Computer buying advice.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I know there are a lot of people out there who are good at putting together desktop machines. I am reaching out to you to help me figure out what I am doing. I have been working primarily off of a laptop computer for the past few years. Recently, I figured out where I was going to be primarily, and figured that it is time to move to a desktop machine. In the past I have put together my own machine buying parts from different sites, and have bought machines that are already put together. I do a lot of coding mostly using Visual C++ and enjoy making video DVDs and mix CDS with my machine. I am not a big game desktop game player; I use the PS3 for my video gaming needs.

Currently, I am happy with the performance of my laptop. It has a Intel i5 2.4ghz CPU and 4 gigs ram. It’s running Windows 7 64 bit edition.

I would like a desktop machine that is at least as capable as my laptop. My laptop is about a year old, so I can’t imagine getting a desktop processor of a similar speed or a bit fast will be particularly difficult or expensive. I don’t mind starting with 4 gigs of memory, but I would like the ability to upgrade. I tend to use my desktop machines a long time, and my upgrades usually come in terms of memory. I don’t plan on doing much gaming, but I don’t want to rely on a motherboard’s video. I’d like a video card that supports more than one monitor. I have seen some desktop setups with two monitors, and I am eager to try that out. (I’d love to have one monitor open to code, and the other with my test application running. Among other things that are nice about having a two monitor setup.) I’d need Windows 7 64 bit. I’d probably opt for a Hard Drive of about 1TB or so. I’d like a machine that isn’t too noisy.

My questions:
Am I better off buying a machine from HP or the like, or building it myself? Cheaper is better. But, reliability is important, too.
Do most video cards offer the ability to connect to multiple monitors? Or will I have to install multiple cards?
Most importantly - about how much would I be spending for a machine like this?

2

As helpful as my fellow dopers are you’ll prolly get more usefull information at sites like tomshardware.

3

I’d build it myself. A friend of mine with requirements similar to yours recently did a fair amount of research and ended up buying an Intel i5 (H67 chipset, Sandybridge architecture) and 8 gigs of RAM for just a few hundred bucks. Of course, he already had the case, hard drive, and DVD drive, but you should be able to build this system very affordably.

As for video, onboard video is almost certainly fine for your needs, but if you want a standalone card you should be able to get a very powerful one for next to nothing (since you’re not playing games on it). For example, dealmein.net lists a Geforce 210 512MB for only $10 after the rebate. It’s not dual DVI, though you could still do dual monitors if one was VGA. I’d just keep an eye on the web deals for a week or two and see if you can’t find stuff like the hard drives, DVD drive, power supply, case and video card as cheaply as possible, then just pick out a well-reviewed motherboard and CPU+RAM and hook it all together.

4

The Sandy Bridge i5 sounds like good advice. Would cost a little more but should last you many years. RAM is dirt cheap so 4-8 gigs will probably fit your budget.

I would definitely toss in a modern GPU in there. Something like an HD 5770 or 6850 depending on your budget. You get 2-6 monitor support, better performance in doing anything HD related (videos, more responsive desktop, etc), and the possibility of gaming if you ever get tired of ugly console graphics :wink:

This shouldn’t run you more than $500-$700 tops including windows 7 (OEM).

5

Thanks for the tips, guys! Good to know about Sandy Bridge. I saw the name, but didn’t have any idea whether it was good or not.
I’ll do some research and come back here to get your guys thoughts. Hopefully, it will catch your eye. If not, I will PM and demand answers.
I think the hard part for me will be figuring out whether a specific CPU will work with a specific motherboard will work with a specific case.

The Librarian:
I lurked at their boards for a bit. But, I didn’t feel like their answers were especially helpful. I saw all of these threads that included accusations that people went to Devry, and they didn’t know what they were talking about. A lot of noise to have to cut through, basically. Maybe, I just needed to learn the personalities. But, for now I am happy with Giraffe and Kinthalis’ advice. (No matter how much Kinthalis tried to insult my manhood by way of my gaming choices.)

6

I haven’t looked in a while, but I have always found the hardware guides published by Ars Technica to be useful when planning to build a machine. There are three types - the Budget Box, the Hot Rod, and the God Box - and I have always ended up building something like the Hot Rod.

7

I second taking a look at Tom’s buying guides.

Also, don’t fret the CPU to mobo stuff.

Whether you shop new egg or Tiger Direct they usually either sell bundles, or the pane on the left will help you screen out CPU’s and Motherboards by socket.

That’s all you need to be able to put them together, a matching socket number.

If you’re going sandy bridge you are looking at an intel socket LGA 1155

i3 sandy bridge

i5 Sandy bridge

i7 Sandy Bridge

And here are the motherboards:

8

The first machine I ever built was based on one of their Budget boxes. It’s still running and still working great. I wouldn’t hesitate to use any of their guides for building a new machine. Even their budge box is built to be a good gaming machine.

9

First, off the shelf systems tend to use the cheapest components they can get away with. For example, they will often use a power supply that is just able to support the components in the system and may not be able to handle significant additions such as a more powerful video card.

