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Ok since the pc i was meant to be getting when my mate went to saudi got sold from under me by his parents.

 

I kind of want to build a desktop rig that's moderately ok for gaming, uni/teaching work and some video editing now net access is back again.

 

I have a nice monitor and a cheapish keyboard from my dad's docking station upgrade so that's fine.

 

I want recomendations with a budget of around £500. There is a pc in the family that's about 5 years old that I will be using as a base for my build but eventually a nicer case is something I plan on.

 

There is a HDD in there that I can use once wiped but I have no idea what the specs of what's in there already until I have chance to gut it when I move.

 

I was told i will have to wipe it because it's full of dodgy porn from brother and adware *suitcase* from my mother being useless with I.T and allowing toolbar installs.

 

But it's a case with HDD and cd drive and psu so.it's a start even though I suspect I will later toss most.of those parts.

 

So with a budget of 500 knowing that case, psu monitor and potentially HDD was sorted what would you buy?

 

So, you only need MoBo, Processor, fan, ram and graphics?

 

You can keep an eye out for a deal of the day bundle on Scan and check the components against the "logical increments" website.

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Seems that way though I will probably end up wanting a case and stuff because pretty at some point.

 

Makes more sense to use he gear I have already as a base point right?

 

In theory I may be able to get some cheap spares when a mate who owns a lan centre next upgrades the pc's or maybe order some bits through him

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  • 6 months later...

all dat necro doe

 

After uprooting my life I'm finally settled and have the funds saved up and some time off to get this new tower finally built.  I've gone off the Logical Increments site as a guide and come up with this lot:

 

MOBO + CPU - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-hex-core-i7-5820k-processor-plus-asus-x99-deluxe-motherboard-haswell-extreme-bundle

GPU - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/6gb-msi-gtx-980-ti-pcie-30-(x16)-7010mhz-gddr5-gpu-1000mhz-boost-1076mhz-cores-2816-3x-dp-12-hdmi-20

Main drive - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/400gb-intel-750-series-aic-ssd-hhhl-pcie-30-(x4)-nvme-intel-nand-read-2200mb-s-write-900mb-s430k-230

Memory - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/16gb-(4x4gb)-corsair-ddr4-vengeance-lpx-black-pc4-19200-(2400)-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-14-16-16-31-xm

PSU - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/850w-evga-supernova-g2-fully-modular-80-plus-gold-708a-single-rail-sli-crossfirex-support-1x-140mm-f

Case - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/aerocool-x-predator-black-orange-ultimate-full-tower-gaming-case-with-side-window-w-o-psu

 

Comes to about 1700, so I'd need a CPU cooler, a storage drive (maybe, but that can always wait til next month if really necessary) and windows 10 with the other £300; no idea what windows costs if I'm honest.  If anybody out there has been keeping up with parts and stuff lately and has any suggestions they'd certainly be welcome.

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Yeah for cooler either go with a giant heatsink, or one of the Corsairs. For bulk storage of photos, videos, documents etc. get a spinning drive of whatever capacity you want (a few TB, right?). They're fairly mature by now, just buy whatever's available from the place you're getting the rest of the parts. Western Digital, Seagate or Samsung would be preferred brands, 7200 rpm will be slightly faster than 5400.

 

Windows 10 is £100 if you just buy it, but it's a free upgrade from 7 or 8, do you have any licenses that you could upgrade? If not it might be worth seeing if you can buy a cheap copy of 7 or 8 (for under £100) and upgrade that.

 

That SSD is nifty, I had no idea that form factor existed.

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That SSD is nifty, I had no idea that form factor existed.

 

 

I've got one, even though it was the 1st gen of them it is still fast as *fruitcage*.

 

The only issue is that generally you have to install windows on another drive, install the drivers for the SSD and then clone windows onto it.

That or install the drivers from a thumb drive while installing windows.  *fruitcage* that.

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Yeah for cooler either go with a giant heatsink, or one of the Corsairs. For bulk storage of photos, videos, documents etc. get a spinning drive of whatever capacity you want (a few TB, right?). They're fairly mature by now, just buy whatever's available from the place you're getting the rest of the parts. Western Digital, Seagate or Samsung would be preferred brands, 7200 rpm will be slightly faster than 5400.

 

Windows 10 is £100 if you just buy it, but it's a free upgrade from 7 or 8, do you have any licenses that you could upgrade? If not it might be worth seeing if you can buy a cheap copy of 7 or 8 (for under £100) and upgrade that.

 

That SSD is nifty, I had no idea that form factor existed.

 

I opted for a pair of 1TB Hybrid 7200 drives with some solid state memory on them; so I'll have one for games and the other youtube video etc; pushed it over budget a bit but I was planning to add them in later anyway so this just gets the job done all in one go vs unplugging everything to do it later.  My old rig actually has 2TB overall so I'm only upgrading but 500 gig in 6 years, which seems odd when I think about it given a decent 1TB 7200 drive is under £40 these days, but then my small music and picture collections don't take up much space at all.  With the rise of Netflix and the like I don't seem to actually store much at all media wise myself.  Usually just have a couple hundred gigs worth of games that I've bought from a steam sale, installed and not played yet, heh.

