New Desktop (800€)
 

Hi,

I'm planning on upgrading my desktop, and I have a budget of about 800 euro (perhaps a little more).
I've been looking around a little and I've found this:
GPU:
PIXMANIA Radeon HD 5830 - 1 GB GDDR5
CPU:
Intel 1156 Quad Core I5 750 2.66GHz
Motherboard:
None yet
HDD:
Was thinking about an Solid State drive as boot drive, and then some other harddisc for data.
Other:
I already have a case, screen, mouse and keyboard. Though some money left for a nice new screen (with a higher resolution) would be nice but not really necessary (since I still have some money left and a new screen would be a good investment for that :P)


Now my question to you is whether you have any better ideas or tips for me to get the best build for about 800€.

Thanks !

-Pablo

Hey there Pablo, welcome to the forums,
where do you live?

GPU
HD5830: €170 http://www.pixmania.be/be/fr/5020944...-go-gddr5.html
GTX460: €190 http://www.pixmania.be/be/fr/6166500...768-mo-gd.html

either one is good , they are pretty evenly matched, http://techpowerup.com/reviews/Axle/...768_MB/31.html if you have a bit extra, spend €30 more for the GTX 460 with 1gb and you're set!

memory wise go for at least 4gb DDR3, 8gb if you can afford it;

the motherboard choice will only become important if you want a certain feature or looking for best OC

@jmke

Thanks,
I live in Belgium ;)

Thanks, I'll look into that !
I forgot about the memory xD Thanks !

might be cheaper to check out www.tones.be www.alternate.be www.forcom.be too :)
although for VGA card pixmania price can't be beat

I would recommend the i5 760 since the 750 will become shortly discontinued; regarding the SSD, I would recommend jumping later on it because the prices are still very high and I would invest these money into another hardware component, like a monitor, as you said.

SSD will be THE upgrade of his machine, making it faster than any other hardware upgrade he can do. definitely worth the investment;

80Gb~100Gb model, either Intel X25-M G2 or one of the newer sandforce drives; use it for OS/apps; and get two big HDDs for all your data.

I'm pretty sure Stefan's PC doesn't have an SSD, otherwise he would not be discouraging the purchase;)

@Stefan Mileschin & jmke
Yea, I also heard an SSD makes your computer waaaay faster :D So I'm still going for one ^^

Though now I was looking for some ram, and normally I get kingston (since I used to have this, and I'm very happy with it). Though ram has gotting really expensive :o

The cheapest I found was "OCZ Gold Low Voltage 2 x 2 Gb DDR3-1333 PC3-10666 PC geheugen (OCZ3G1333LV4GK)" or "OCZ Fatal1ty Dual Channel PC geheugen 2 x 2GB DDR2-800 PC2-6400 CL5" (both in Pixmania, but since I don't have 5 posts yet I can't post the link :/ :P )

So both 4GB. But I have no idea what the difference is :P Nor do I know whether the "OCZ" ram is any good :P
Any of you have any experience with that ram ?

Thanks !

Dear John, I have one, but I cannot say I can recommend one 100%, mostly because with the price you get a 64GB one, I can also buy a 2TB hdd easy, in my country at least.

OCZ Fatal1ty Dual Channel PC geheugen 2 x 2GB DDR2-800 PC2-6400 CL5 -> don't get this because it is DDR2, not 3

Regarding the RAM , you can't go wrong with either A-DATA or Corsair.

:o
what?

boot times, app loading times, general alt-tabbing and every single action on your PC is made AT least 2x faster than with a normal HDD. That's worth the investment and tweaks for getting your OS/apps on a smaller SSD :D

pretty darn good memory; if you're not going to overclock, any memory speed rating will do fine:D

@Stefan Mileschin
Haha, thanks for pointing that out, didn't see it was DDR2 xD

@Stefan & jmke
Yea, still going for a SSD, even though it costs a lot ^^

@jmke
And what rate is needed for overclocking ? (never did it, neither am I planning on doing it, though just interested :P)

Thanks a lot !
-Pablo

You are right about that, it is very fast, but some SSDs don't have automatic trim in their firmware and the drive becomes slower and slower as time passes. For these we have to execute the trim command manually, with a software provided by the manufacturer.
Also, I would not recommend storing important data on it because if it fails (and I have seen many cases on the newegg.com website comments), there are little to none possibilities to recover the data, as with the platter HDDs.

I am not sure about the other manufacturers, but there are some that offer a lot of firmware upgrades for the drives and after each firmware upgrade, you will lose all data stored on the drive :(.

I am surely waiting for SSDs to become more affordable but it seems their price remains very high (even if there are lots and lots of manufacturers that produce different models, so we cannot say that there isn't competition)

SandForce, Indilinx and Intel controllers have no trouble with them; those are the recent SSDs (or golden oldies in Intel's case)

hence why only OS/Apps as I wrote :D
and of course an image of the SSD drive on the larger HDD for fast recovery.

price "was" very high, now it's just high. next year hope to get 160gb at €200 price point and 80gb at €100, then I can do a complete rollout for all 400 desktops and give them the speedboost of a lifetime :D

I really hope your wishes will be granted next year or even faster :)

Intel will publish 320gb SSD end of year, pushing down price of 160 & 80gb , so yeah. I have big hopes for SSD in 2011&2012 :)

Metalmorphed, you haven't mentioned if you already have or want us to recommend you a PSU or a CPU cooler.

