New PC - spec required

Lil306

23n1th wrote: »

My advice would be to go down the AMD route, more bang for your buck as they say. That and wait a while, there's a lot on new technology coming out just now (like usb3, uefi, ssd hard drives, etc) which in imho is worth waiting to become more mainstream.

Normally I would suggest the AMD for bang for buck, but they really don't compare to the Sandy Bridge CPUs for the price. The sandy will make good work of the encoding, if the OP is on a really tight budget then I'd definately recommend an AMD

I built my new PC for £500 (wd raptor, quad core amd and 4gb ram) it's fast enough for lots of things, biggest let down is graphics card

pledgeX

Don't forget a decent monitor if you don't already have one. No one has mentioned this yet! Unless you really want the best performance, then I'd spend a decent chunk on that.

Something like and i3 would be fine. I personally have an AMD phenom x4 which was about £100 cheaper back in the day than the intel version it was up against and really wasn't £100's worth behind in terms of performance.

I doubt you'd need much more than 4gb ram.

Hard drive space is cheap as chips these days so make sure you get at least a 1TB if you're going to have a lot of videos. Might as well as there isnt much difference in price anyway!

If you don't game then buy a cheapish graphics card (anything can cope with HD these days) and put the money into a better processor.

And don't forget the operating system, these are always more expensive than you think (unless you like linux )

23n1th

Lil306 wrote: »

Normally I would suggest the AMD for bang for buck, but they really don't compare to the Sandy Bridge CPUs for the price. The sandy will make good work of the encoding, if the OP is on a really tight budget then I'd definately recommend an AMD

I built my new PC for £500 (wd raptor, quad core amd and 4gb ram) it's fast enough for lots of things, biggest let down is graphics card

Theres always fusion if you wait for it.

My current PC cost under 500 to build however I have upgraded twice since and will upgrade it again this year. My advice is get a good case, a good PSU and a very good motherboard, the rest of the components can be upgraded easily over time.

kph100

I have a display so no need there.

What about the Dell XPS8300 appear to have a sandy bridge processor i7.

I am not happy about building a PC would need to but one built.

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=d00x8304&c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1&model_id=xps-8300

Thanks

gonzo127

difficult choice which will also depend on which programs you are using, as encoding does generally like more cores although the i7 is fab a x6 can be quicker on some programs

when you think about money this is quite good for your use

http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/system/weekly_sales_I/

with a few changes and it comes out quite good
change from liquid cooling to the TX3 cooler - is still good and will allow an overclock if you want but you dont have to concern yourself about a liquid res
upgrade to 8gb ram
drop to the nvidia gt 520 for the cuda support
change to the coolermaster 650w psu
put a 64gb SSD in for the os
knock a 1tb samsung f1 for the storage
add windows 7 64 bit

which comes in under £800 delivered (£740 plus any delivery charges that might apply)