Gaming PC (£2700)

Sput2001

All this bollix bout the superiority of pcs is usually from people who have little willies.

Whereas people who bang on about the superiority of Macs are hung like horses, of course.

BillScarab

Marty_J wrote: »

All this bollix bout the superiority of pcs is usually from people who have little willies.

My, making totally blanket statements is fun!

Seriously though, I'd need to be very rich/hit on the head with something to consider spending £2,700 on something to play games with.

Is it really going to be 9 times as fun as a PS3?

I bought a PS3 instead of a gaming PC as everyone said a £300 console was better value than a PC. Unfortunately my Company of Heroes, Civilization IV and Medieval Total War games don't seem to work. What should I do now?

Without knowing what games the OP is wanting to play there's no point recommending a console.

lee634

NickMidgley wrote: »

Whereas people who bang on about the superiority of Macs are hung like horses, of course.

Well thankyou Nick, I'm Glad you read my comments on the Mac V PC debate :rotfl:

Marty_J

NickMidgley wrote: »

Whereas people who bang on about the superiority of Macs are hung like horses, of course.

Those pictures were taken when I was young and needed the money.

BillScarab wrote: »

Without knowing what games the OP is wanting to play there's no point recommending a console.

Good point.

[Deleted User]

As I said last night (and now I'm sober), if you want a well specced machine that will handle everything currently available, and for the foreseeable future here is what I would go for:

Motherboard, CPU & Memory
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 - £117.49
Asus P5Q Deluxe Intel P45 - £135.11
CZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-8500C5 1066MHz DDR2 - £70.49

Graphics Card
Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB - £234.99

HDD
Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB - £93.99

Bluray Reader + DVD RW Combo
Pioneer BDC-202BK 5x BD-ROM -£81.06

Soundcard and Speakers
Asus Xonar D2X 7.1 - £111.61
Acoustic Energy Aego M 2.1 - £105.74

Keyboard
Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 5000 - £54.04

Case and PSU
Antec P182 Super Midi Tower Case - £91.64
Coolermaster Real Power 700w Modular - £86.94

Monitor
Samsung SM-226BW 22" - £174.24

Operating System
Vista Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - £69.31

Cooling
Tuniq Tower 120-LFB - £46.99
3 x Yate Loon D12SM-12 - £17.58
Zalman ZM-MFC2 Multi Fan Controller - £35.24
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - £4.69

Total: £1536.15

And that will be a pretty mean system

aliEnRIK

Im assuming with all this cooling stuff your talking of overclocking the quadcore? Id be a tad........nervous........of overclocking such a pricy machine to be honest!

[Deleted User]

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Im assuming with all this cooling stuff your talking of overclocking the quadcore? Id be a tad........nervous........of overclocking such a pricy machine to be honest!

Well, you could if you wanted too quite easily. the Q6600 is a very clockable chip.

The Antec fans that come with the case are quite poor, the cooler for the CPU will prolong it's lifetime and the 4870 will be dumping a lot of heat in the case that will need taking out.

Plus, the controller will allow you to turn the rpm of the fans right down when you're not doing anything intensive to keep it nice and quiet.

Overclocking is pretty safe if you've got adequate cooling and you know what you're doing.

mdbarber

RAID has a variety of options, including one called striping, it uses the sectors/stripes concurrently and therefore boosts disk transfer performances.
On a raptor raid 0 i would expect a 35-45 percent increase in disk performance avg.
As this is the slowest transfer area in the system to build a setup of this magnitude without raid 0 would be folly as you will have the cpu/mem sat round waiting for data from the drive far too much

epz_2

there is no point in having an ssd and a raptor drive, a £50 750gig storage drive is fine.

i also see no point in a blueray burner its expensive and pointless.

personally i would also cheap out on the cpu/mobo and replace them in november when intels new 8 threaded cpu with integrated memory contoler ships, clock for clock its like 30% faster.

BillScarab

mdbarber wrote: »

RAID has a variety of options, including one called striping, it uses the sectors/stripes concurrently and therefore boosts disk transfer performances.
On a raptor raid 0 i would expect a 35-45 percent increase in disk performance avg.
As this is the slowest transfer area in the system to build a setup of this magnitude without raid 0 would be folly as you will have the cpu/mem sat round waiting for data from the drive far too much

Every objective test I've seen of Raid 0 on a desktop machine has shown either no improvement in real world performance or such a tiny improvement as to be imperceptible.

Different in server environments but for most users I think it's fairly pointless. Better off going for Raid 1 for the redundancy.

For example

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101