Please help me spec my PC!

Toxteth_OGrady

irisandalex wrote: »

Regarding the speed - would I be better to spend an imaginary £10 on better memory or a .1GZ faster procesor?

I'm a gamer/overclocker so my opinion will be skewed but I would choose a cpu first (on price/performance) and then choose the best memory to go with that cpu.

irisandalex

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

Your system as specced will draw about 226W so at 80% efficiency you need a minimum of 282W.

Could you let me know how you got to 226W please? Thanks.

Toxteth_OGrady

Using an online power supply calculator. It's also worth bearing in mind that if you do decide later on to go for a graphics card you would have to get a new psu as well. I think the choice of SSD is over the top for the rest of your system. Again IMHO I think a 1TB Samsung F3 drive would be much better VFM at this performance point and be 40 quid cheaper than the SSD with a lot more storage.

spakkker

You would be wasting your imaginary £10 in either case.
Speeding up ram, if possible, isn't a major boost.
I've used 7760 cases in a few builds -ok
That m/b seems to have only one pci slot ,maybe better with usb w/less adaptor.
You'll need some molex/sata connectors
You may want to add a discrete gpu in the future ,these will need maybe 75W , so bigger psu is really in order.
Overclocking is dictated mainly by the m/board then cpu. The 3 core cpu is probably an imperfect quad ,tho' may be possible to unlock the 4th core hence a cheap quad ! It needs an unlocking capable m/board and is not guaranteed. It may be flakey if unlocked/overclocked
I don't know what sort of system you are currently struggling with but I think you will be underwhelmed with that amd cpu.

irisandalex

thanks for comments, checking them out now. But the main thing I want to ask about - you think I'll be underwhelmed by that CPU? I thought I'd gone pretty high spec there! Without going for the latest generation sandy bridge chips.

irisandalex

spakkker wrote: »

Speeding up ram, if possible, isn't a major boost.

Great. Will stick with the cheapo stuff then. I like that it's all on one card as well, makes future expansion easier.

spakkker wrote: »

I've used 7760 cases in a few builds -ok

Great.

spakkker wrote: »

That m/b seems to have only one pci slot ,maybe better with usb w/less adaptor.

It has:
1 PCI Express x16 slot with x16 operation (PCI Express Bus SPEC V2.0 compliant)
2 PCI EXpress x1 slots
1 PCI slot, support 3.3V/ 5V PCI bus Interface.
Wouldn't the wifi card fit in any of those?

spakkker wrote: »

You'll need some molex/sata connectors

What for?

spakkker wrote: »

You may want to add a discrete gpu in the future ,these will need maybe 75W , so bigger psu is really in order.

Pretty sure I won't buy a GPU, think the onboard will be good enough. I'd really like a 80+ PSU, so I've upped the power a bit and hopefully the quality a lot with this one:
Compucase Green Earth 350W 80plus Certified PSU - 20+4pin 2x SATA 1x PCI-E
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151783

spakkker wrote: »

Overclocking is dictated mainly by the m/board then cpu. The 3 core cpu is probably an imperfect quad ,tho' may be possible to unlock the 4th core hence a cheap quad ! It needs an unlocking capable m/board and is not guaranteed. It may be flakey if unlocked/overclocked

Thanks for info.

spakkker wrote: »

I don't know what sort of system you are currently struggling with but I think you will be underwhelmed with that amd cpu.

As per my previous reply - I hope not.....

custardy

what spec is your present PC?

irisandalex

It's a laptop with a Turion 64 1600Mhz single core processor. 2GB RAM.

I think it is even slower than it should be though, maybe as it is constantly running insanely hot.

Really slow and drives me completely crackers. Should have got round to getting a new one ages ago.

custardy

irisandalex wrote: »

It's a laptop with a Turion 64 1600Mhz single core processor. 2GB RAM.

I think it is even slower than it should be though, maybe as it is constantly running insanely hot.

Really slow and drives me completely crackers. Should have got round to getting a new one ages ago.

the athlon quad is a big step up then
you may find stripping down the laptop and cleaning out the heatsink area will help(once you have a new PC)

irisandalex

I'm going for the athlon x3 rather than the quad, but still figure for general office tasks it should be exceedingly quick.....

I have stripped down the laptop, heatsink is clean. It's just cr4p! ;-)