Didn't really think about that yet :P
But if you know any good ones that are affordable that would be great ! :D

Well, everyone has its preferences; a very good heatsink would be the Venomous X from Thermalright, but you have to buy the fans; if you want a silent setup, I would recommend the Noctua SE2.

Regarding the PSU, I would recommend a 650+ PSU if you are willing to overclock the system in the future. Depending on what you find in stock, we could try say which ones are better.

start out with the Intel CPU Cooler and if you find it too loud, upgrade, while the thermalright and noctua models won't disappoint they are priced hefty.

other alternatives might not perform "as good" but for a few degrees more, you pay half the price :)

Scythe Mugen 2 for example is good midrange cooler which comes with fans and offers decent performance at <$30 price.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coo...mugen-2_8.html

For the i5 750 CPUs at least, the stock cooler is a joke (haven't even used it till the last CPU cooler review and I could not believe how weak it is;I have also reseated it twice, while obtaining the same results). I could not even overclock the CPU to 3.2GHz without going over 80 degrees Celsius in OCCT. The cooler presented by John is also a very good choice if you don't want to spend much while obtaining a good price/performance ratio.

Hmm, I'm not really planning on overclocking so I'll stay with the one I get with the cpu :P And if I want to overclock later, I'll consider one of the fantsy-er ones :P
Thanks anyway ! :D

Glad to help! If you have any other questions please ask.

Haha, I will ! :D
Going to look around a little more, and see how much it costs exactly :D

Thanks !

Ok,
I was looking at some more a little more expensive graphic cards and the thing I found was:
GAINWARD GeForce GTX 460 GS - 1024 MB GDDR5
SPARKLE GeForce GTX 465 - 1 GB GDDR5
(both at 230€)

Is it worth the extra buck compared to a GTW460 with 768MB and compared to the HD5830 (1GB) ?

And also, since both cost the same, is the 465 much better than the 460 ?

Thanks !

465 is actually on par with 460 1gb model; blame nvidia model naming for that, in my humble opinion avoid 465,

regarding GTX 460 768 / 1gb and HD5830 you will get diminishing return in performance compared to extra € spend. in my humble opinion I would go for GTX 460 1Gb to be most future proof.

from: http://techpowerup.com/reviews/Axle/...768_MB/31.html
gaming at 1920x1200,

Radeon HD 5830: 94%
Geforce GTX 460 768: 100%
Geforce GTX 460 1024: 108%

so 460 1Gb is 8% faster compared to 768Mb, but costs 21% more
460 768Mb is 6% faster compared to HD 5830, costs ~11% more

best bang for the buck HD 5830 at €170, no beating that.

@jmke

Thanks ! I am pretty sure I'm going for a 460GTX 768mb :P

Though now I was looking for a SSD, and my brother says intel SSD's are the best in pretty much every way, though they cost a lot too :P
Any advice on that ?

Thanks !
-Pablo

Ok, what I currently have for a pc:
Graphics: 186€
GAINWARD GeForce GTX 460 - 768 MB GDDR5
http://www.pixmania.be/be/nl/6166500...768-mb-gd.html
(I went with the GTX 460 since it's a little better, and I kind of like nVidia more than ATI xD)

CPU: 265€ (i7) / 192€ (i5)
INTEL Core i7-860 - 2,8 GHz - Cache L3 8 MB - Socket LGA 1156
http://www.pixmania.be/be/nl/6009324...ghz-cache.html
or maybe
INTEL Core i5-750 - 2,66 GHz - Cache L3 8 Mo - Socket LGA 1156
http://www.pixmania.be/be/nl/6009326...-ghz-cach.html
though I prefer the i7 since I'm planning to use the computer for 3D software and programming (I'm a DAE-student, it's a game development school so :D)
Though not sure it's worth the extra buck ? I could use it, but maybe it's overkill ?


Ram: 110€ /4GB
CORSAIR XMS3 - Geheugen - 4 GB ( 2 x 2 GB )
or 8GB of the same if I find the money ;)
http://www.pixmania.be/be/nl/3708864...-gb-2-x-2.html

Motherboard: 115€
ASUS P7P55D - Socket 1156 - Chipset P55 Express - ATX
http://www.pixmania.be/be/nl/3492815...56-chipse.html

Power: 67€
OCZ StealthXstream II PC-voeding 600 W
http://www.pixmania.be/be/nl/5955067...i-pc-voed.html

HDD: 90€
WESTERN DIGITAL WD Caviar Black WD1002FAEX harde schijf - 1 TB - intern - 3.5" - SATA-600 - 7200 tpm -buffer: 64 MB
http://www.pixmania.be/be/nl/5041462...wd1002fae.html
Not a SDD for now, maybe later as an upgrade, but I just can't affort it right now


Seems ok ? :D

Thanks a lot for all the help, tips and information !

-Pablo

You could go for the i5 750 easy (and if you save this amount of money because you buy the 750 instead of the 860, you could go for the 460 1GB version)