Well, I asked a friend to look up a set up for a computer for me.
I wanted a system that works really well for computer games as I just want to buy something and play it with settings maxed or at least medium without worrying if it will work. I also want it to be able to run multiple programs at the same time with ease, so photoshop doesn't crap out on me designing high quality posters on a LARGE size (a0 for instance).
He came up with this list, but as I have no expertise in computer hardware whatsoever, I figured I'd run it past you guys first:
processor
Intel® Coreâ,,¢ 2 Quad Q9650
motherboard
Asus Maximus II Formula
videocard
Asus ENGTX275/2DI/896MD3
memory
GeiL 4 GB DDR2-1066 Kit
HD
Western Digital WD10EADS
power supply
Corsair CMPSU-750TX
Price if I ordered this on alternate.nl: â,¬ 923,-
Then I'd have to buy two monitors, a case, mouse & keyboard and I'd be all set.
Is this a good computer? The price looks awesome to me right now as I had figured something more in the â,¬1600,- price range, though of course I suppose a monitor can be a quite expensive thing as well.
Oh hey Heineken
That looks O.K. to me, but do you have adequate cooling for the case? When I got my latest computer, I thought the specs were nice but I didn't have enough cooling for it all to preform as well as it could. I later upgraded the CPU fan and added more case fans. The expandability of the board is also an issue.
It became this, to a total of € 1272,- (1279,50 after shipping):
(https://clockcrew.net/talk/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ffiles.myfrogbag.com%2Fhtdpnw%2Fcomputer.png&hash=24b96381ebbada9e81a33a7c844880eab868c1b2)
Now it has a DVD rom drive, WLAN adapter and a 24" samsung monitor. The case has some big fans built in, so the cooling should be in order.
You'll probably not believe me, but get two CRT monitors. Their color display is superior still to the LCDs price for price, and you can get higher frequencies displayed allowing for crisper more realisitic colors. Great for gaming, as well as photo and video editing. But if deskspace is that valuable, dont get two monitors but one huge one that you can save for.
Quote from: ScrewdriverClock;1685848You'll probably not believe me, but get two CRT monitors. Their color display is superior still to the LCDs price for price, and you can get higher frequencies displayed allowing for crisper more realisitic colors. Great for gaming, as well as photo and video editing. But if deskspace is that valuable, dont get two monitors but one huge one that you can save for.
Even though the principles about CRT monitors he says are true, don't get CRT. They are just way too big and large sizes are not only hard to find but ridiculously expensive. Not to mention CRT shipping is much higher than an LCD, also making it hard to transport.
Quote from: ScrewdriverClock;1685848You'll probably not believe me, but get two CRT monitors. Their color display is superior still to the LCDs price for price, and you can get higher frequencies displayed allowing for crisper more realisitic colors. Great for gaming, as well as photo and video editing. But if deskspace is that valuable, dont get two monitors but one huge one that you can save for.
I've worked with LCD for a while without any problems, I don't think I will really notice the difference. The reason I'd like to go dual is because I think it's really practical in the sense that you can maximize two windows and work between them at the same time, without having to scale and such. Although I've heard that Windows 7 supports something like that on a single monitor with dragging and clicking and stuff, I just like two monitors.
If I had a little bit more money right now, I'd consider going for some super widescreen monitor, for now, a single 24" monitor upgraded to two 24" monitors will suffice.
I was mostly wondering if the internal stuff would be okay, but I appreciate your input!
The only thing I can think of is adding another 4gb of ram just for the fuck of it.
Well, I have four slots for RAM on this motherboard so that's not a problem. I could either upgrade the ones I have or add new ones.
Get an AMD CPU, Intel are waaaaaaaaaay overpriced. By overpriced I mean literally 8 times the cost. Phenom IIs are pretty cool at the mo. You want 4 cores definitely and around 3GHz of GHz.
I've not really heard of asus video cards but they are probably really terrible. ATI are the best value for money cards right now. Get something in the 5 or 4 series with at least 1GB VRAM. Get a 5*** ati card if you want to play the newest games in max settings, full AA, for a while. NVidia used to be cool but now ATI is way better value than them.
I have no idea if your PSU is any good or not, as long as it's above 400MHz or so it should be fine.
€1000/£900 is pretty damn expensive for a decent computer. I only spent about £300 on mine.
DDR3 RAM is expensive as fuck right now but you'll probably need a motherboard compatible with it since you're gonna be fucked later on if you don't. You're gonna need 4GB. You probably won't ever use more than 4GB except in the future where we all have hover boots, hover cars and hover cocks. DDR3 RAM is about twice as expensive as DDR2 at the moment but if you don't waste money on expensive shit then that should be fine.
If you're building your own computer you should never need to spend more than €600 altogether.
Make sure you get SATA dvd drives and hard drives and shit. You might want a 3.5" memory card slot things as well with SD card readers, usb and shit like that. They are pretty useful and only about £5/€6.
Dual monitors own btw. I have a 20" 1680x1050 and a 14" 1024x768. It's pretty cool for web design as well, with seeing how it'd work on other resolutions. You should probably get a 16:9 HDTV and hook it into the HDMI port on a ATI vidja card plus a 4:3 monitor you can have at the side. The size and type of your monitor is really completely your preference. It's best to have a screen at a 16:9 ratio though, for movies and shit without black bars, also some games are gay and lock you into a 16:9 ratio like mirror's edge and assassin's creed. It's cool to watch shit on one monitor while you work on the other and all other kinds of cool things.
I don't know what case you have because that picture is all in some kind of wierd language like Greek or Danish or some strange form of Dutch. You should probably get an ATX case, it's only a bit taller than a microATX case and they usually have better cooling.
You need to get a 64 bit version of Vista or 7, you're best off with 7, either pirate it, get a student edition if you qualify or go to MSDN if you qualify for that, failing all that, buy it with many moneys.
You should only ever really get RAM in 2GB sticks or more, anything less and you're probably gonna end up replacing it later on and losing some money. It's not that important, just don't fill up your ram slots with 128MB slots of RAM.
Make sure your motherboard has the right CPU slot for the CPU you want. Usually motherboards will either be sided with AMD or intel. I don't know what Intel uses but AMD uses AM2,AM2+ and AM3. AM3 is the latest one and only AM3 CPUs will work in it, other ones will blow your computer up, seriously. AM2+ works with AM2+ and AM3 CPUs, although using an AM3 CPU in a AM2+ will be slower than if it was in an AM3 slot. I'm not sure about AM2, it's pretty old and I'm guessing it only works with AM2 CPUs. AM3 is the only one which supports DDR3 memory I think, so you'd best probably go with that. Get an ATX motherboard if you have an ATX case, microATX if you have an microATX case etc...
If you're getting an ATI card then you should probably get a motherboard with two PCIe2 x16 slots and crossfire support, then when you want to upgrade your COMPUTER GRAPHIX, just pop another ATI card in with your old one and get added power without wasting the old card. NVIDIA has SLI but you have to have the exact same video cards for it to work.
Motherboard usually have integrated sound which is fine, you'll probably want a cheap PCI wireless card though, dongles can go a bit dodgy at times. Maybe a TV tuner card if you're into that kind of thing, you wierdo.
You should probably start by looking for your CPU and motherboard.
Not sure what else to say, that's pretty much the extent of my computer building knowledge. BTEC ICT did help quite a bit.