New PC and HD questions!

Tractor Boy

Tractor Boy

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Nick
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Hi Folks,

I am going to be building myself a new PC in the next few weeks (first time :thinking:) and have settled on an AMD Phenom X2 550 chip with a decent mobo and graphics card and was going to run the hard drives as follows:

250gb WD blue for the OS and programs
2x 1tb WD caviar green. The idea is to have one as the main drive for photo's and music with the other acting as a back up using something like synctoy. I also have a small external HD to back up photo's to keep and family stuff as well as burning photo files to a dvd.

As I don't do photography in any professional capacity and don't really need NAS or DROBO kind of stuff do you think the above is a good idea or are there any other ways of doing it that may be better :shrug:

I am open to suggestions but do have to consider that I have limited space and that the computer is also used by the family - may look at putting a password protect on the two 1tb drives to stop interferance :suspect:

Thanks

Nick
 
If it's for family stuff, surfing and the odd game, watching videos that set up is fine. You can buy triple and quad core processors for about the same price as that phenom though I'm not sure how much benefit one of them would bring you.
 
It would be used as a family PC so internet, Music, bit of gaming (mainly things like Toontown and a few Dr Who bits for the boy) and for me to do my photo bits. I only run photoshop and a few other similar bits so don't need a huge amount of processing power although this would be very upgradeable if needed in the future. I was going to put in 4gb of ram and run it on Windows 7.
 
Sounds fine then :) don't bank on it being upgradeable for long though, that's not the way the industry works.
 
The way the mobo and processor markets move I would be inclined to build something with a high end mobo with a current mid to low range processor, reasoning that the higher end processors will drop in price over the next 18 to 24 months ready for an upgrade. That would probably extend the life of the pc to about 4 years.

Dont be put off buying a built pc though, whilst it may come up a bit cheaper building your own it's always good having that 12 month warrenty. I bought my current one from Dino pc a couple of years back, for about £1000 and it's still going stong, and I expect it to last for another couple of years of high end gaming before needing an upgrade of any sort, apart from the processor perhaps.
 
Thanks for that Mark.

I have looked at pre built systems but I can't get the spec I want and the extras at what I consider to be a reasonable price. I have even looked at the "spec your own" sites an they come out nearly 50% more expensive. The system parts from places like Overclockers or Ebuyer come in at around £550 including the Windows 7 OS and I know that I have got things like a decent case and PSU not the cheapest available.

More than anything I was trying to check that my idea of having a small 250gb HD for the OS and programs with a pair of 1TB HD for photo and music storage and backup was a sensible way to do things or if there wasa better way of going.

Thanks

Nick
 
Nick.
In that case 250 would be fine for the OS but given the falling prices I would go for a 500gb, software is getting quite blotted these days.
One thing though, I have two graphics cards in mine, due to the size of them I had to remove the second hard drive and use a USB drive caddy. You may want to keep this in mind when considering sticking 3 HD's in a case.
 
Don't skimp on the case, buy a bigger, good quality one and get a decent 700w+ power supply to go with it as these are the two things that will be useable for many years to come even if you upgrade the rest.
 
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