Our laptop recently met with a sticky end (our 4 year old stood on it accidently). The hard drive is kaput, and its not worth repairing and replacing the damaged components.
We are thinking of getting a desktop system. Looking around at websites like dell, desktops don’t come cheap. Someone recemmended to me that it would be worth doing a custom build. We have a budget of around £400 (about 580 dollars). I’d like to able to run some games, aswell as the usual windows applications. I assume that the two most important components are the CPU and the graphics card? Whats your experience of custom builds, and what would you recommend as a good graphics card and CPU? By the way I don’t need to run Crysis maxed out or anything just things like Silent Hunter IV
I’m an avid gamer, but run on a strict budget, so I think I’m a good person to asnwer your question.
First, I prefer desktops to laptops precisely because a desktop can be more powerful for less money than a laptop. I think you can remove that particular concern. On the other hand, they’re definitely less portable, so if that’s still a need, a laptop may still be a better choice.
But you asked about desktops, so I’ll assume that’s been decided. There are definitely good pre-built systems out there, and I’ve been relatively impressed with Dell in the past. That said, a pre-built will never give you exactly what you want for the minimum possible price – there will always be things in it that you wouldn’t have wanted, and you’ll still have to pay for them. Thus, building your own is almost always cheaper.
HOWEVER, building your own can be a major nightmare if you’re not already familiar with the process. Many companies these days ship the boards as fast as possible, before the BIOS has really been finalized (or even passed basic tests!). Expect to need to reflash the BIOS from the get-go. Similarly, you’ll need to install the OS, you’ll need to make sure you get the right PSU, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got cables, space, and so on. And if you want to overclock, there’s more stuff involved with that.
As somewhat of an expert, I put together my own machines (have for years), and I often put together my friends’ and family’s. It still takes me the better part of a whole day’s effort, and that’s once the parts have all been chosen and arrived. If you’re not an expert, I’d advise buying a pre-built.
That said, you’ve still got a good amount of choice, even with pre-builts, plus you’ve got places like cyberpower that put together a machine with more customization, so it’s like something in between. The point being that your questions about what’s important are still valid.
You’re right that the two most important things these days are graphics card and CPU. The most important thing that many people miss, though, is that they need to be MATCHED. Having an awesome CPU and a crappy Gfx card sucks, as does the other way around. Duh. But similarly, having a “pretty good” CPU and a “great” Gfx card is wasting money on the graphics, just not as egregiously.
I’m honestly not current on the latest and greatest in either category, but it sounds like you don’t need to be. If you get a simple, cheapish Core 2 Duo, and any 256MB PCIe graphics card, you should be OK. Together, these two components will run around $150 to $200 (as a guess), and everything else together should put you in the price range you were talking about, if not under it.
I freakin LOVE building a new PC! I’ve built at least a dozen in the past, and fixed many more. If you really want a good idea on the parts and process of building a PC, I highly recommend arstechnica’s hardware builds. I usually find the best deals on newegg for parts, but I’ve found better deals on things elsewhere or local. slickdeals.net also has great places to shop for cheap prices.
I’ve built, and I’ve bought. For commodity machines (and at the 500-600 dollar mark, yours is definitely in that category), you can’t beat what the major manufacturers can put together. They get much, much better pricing on parts and OSes than you do, even if you buy OEM Windows to put on it, and their margins are so slim than they’ll still come in under your component price: CPU + Video Card + Windows will probably put you over $400, and you still haven’t bought a case/memory/power supply/hard drive/optical drives, etc.
Where you can do better is high-power, special purpose rigs: gaming, science workstation, video production system, etc. These use higher-end components, and the big manufacturers have much higher profit margins, so there’s room to improve on their prices.
My rule of thumb (in the US, mind you, so there are likely to be regional differences) is that for any PC worth less than $1000, it’s better to buy commodity, and for anything greater than that, build it yourself. That number is coming down; it would have been $1500 a few years ago, but it’s definitely not at the point yet where you can save money on a $500 PC (and if you do, you’ll end up with a worse PC to do it).
You’re going to need to stretch that: a decent monitor will cost you about £100 and so will a decent graphics card. And be very wary about buying the cheapest Dells as their PSUs are anaemic and aren’t standard.
As a general rule: let’s say a PC/Windows laptop that does everything you want costs X.
A MacBook = 2X
A desktop = .5X
Therefore, you can get the same computing power in a desktop at half the price of a laptop, and 1/4 the price of a Mac.
In general, I usually aim to spend around $500 on a new computer, and I switch out upgrades and replacement parts by myself, so I usually get 6-8 years out of it.
If you are interested, tomshardware.com usually runs yearly do-it-yourself projects with the latest parts at 3-4 different budget levels.
If you decide to take the plunge, the cheapest parts anywhere are on pricewatch.com.
Custom builds sound like a lot of hassle. Thanks for the advice. Looks like buying ready made is the war forward. I have looked at the Cyberpower website. They let you configure almost everything on a PC. I have played around with their configurator, and come up with this spec PC, which comes in at £458 (around 670 USD).