 

In a twist of events that really quite surprised me, I totted up my build list, then just to double-triple check before hitting checkout, I looked at Cyber power, Overclockers, PC Specialist, the Scan X3S building divisionand some others I'd not heard of to compare prices on the parts vs pre-builds.  Most of them produced a much higher price for a ready-made rig using the same components and some of the warranties were nigh-on pointless (only 1 month collect and return at CP for example), but the Scan warranty was one of the best.   Their custom builder site also lists the exact price you're paying per component, so I cross referenced them all against buying the parts direct from their site to self build.. exactly the same.  Now, whether they're charging over the odds for the parts themselves I'm not sure as I started to get serious information overload from doing so much comparison between stuff/sites all afternoon, but their parts prices certainly didn't appear to be jacked up.  The overall pre-built Scan rig cost literally a few tenners more than the parts did individually and obviously you're then getting the thing built for you, tested for any serious lemons (which is a big deal for me personally with my living situation, having to return anything and rebuild would be an absolute *fruitcage* nightmare) and delivered to your door.

 

For example, on one site I specced out a pre-build with the parts I listed and no CPU cooler or storage drives, came to around 2200 with less of a warranty and a smaller PCI-e C:\ drive, amongst a few other things that weren't as good.  The parts I listed on Scan's builder came to under 2k with windows 10 (which btw is out of stock at a lot of places).  So yeah, I got a high end CPU cooler and a couple of really nice storage drives plus some other improvements for the same price as competitors were charging without said parts.  It almost feels a bit too good to be true, so I guess we'll see what happens when the thing arrives and how they handle any issues that do happen to come up.  Can't say I particularly forsee any though.

 

I'd only seen the PCI-e SSDs a few days ago myself, by pure chance the guys on the NODE youtube channel happened to get a bunch of top end free parts from Intel and one of them was a MoBo mounted SSD.  Now their main guy Brandon was really singing the praises of these things and he was a large portion of the brains behind Freddy Wong/RocketJump/VGHS and their company/group is developing some amazing stuff with 3D and VR headsets, 360 video on YT and motion-sensed/tracked gloves inside VR headsets, including a game that combines a headset with motion tracked gloves which have many points of tracking all over them; lightyears ahead of current releases in terms of the way you actually play (it can't be played on a monitor, requires all the new hardware).  So when I looked at the transfer rates on these new drives I was sold right away, especially comparing the boot time from shut down on my old rig with no SSD vs my new laptop than just has a conventional SSD - about 3-4 minutes vs less than 10 seconds.

 

I would reconsider ordering that case with the Corsair 100i - I don't think the radiator for the Corsair will fit! It needs two 120mm fan ports next to each other, I've checked your case and I can see one large fan at the top, and just one fan at the back.

 

Well I placed the order already unfortunately, I've never really figured out all the details on cooling fans etc, heh.  Seems to vary wildly between cases, if I'm honest I'd presumed there was more of a standardisation for mounting of the heatsinks on common liquid coolers when it comes to the higher end cases.  But hey if it does fit the guys at Scan will rig it up and if it doesn't they'll have to put in one that does.  So there's another big plus to getting a pre-build, takes my ignorance out of the equation and means a lot less hassle.

 

I didn't actually opt for the case I listed, but the only thing I changed was the colour soooo... anyway, I'll post up pics in a few days when it arrives.  It's not lit with a co-ordinated internal colour scheme or anything because I live in a small room by myself and very few people in the military are in to PCs, but knowing what this crowd is like I'm confident you guys will enjoy the aesthetics none-the-less.

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  • 1 month later...

Help appreciated;

 

Turned my PC on after getting back from work yesterday evening. Didn't boot. 

 

At first thought it was a dodgy monitor connection, but tried various ports and different monitor - no dice. Then I noticed that my mouse optic light wasn't on, nor my joystick light. Only my keyboard arrow key lights were on (for some reason my keyboard has lights on it's arrow keys...) USB devices won't charge - seemingly the only thing it can do is open/close the disc drive. Get two slightly whirring beeps when I turn it on but don't know if this is unusual. 

 

It's still in warranty so I can send it back - bloke on the phone told me to take the RAM out, listen for some beeps then try putting it back in but in different slots. Any other thoughts?

 

Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeers

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My PC has and issue sometimes where I'll turn it on and get a blank screen.  For some reason, it tries to overclock and only shows it failed to boot properly on my mirrored TV screen over HDMI.  Whereas my PC to monitor is via DVI and shows nothing, like there is no power to the monitor.   But I suppose you have tried with different ports and VDUs.

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That link was might helpful.

 

What PSUs are you wonderful folk using? Mine's reached its limit I feel and I can't actually power my GPU off it due to a lack of connectors. Are those modular ones where you can add and take cables away any good as I was looking into them when I built this (five years ago now) to try and keep things neat.

 

Also on the lookout for a nice, big case as there's so little room in my current one that I can't fit thw GPU into PCI-E1 as my hard drives are in the way.

 

Basically Fallout 4 is making me rebuild my entire PC. And I've already blown enough on the sodding Pip-boy Edition.

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I personally use a Corsair PSU.  They are highly regarded.  I would stick to the big name brands as they are obviously fairly important and you don't want to compromise other components.

 

Use one of the calculators online to give you an idea of what you need.  I have a 620w which has ample power for multiple HDDs, SSD, and multiple GPUs.

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I do love Corsair for their RAM.

 

Annoying thing is I don't know if my GPU works now and won't until I can sort a new PSU out, which won't be until Friday earliest and I've only got a Maplin and PC world to buy bits in person. Should've saved a bit more and bought one new with a warranty.

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Anyone with steam, have you ever had a download fail because of a "disk write error" im trying to download sky rim on steam, it gets to 100%, then says disk write error. Have seen 3 fixes, none of which worked...

 

 

It's a irritating bug that occasionally it forgets where it's installing something when you have multiple drives. If you check the data location for that file, it's probably a different drive to where you started installing.

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