I was round at my sisters earlier today and her partner showed me his £3000 computer. It was pretty obscene and overkill, but got me thinking about what different budgets will get you.
I was wondering whether people think it would be interesting to have a couple of threads for different budgets, say low(£400), mid(£750), high(£1000) and "sick" (£2000+)
The idea being that they are stickied, the first post has a spec in it for that budget range, and as people find deals, or a better component comes on the market, it gets updated. it would be a good first point of call for people needing a starting point for system building, and It could lead to interesting discussion when there are alternative options etc?
Thoughts?
There's a site that already does this, but for the life of me I can't remember which, they usually update each month depending on changes to components in the market..
Someone else will remember the link, it's been posted a few times, but I don't think it's a bad idea, will definitely generate a discussion, and will be more tek related, rather than posts about ties :P
I'm particularly interested as I just can't help but feel the £3000 computer was excessive. If you were to plot the "bang for buck" I'd say that it's quite a steep curve which at some point plateaus out, and I think his computer was somewhere along the plateau.
From memory he had:
i7 extreme CPU (don't know which one, but assume top line)
2x 1tb HDD's (I thought this was a bit low, primary HDD was a barracuda)
16gb ram
2x Nvidia 480s I think
water cooled
27" 3D monitor.
MahOOSIVE tower unit. Thinking about it, it was pretty loud, I thought watercooled computers were meant to be quiet... (It had a massive fan in the top of the tower, and he's placed it on his desk so he can look at the pretty insides...=noise)
I couldn't even contemplate spending 3k on a computer! Back in the 90's yes, but now I'd struggle to see the point in spending over a grand surely with a monitor maybe on top of that? But saying that I haven't built a computer for years, but really?
What does he use it for MS Word and Facebook? ;D
£2k+ = iMac
roll on developers conference. My PC died last week & I have a hole burning in my pocket.
He's a jet pilot = someone with more money than he knows what to do with it.
He likes to play Crysis and the likes, I suspect he's one of those people who are more concerned with how the game looks and the FPS than how it actually plays.
There is a cool silent set up for a hackintosh that is surfing that boundry if you look for the blackintosh on youtube you'll find it.
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proper water cooling is quiet, "water cooling" bought off the shelf as a sealed unit........ usually costs the earth and doesn't perform in my experience. Admittedly it's been nearly 10 years since I build a WC rig, but I reckon that probably hasn't changed much.
U2711 monitor is £500 notes, but I'd struggle to spend even a grand more tbh, even with SSDs in raid and a top end Ivy Bridge i7 ???
Let's get the threads going then :D
We'll soon find out how much a high end rig should cost, without spending money for the sake of it!
Quote from: XEntity on May 20, 2012, 23:12:21 PM
Let's get the threads going then :D
We'll soon find out how much a high end rig should cost, without spending money for the sake of it!
Don't forget the low end rigs too :D
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2012/05/18/pc-hardware-buyer-s-guide-may-2012/1
Will save you some time. :muttley:
PS. £3K is excessive now, you can build a decent PC with a decent monitor and accessories for under a grand.
Question is, do we just follow that, or come up with an alternative to their recommendations, if there is one?
Quote from: zpyder on May 20, 2012, 23:41:16 PM
Question is, do we just follow that, or come up with an alternative to their recommendations, if there is one?
You use that as a guide, the Gaming Workhorse is a good pc but you could cut back on the specs and save about £300 and then use that to buy either a big single or dual monitor setup etc, each to their own, i'm still running a first gen i5.
Quote from: zpyder on May 20, 2012, 23:37:13 PM
Quote from: XEntity on May 20, 2012, 23:12:21 PM
Let's get the threads going then :D
We'll soon find out how much a high end rig should cost, without spending money for the sake of it!
Don't forget the low end rigs too :D
Boring!! :P
What are the rules? Are we including monitor prices, I'd say no and have something separate for monitors?
Edit: Another thought, do we want to do it by price or by use? i.e. could also spec HTPCs, servers etc..
I don't understand how the guy could spend £3k and only have 16GB RAM? Madness!
The problem with these scenarios boils down to what type of user profile do you cater for? The gamer, the video editing professional, the photographer, etc? All have different requirements, one might want a top of the range monitor and lots of RAM but not really be bothered about the graphics card or CPU for instance.
My gaming PC would cost about 2.2-2.3k if I needed to replace everything, guess the base unit alone would be around £1400-1500 but it isn't particularly high-end tbh, sub £200 CPU, 8gig ram, SSD, decent mobo and soundcard, 400+ quid in graphics cards, I have a 27" monitor and gaming @ 2560x1440 needs quite a lot more GPU grunt over for example 1920x1200 to keep the frame rate over 60 with eye candy turned on.
It was put together with the aim of being reasonably quiet for a air cooled crossfire set up, rather than going for all out performance or value for money, so I spent quite a bit on the case and swapped out the standard case fans for Noctua's which bumped the price quite a bit.
A good gaming system to run on a single 1920x1080 monitor could be put together for well under £900 and IMO that would be good until the next gen of consoles comes out, as we will not see much in the way of improvements in graphics till then, that's with quality parts and not skimping at all, on a budget £500- 600 could build a very usable gaming machine.