If you build the system yourself and don’t need high performance graphics, then the i7-2600 and 2600k chips have on-chip graphics support if you get the H67 type motherboards (socket 1155) rather than the P67 boards.

Also, this chip supports hyperthreading which will give you 8 cores total - 4 real, 4 virtual. The virtual cores will run at about 60-70% as fast as the 4 real cores with hyper threading turned off. This is very handy for a whole range of applications like transcoders that can use multiple threads on multiple cores.

If you go with an 1155 board, these have dual memory channels rather than the triple memory channels of the socket 1366 boards. The latter is used for hyperthreading chips like the i7-950 which about the same price as a 2600. The difference is that the Sandybridge chips (like the 2600) run at a max of 95watts where as the older 9xx chips run at 130watts IIRC. Although I think there are some low power variants.

If you go dual channel, I would get 2 4gig sticks of ram. Pay more attention to the latency than the speed. Latency is usually expressed in number clock cycles for a CAS operation. The most common and cheapest memory tends to require 9 clock cycles and will be list as CAS 9 memory. Try to get at least CAS 7 and a rated speed of at least 1333mhz.

Most 1155 boards will have 4 slots so you can always upgrade to 16gig later if you want.

For HDD’s, look into getting an SSD that is at least 64gig. Try to get a good brand like OCZ, Geil, Patriot, G.Skill, etc. Make that your boot drive.

For storage, the 3 terabyte drives are out and are less per gigabyte than 1 or 2TB drives, but 2TB is still the sweet spot in terms of price.

For the motherboard, I would stick with Asus, especially for a first build. They’re very good quality and have good support. MSI, Gigabyte, and a few others are also good, but in my opinion, Asus is still the best even if you do have pay a premium.

For the powersupply (PSU) get at least a 550watt model that is at least 80% efficient and only buy a brand name.

The ratings are newegg are very helpful and as long as a highly rated product has more than a handful of reviews, you can normally rely upon them.

10

Some O_o advice in this thread.

Everything is going to run two monitors. For three or more monitors, you either need two video cards or an ATI “Eyefinity”-featuring card. The GPU included in the Sandy Bridge chips is better than a Geforce 210, so that’s not a great purchase. The 5770 is a great value card, but you’d do better to spend video card money on a SSD and stick with the Sandy Bridge GPU, if you don’t want to play PC games. You can always get a discrete card later. For some bizarre reason, Intel put a better GPU into the K-branded chips, which is worth the extra $20. It’s odd because the K-branded chips feature unlocked multipliers, which means pretty much only overclockers want them. To overclock though, you need a P67 chipset motherboard, which doesn’t support the onboard GPU. Silly Intel.

Those ArsTech builds aren’t really in-line with what you’re looking for. They’re gaming-focused machines taking advantage of overclocking and every trick in the book. If you’re cool with all that stuff, that’s a different matter. It isn’t too useful otherwise.

The Sandy Bridge + H67 (or even H61) is definitely what you want. Of the two price/performance peaks, it’s the faster of the two. The difference between the H67 and H61 is that the H61 is much cheaper, but lacks RAID, 6GB SATA ports, has fewer ports, only 2 DIMM slots, and just generally lower build quality. Not low quality though (usually).

CAS Latency isn’t something to worry about. Speed rating and voltage are the only real things to look at for RAM. The H67 and H61 only support 1333 MHz or 1066 MHz, so 1333 MHz is automatically the winner there. Anything higher is a waste.

Don’t buy an SSD based on brand. What matters for SSDs is the NAND type and controller type. The best SSD is the Vertex 3, but it’s expensive and requires a 6 GB SATA port, so it’s even more expensive since it eliminates the H61 option. The C400 and Intel 510 are basically the same drive since they use the same controller. They’re slower, also require 6 GB SATA ports, but maybe are cheaper. You can find good deals on older generation drives, like the Corsair F-series (120GB+ only) or the C300.

550W is serious overkill for a machine that doesn’t have a gaming video card. You could probably get by with 350W, but it can be hard to find quality units in that range. The brand isn’t a very good indicator of quality, since everyone just rebrands someone else’s stuff. The Corsair CX430 is 430W and of decent quality. It’s also like $50, which is nice. That’s what I’d get.

Don’t listen to Newegg reviews. Use quality reviews. Bit-tech for cases. Anandtech for SSDs and everything. jonnyguru for PSUs.

11

You guys have really given me a lot to think about and a lot of different things to play with, and made the stuff I am looking for a heck of a lot less imposing.

Now, I put together a system. Not one I intend on buying right away, but something I think looks good, and I think everything will work well together. I stole some ideas from you guys, and a couple from ars technica.