•CPU: AMD Phenom™ II X2 550 Black Edition Dual-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology
•HDD: Single Hard Drive (250GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 8MB Cache 7200RPM HDD)
•MOTHERBOARD: ASUS M4N68T-M NF630A AM3 DDR3/1066 SATA PCI-Express MBoard w/GbLAN, USB2.0, &7.1Audio
•MEMORY: 2GB (2x1GB) PC10666 DDR3/1333mhz Dual Channel Memory (Corsair Value Select or Major Brand)
•SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
•VIDEO: ATI Radeon HD 5450 PCI-E 512MB Video
•MONITOR: 22" TFT Active Matrix LCD Display
This also includes a wireless card, 15 in 1 card reader, webcam and keyboard and mouse.
I couldn’t find out what the clock speed of this CPU is. I presume its around 2.8Ghz? What do you think of the above system in terms of value for money, and ability to run some games? I don’t need to run everything at highest settings, just things like, for example, far cry or silent hunter with a good frame rate and decent resolution.
Don’t forget to buy an external USB hard drive to back up your data if you’ve not already got one.
Asus are one of the better manufacturers.
Possibly a little on the low side for memory.
Don’t forget that you’ll need a set of speakers! And if you want to use Skype or similar, I recommend a second sound card - nothing fancy, mind, just an ultra-cheap one.
Ugh! This really won’t cope. It’s not a gaming card.
Resolution? Should be 1080p at that size; it’s just too large for 720p for my eyes.
I don’t expect the Radeon 5450 to be able to do that for Far Cry; I’m not familiar with Silent Hunter.
And don’t forget to buy a case and PSU (or are they included already?)
You’ll need a DVD drive.
You’re going to need a copy of Windows.
I’m not familiar with Cyberpower, but your local Trading Standards department may be able to advise you. I usually buy from Novatech or eBuyer.
Thanks Quartz. It does include case, PSU and DVD drive. The world of graphics cards is a bit confusing. What card would you recommend as an reasonable gaming card on a budget?
I purchased Windows 7 for our laptop. Seeing as the hard disk is damaged beyond repair, I have no way of taking Windows 7 off it. Do you anticipate problems activating Windows 7 on any new PC I purchase?
ACtually, for Skype or similar applications, I’d recommend a USB soundcard, perhaps even a USB headset, which comes with one. It’s just easier to handle. And you can get them cheap, around $30 or $40 online, (£20 to £30, according to Yahoo Finance), about the same price as an actual second sound card.
I have a pair of USB headphones I got as a birthday present, and I love them. And the fact that it’s USB means you can wait until later to actually get them.
Since you seem to prefer ATI, I’d suggest a Radeon 5670 or better.
This is actually a very difficult question. It depends upon the actual license you purchased and where you live. Some licenses are transferable and others aren’t. If your laptop came with W7, or you purchased it as an upgrade from the laptop’s manufacturer, the license is almost certainly not transferable. If you purchased it as a standalone item, then it may well be transferable.
I built my machine for about $600 a year ago, using one of Ars Tech guides. I originally put an Audigy 4 in there but it was giving me trouble so I ditched it for a Turtle Beach USB card. I’ve never had a problem with it. It sounds better than both the onboard sound and the Audigy card when I play music. It was about $40. That said, onboard sound for gaming & general use will certainly get the job done these days.
Herge - you don’t say, but is your version of Windows 64 bit or 32 bit? If it’s 64 bit - and hopefully it is - don’t settle for less than 4gb of RAM.
For the graphics, my current machine has a ATI Radeon 4850. That card’s a little long in the tooth but it’s been a real champ. I don’t feel any urgent need to replace it, even though my CPU is not as good as a the Phenom II you mention. Ars’ build guide for their budget box prefers the 4850 on bang/buck over the 5760 & 5770 (and over the nVidia offerings.) I’d say get a 4850* now and think about replacing it in a couple years.
Link to the Ars guide- not the one I used but the upgrade from last fall. Mine is similar though.
Herge, you asked about overclocking. It’s not as important as it was ten or even five years ago. CPU’s have gotten so fast that the difference are more incremental than game-changing. Unless you’ve got your heart set on it, you can probably skip it. At this point, more RAM & a better graphics card will give more noticeable results results.
(*You’d think, theoretically, that it sounds like all cards of a higher number should be better than cards of a lower number. Thanks to the Miracle of Marketing, that’s not always the case.)
I think your budget is too small and you’ll be a lot happier if you can put another $200 into the system. Especially if you need a new monitor - a 22" LCD will start at least at $150-200 and so you’re really only spending $500 or less on the PC itself.
The CPU is decent enough (3.1ghz). Quad cores are more future proof but it’s no slouch.
250gb HD is fine if you think that’s enough space for you - you didn’t list a brand or model so I can’t comment on it. Some will be faster and/or more reliable than others and that’s important, especially if it’s the drive that’ll host your OS and other programs.