Higher resolutions than 1920x1200, 3D or Eyefinty see's the price climb rapidly, if money was no object I would be running something like this:
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on May 21, 2012, 01:13:30 AM
I don't understand how the guy could spend £3k and only have 16GB RAM? Madness!
The problem with these scenarios boils down to what type of user profile do you cater for? The gamer, the video editing professional, the photographer, etc? All have different requirements, one might want a top of the range monitor and lots of RAM but not really be bothered about the graphics card or CPU for instance.
I think his GFX cards were like £600-700 a pot. He literally had gone through the build list and picked the most expensive things possible, and then done random things like not have the main installation drive be an SDD :dunno:
I would have thought that the different use PC's would be most important at the lower end of the budget, towards the high end all the technology and budget tends to merge back together?
Quote from: Shaun on May 21, 2012, 03:07:44 AM
Higher resolutions than 1920x1200, 3D or Eyefinty see's the price climb rapidly, if money was no object I would be running something like this:
that's what my nephew is running... 3 x 24inch screens in portrait and eye infinity at full HD and 2 cards in sli
(can't remember which screens, but they're nice dell ones)
looks horrible to me most of the time.... using windows like that just plain freaks me out... but he loves it :o
He loves it when he's looking at boobies on the internet ;)
I guess you're right zpyder about the budget meeting any and all requirements at the high end, but definitely for the low and mid range you need to choose components wisely.
That looks crazy! Doesn't look like there is any lag and running a nice number of FPS..
On another note.. why don't they make force feed back mice and keyboards for PC gamers?
Cause it'd be bloody irritating?
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Haha, probably.. What about full body force feedback, so you knew where and from which direction you were being shot ;D
Thought there was a suit someone was already working on for that years ago.
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I'm sure they had it on The Gadget Show. Old link to the tech:
http://thefutureofthings.com/pod/6912/philips-force-feedback-jacket.html
I installed a £4.7k machine a month or so again, I think it was a HP workstation with that nutty intel CPU but I'm that ungeeky now I barely looked.
"Can't afford it so I'm not interested."
Here's one I can't fathom:
Windows 7 Pro: 192Gb
Server 2008 Std: 32Gb
SBS 2011: 32Gb.
The desktop o/s supports more RAM than the server o/s does unless you go enterprise..
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on May 21, 2012, 01:13:30 AM
I don't understand how the guy could spend £3k and only have 16GB RAM? Madness!
16Gb is the limit for 7 Home iirc.
Quote from: Pete on May 22, 2012, 21:39:08 PM
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on May 21, 2012, 01:13:30 AM
I don't understand how the guy could spend £3k and only have 16GB RAM? Madness!
16Gb is the limit for 7 Home iirc.
3 grand on a PC and he can't manage £150 for a Windows 7 Pro license?
Quote from: Pete on May 22, 2012, 21:39:08 PM
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on May 21, 2012, 01:13:30 AM
I don't understand how the guy could spend £3k and only have 16GB RAM? Madness!
16Gb is the limit for 7 Home iirc.
Home Premium too actually, which i'm disgusted by in all honesty as that information is nowhere to be seen on their sh*tty Anytime Upgrade either. You shouldn't have to buy a more expensive OS just to use the full amount of RAM your hardware is capable of. RAM is neither an expensive luxury or difficult to support as once you're on 64-bit the paging of RAM addresses is a total non-issue. Imagine if they stopped lesser versions of it working with SSDs or high end graphics cards instead? :disappointed:
Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on May 22, 2012, 22:27:00 PM
Imagine if they stopped lesser versions of it working with SSDs or high end graphics cards instead? :disappointed:
What like DX10 on XP?
To be fair 8gigs is enough for 95% of dedicated gaming comp at the moment and 16 gigs would have been overkill when 480's where the top of the line cards which Im guessing is when it was built?
Today the top of the line 1366 boards have quad channel, so 16gig would be worth going for now as 4x4gig sticks are not so bad price wise, it would be further proofing more than anything else. The most I have seen used by a single game on my system was SWTOR it used just over 4 gig's, but that game's engine was a buggy POS.
Quote from: Pete on May 22, 2012, 21:38:25 PM
I installed a £4.7k machine a month or so again, I think it was a HP workstation with that nutty intel CPU but I'm that ungeeky now I barely looked.
"Can't afford it so I'm not interested."
Here's one I can't fathom:
Windows 7 Pro: 192Gb
Server 2008 Std: 32Gb
SBS 2011: 32Gb.
The desktop o/s supports more RAM than the server o/s does unless you go enterprise..
Quite simple really, MS put a hefty tax on you using memory, it's written into the operating system. If they chose to they could very easily free it up so you can use any amount up to the 64 bit limit. By preventing you using that memory they hope that a few high end users will go for the higher version of windows 7.
Windows 7Home basic 64 is capable of using just 8GB
But soopah you're forgetting that clocked edits high def video, creates multiple massive masterpieces in photoshop simultaneously as well as playing swtor, diablo3, crysis and solitaire at the same time :) the man has a 3tb page file! :D
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People that shut stuff down aren't working hard enough ;D
Actually when I installed Windows I wondered where all my SSD space had gone - 32GB pagefile! I Soon got rid of that!
I've not done much today M3ta7h3ad but already have 8GB committed to RAM, 24GB still free to play with though :lol:
Lol pure mental amounts of ram :)
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