Here’s what I came up with.
I decided to forgo the video card for now, and put this machine together with a K branded chip, as suggested by Palooka. The 2500k was priced high, but got excellent reviews, so it seemed worth it.
I like the idea of SSD drives, but they are so expensive, that I decided to forgo it for right now and stick with a hard drive. I know the drive is only 5900, but I like the power savings, and I think I can live with the slower speed.
Just grabbed the DVD drive suggested by Ars Technica.
I chose the case because it got really good reviews from a couple of sites I ran by, and I like the idea of putting together a really quiet machine.
Intel Core i5-2500K retail = $225
ASUS P8H67-M Pro REV3 Motherboard = $130
G.Skill 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1333 1.5v = $80
Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB = $80
Sony Optiarc AD-7260S DVD-RW = $20
Antec LifeStyle Solo ATX Quiet case = $90
Corsair CMPSU-430CX CX Series 430-watt Power Supply = $40

I probably will follow giraffe’s idea of keeping an eye open for deals and buy things piecemeal. I always take a long time to make a purchase like this, and keep an eye open on the deal sites, and keep my mind open if I decide a different piece of equipment will work or be better for my budget. But, in spite of that, I wanted to see what I could come up with following everyone’s advice. If I were to jump and purchase today how does this setup look? More importantly, does the logic I used to put it together make sense?

12

I don’t know where you’re located, but I’m going to assume it’s the United States and you’re not near a Micro Center location. If you are near one, they do crazy in-store loss leaders on CPUs and motherboards all the time. Anyway, what I mean is you’re either looking at Newegg or Amazon.

The Antec Solo case is an ancient case. Today you can get cases that’re quieter and easier to work with because they offer cable routing portals and stuff. For the $90~ range, I’d look at the Fractal Define R3. It uses the same minimalist-styling as the Antec Solo, but offers those more modern features and a bitumen-based soundproofing lining. (The lining smells for two weeks though.) That’s what I’d get if I wanted a cheap and quiet case. Not saying the Solo is bad or anything. If you like it’s smaller size and styling better, right on. It’s a personal thing. The cable routing improves air flow, which lowers temperatures and thereby noise. It’s easier when you have the holes to run cables under the motherboard tray, but you can do a fine job with the Solo if you try.

I’d also switch out the Corsair CX430. I was looking through some more units and the Seasonic S12 II 380W is much better. It costs $15 more, but the quality and efficiency are superior. It uses better capacitors so it’s less likely to randomly die and it’s actually 80% efficiency so it’ll consume less power, which saves money over a long enough timeline. SilentPC did the Seasonic 380W review, if don’t want to take my word for it. The truth is that I don’t really have much experience with these non-gaming builds.

13

Be sure if you go Sandy Bridge to get a B3 level motherboard. The previous versions had some issues with the SATA 1/2 connections degrading performance over time (in fact, several MB’s were recalled for this).

Also, on the video, anything current from either AMD or NVidia should support multiple monitors. I’d personally go for the NVidia GTX560 Ti (not the most powerful, but has a lot of good reviews for price/performance). I believe it can support up to 2 monitors. Anything more and you might have to go up to the GTX570/580 cards…

14

That’s a good point about the motherboards. The best thing to do is buy from a reputable dealer like NewEgg. When the problem was discovered, they immediately pulled not only their 1155 m/b’s but also all of the chips that used them. They finally reintroduced the chips a couple of weeks before the re-worked boards became available. With other dealers you probably won’t know for sure until you have the board in your hands and can check it against the company’s web site. I’m not saying newegg is the only reputable dealer, but they’re the one I’m most familiar with.

15

You can certainly get it for a few bucks cheaper if you order at different times from different places, but that can be a problem as well. If everything works find right out of the box, you are good to go. If something does not work and you are past the return period it can cost you money. I like to get everything within a few days and put it together immediately. I also like to use a single source because it makes it easier when things go wrong. Having said that, I have built two machines and nothing has gone wrong, but I am not sorry that I paid a bit more for the convenience.

Also, my take on memory is that for the vast majority of users (and this includes gamers), anything above 4 gig is wasted. If not wasted, any gains fall off sharply after that point. The oft repeated wisdom is that the best way to improve performance is by adding memory, but I am not sure that applies after 4 gig.

I looked briefly at your motherboard and it did not look like it had a video chipset (it has something called iGPU Boost - I don’t know what that is), but if you are not getting a graphics card, you will want to verify that it has a video chipset. I do know that many mobos are sold without one.

16

I think your setup looks good, although I’ll second Palooka’s recommendation of the Seasonic S12 power supply – I’ve used several of these over the years and they are excellent. Very quiet, with good voltage stability (more important than the max power draw number: a generic 450W can actually be worse than a quality 380W in terms of its ability to perform under load.)

I’ll also echo dzero’s recommendation to be careful of where you buy your motherboard or memory from. You don’t want to save $10 only to end up with an unstable revision of a motherboard – definitely not worth it. Go with a reputable site like Newegg, and make sure the version you’re getting has a positive online reputation (check the reviews and Google “[motherboard model info] problem” and see what comes back.

17

palooka:
Woah! Microcenter looks awesome. Great prices. There is one about 45 minutes from me. It looks like that is well worth the trip. The processor/motherboard/case prices are quite good. And, I wouldn’t have to wait for shipping.

ethelbert:
I might have misread things, but I think the CPU I picked out has it’s own video chipset. So, the motherboard doesn’t need one.