Asus is a reputable board maker but I’m not familiar with that motherboard specifically.
2gb of memory will make you notice how little memory you have frequently. You’ll probably want to close any browsers/background programs you have before launching games and you’ll frequently run into situations where your computer bogs down because it’s using the page file. 4gb is standard and gives you much mre to work with.
The 5450 is about as cheap/bad as you can get while still be considered a proper video card. It’ll probably be adequate for older games like SH3/4 and farcry at medium settings at less than your monitor’s native res - something like 1280x960 medium settings would probably be good. But you would benefit massively by upgrading here even to a pretty modestly priced 5670, or better, a 5750. This is definitely going to be the weak link in your setup - the ram will give you issues, but you always have the option of closing everything else to make things run well. The 5450 will never be that good.
It’s hard to comment on the value there. I’ve heard parts in the UK are more expensive than equivelant parts in the US. I also don’t know what brand some of those parts are, and the PSU. I could definitely throw together something better for that price in the US, but you may not have that option.
I would strongly recommend investing an extra $100-$200 or so and upgrading the ram to 4gb, and the video card to a 5750. You could go with a quad core cpu and a faster hard drive (again, the description is too vague but I assume it’ll be the cheapest one that matches that description) but the first two upgrades I mentioned are the most critical. If you only upgrade the ram/video card, the overall experience will be much better.
I disagree with their assessment. The 4850 is good, but the 5760 at the same price point only slight underperforms it while also having DX11 support, lower power draw, less heat, and better overclocking. The 5750/5770 do cost more, but have a decent performance boost to come with it along with those other benefits.
Eh, free performance is still free performance. It’s not a requirement though.
It’s not an issue of marketing. They need some way to describe dozens of variations of card types over several different generations of technology. ATI’s naming scheme is consistent and logical if you understand how to read it - Nvidia’s is not quite so much (they’re guilty of renaming like crazy sometimes).
The first number is the generation of the card. Any Radeon 5xxx is a card that will have directx 11 support, mosty have eyefinity support, they run cooler and use less power than 4xxx or 3xxx cards, they are faster clock per clock, and in general just have more refined technology. But there are a variety of budget and performance points within a series. The 5870 is the high end single GPU of the 5 series, with the most stream processing units, stock clock speed, ram, etc. Everything lower than that is reduced in some way. The 5850 has similar clocks but one bank of stream processors is disabled and it has slightly slower and lower quality memory. The 5770 is a big step down with half the stream processors of the 5870. By the time you get down to x5xx or x4xx numbers, you have a seriously stripped down budget card with a lower clock rate and fraction of the stream processor units and memory of the 5870. So you end up in situations where cards have the technology of the newer generation of video cards, but they lack the raw horsepower of the high end units of the previous generation. But it wouldn’t make sense to put these low end cards numbered with the previous 4xxx series, because they still have all the other features that distinguish them - the dx11 support, lower temps and power draw, etc.
I couldn’t really come up with a more logical way to name/number ATI’s units. Wikipedia has a page listing all the technical details of each model.
You mean the 5670? (Couldn’t find anything about 5760). I’ve read (on wiki, but still) that they’re going to relaunch that card in the fall, basing it on their Juniper line rather than the current Redwood based product. It might be worth holding off on it until then.
Your point about dx11 is well taken and if I were building a machine today I’d probably spring for one. But there’s probably only a dozen games out that support it or plan to support it in the near future. It’s not really a pressing need. Civ 5 & the Cry Engine are the only two I can think of.
Bottom line - I don’t think it’s unreasonable to go for the horsepower of the 4850 for a budget box today. While it’s true that the 5— line has features that the 4---- line doesn’t, it’ll be a couple years before those features become common in gaming. The key word for my thinking is budget.
Still, the 5670 is a closer price to what Herge was looking for. Lower temp is good too. My machine also functions as a space heater (not an exaggeration - I have the furnace duct partially closed off up here.) It’s a reasonable choice.
As for the naming, yeah, I know how it works. Mostly what I want is something more than a collection letters and numbers: 4650, 4580gt, 4850se, 5460se, 5770gs, 5780xl - it’s a personal thing but it drives me nuts. Neither here nor there of course.
Yep, transposed the numbers. I recommend stepping up to a 5750 or 70 for just about anyone - the price/performance ratio there is excellent.
The 4850 isn’t a bad suggestion, I just disagree. There are a decent few DX11 games out - bfbc2 probably benefits the most from it. Dirt 2 looks spectacular. It’s becoming more common to support it. It won’t be years before DX11 is common - major titles that are worth half a crap will have it.
It’s not essential, but given the price/performance tradeoff in question I think it’s worthwhile.
The ATI line doesn’t use any letters, which is part of why I said ATI’s line is more consistent and understandable than Nvidia’s. So those examples you just made up wouldn’t and don’t exist.
