gb worth of running at 2333mhz
sandisk 128gb ssd for windows boot
2 x 1tb HDD for software and gaming.
cooler master 1000w +gold PSU
2 x Nvidia GTX 670 factory overclocked (having 2 is a bit o.t.t as one will laugh at anything you throw at it, i put 2 in for the sake of future proofing.
wireless keyboard and mouse and wireless receiver for xbox 360 controller for gaming.

as a guide this build cost me in the region of £1250. however its good for a good few years to come. with this setup i FRAPS records avergage FPS of 170 playing battlefield 3 on maximum settings and average of 110 FPS playing skyrim with some extreme ass mods.

hope this helps.
 
No hint of failure impending - just died. Lots of internet posts with similar failures on force 3 drives.... but then there probably are for most makes if you search.
Had his data on other drives and emails saved by google so not much lost despite having no back up of C:
 
I will update my image soon just in case!
 
RobertP said:
No hint of failure impending - just died. Lots of internet posts with similar failures on force 3 drives.... but then there probably are for most makes if you search.
Had his data on other drives and emails saved by google so not much lost despite having no back up of C:
Click to expand...

That is the thing with SSD. Unlike a traditional hard drive, you will only know it has failed when it no longer works.

For that reason, I back up my c drive which only has the OS, Photoshop, Lightroom and Battlefield 3 installed.

When it fails I only need 5 minutes to swap out and be running again.
 
That shouldn't be the case. You can monitor the SMART information on the drive and it will indicate the remaining life of the drive based on rated write and read cycles.

They also tend to fail in read only mode and the drive itself will map out these and give another sat on the amount of free location available for mapping. You should therefore get bios warnings when they start to fail. Like any component though you can get sudden electrical failures which makes the drive fail completely.
 
SMART and its usefulness are sometimes debatable.
With SSD it can show flash blocks that have failed and reallocated but that is not a warning of imminent failure. The MTBF for SSD is much greater than a spin up drive and with no moving parts to deteriorate and fail you tend not to get a warning before.

One of the largest causes of failure and data loss as I understand it is due to bugs in the flash controller firmware. No monitoring can protect against that.
 
neil_g said:
SMART is like using a cullender as a bucket.
Click to expand...

Strangely enough, I have found that too, with different spelling though ;)

My SSD software still says good for 8 years as well!
 
jus_tin said:
im not convinced about SSD's, are they really worth the extra $$$? and with online gaming (if you do any of that) makes no difference. faster application load/close and file saving is basically all it improves isnt it?
Click to expand...

Switching from a HDD to an SSD was responsible for the greatest speed increase I've ever seen with any upgrade I've ever done over the last 20 years.

Windows itself, and a load of other software, uses hundreds of DLLs which are loaded into memory when needed. With a HDD it can take 10 milliseconds just for the head to find the right place on the drive. An SSD will find it and load it it around 1% of the time. Now saving 10ms doesn't sound like much - but they add up - so that everything on the machine just feels that little bit snappier.
 
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