It's that time again. Time for a new PC. Had my current one over 4 years now and the Core 2 Duo is feeling a little dated.

Looking at the Intel i7 -960 quad core, might even shell out for a i7-970 six core. Anyone have any experience with these chips? Any other suggestions welcome, keep AMD suggestions to yourself though please, going with Intel no question.

This is a complete new system. MB, RAM and Graphics Card so any recommendations for those parts welcome too.


Peace

So what's your PC mainly used for? Gaming, media, or just internet porn?

All 3 at the same time preferably.

Multi tasking then eh?

Yeah, i'd like to be able to Multi task AND do some other stuff at the same time.


I want to play games on it but i'm not a serious PC gamer. I want smooth HD video editing and playback capabilities and I want to be able to do this while downloading porn at 50mb/s. It's got to look pretty and its going to have 2x 28inch 1080p monitors to strut its stuff on.

I want it to be badass but I don't want to waste cash on items that don't give value for money. £1500 tops for whole system, not including monitors.

Good luck with that. I heard it was very difficult to achieve on a single PC if not impossible.

Hey don't knock AMD lol. With the deals Micro Center had and has on them (free mobo, free ram, etc.) I couldn't pass up some Quad Cores and I'm quite happy with the results. Heck for the price of some of the Intel procs I was able to build a core system. Give us a complete list of your hardware when you start to build.

As someone who has built both an AMD Phenom II X4 945 system and an Intel i7 920 system in the past year for himself I wouldn't be so dismissive of AMD as well - but I understand the want for the i-series, features like the quickpath interconnect and the on-the-fly single core overclocking is very nice.

For motherboard I'd recommend either Asus or Evga, both tend of offer a good array of newer future-proofing features (onboard usb 3.0, sli/crossfire support if that's your thing - I personally think it's a waste of money) and overclocking/unlocking options (really just depends how large/small you want to go, full atx, micro-atx, etc etc.)

6gb of triple channel ddr3 should be plenty for anything you really would like unless you plan to run virtual machines, in which case may want to go for double, I personally tend to stick with corsair as I've had good luck with them for a long time (to be entirely honest even through work I think I've seen only one total stick of bad corsair ram).

For graphics, most people are either glued to AMD/ATI or NVIDIA. Personally I feel the newer 400-series nvidia cards like the 480s although nice are way too power hungry and run way too hot (only reason I would recommend them at this time is if you run a Linux-based OS since ATI support under linux is even more dismal then Nvidia). I have an ATI Radeon 5870HD on my i7 rig, first ATI card I've let myself had since my old 9700, and I've been more then impressed with it. Everything is played on max, I've yet to have it choke on *anything,* supports multiple monitors through DVI as well as HDMI output. The drivers have good manual control of the fan temps/speeds/settings as well as OC options (I haven't felt the need to yet). As I alluded to earlier, unless you work in graphic design and make a serious income or have a serious hobby of rendering images and video projects stay the hell away from Crossfire/SLI - you'll be spending double the money for double the heat, double the power draw and less then double the performance.

Storage is cheap, Sata6 unfortunately isn't very popular yet and is still very expensive. Very easy to pick up a WD 1TB or 2TB sata3 drive for storage. In terms of an OS drive if you can afford it at the end of your build and really want to see it fly - I really recommend an Intel SSD. I use an 80GB as my OS drive (I'll be popping in a 160 at some point I think) and the performance is really impressive, the second generation x-25m w/trim support just makes the loading of apps 'pop.' You don't notice how big of a bottleneck disk I/O is on these newer machines until you rock one with an SSD for a bit. It's not for everyone and the cost-per-GB is still stupidly high but it's something to consider.

For the love of god no matter what get yourself a quality 80+ certified power supply - yes, they can be almost double the money, but for proper stable power regulation to your expensive ass motherboard/cpu/gpu components it's a vital piece, spend the money on it.

Thanks for the detailed post - useful.

What OS would you guys recommend on a new PC and why? Win 7, or stick with the old reliable Win XP?

YEah, nice post Punzada.

Will be taking your advice on the graphics card, that was one of my main concerns having already decided on the i7 quad core. Was considering 2 x nvidia gtx460's. Already opted for an 80gb ssd for a boot drive and 1TB western Digital for storage but good to hear agreement on the choice. I was going to go for 16gb of ram but might rethink that if the general consensus is that its overkill. Power Supply is going to be "800W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£89)" . MB is Asus (with Crossfire support just in case).

I'll post a full spec when I get home/ I'm almost there with a final decision but will probably wait until December before ordering, I want it to arrive around the Christmas break period.

OS was going to be Windows 7, still probably will be but will wait for popular opinion on that before deciding.

Also whats the general idea on using multiple graphics cards?

Windows 7 hands down. Better everything minus some legacy hardware compatibility (which if you get professional, they give you use of an XP VM to help with that). Security is much tighter, everything pops and I've even seen it run well on single-core hardware. Don't be scared by the disastrous clusterfuck that was Vista. Anyone who worked with it saw the change with R2 of Server 2008 and then Microsoft correctly implemented it and turned it into 7 which by all accounts - is damn good.

I'm sure you can find some benchmarks where people get 10fps more on this game or that game due to some stripping down even further of XP and squeezing every bit out of their earlier hardware but if you buy good enough (not even necessarily expensive, just new) hardware out of the gate you won't even notice it.

As much of a linux fanboy as I am deep down there isn't much I can pick apart with Windows 7 (if I really want to get into semantics I'll get into the stupid file permission configuration it has, or the pointless redundancy of 'libraries' but these are all very minor gripes).

Agree with Punzada re Win 7 winning out, and the uselessness of libraries (if I was stupid enough to keep files all over my computer I wouldn't be too worried about holding them in a "library").

Only issues I have had with Win 7 have been hardware issues and occasional problems with the sleep mode. Best Windows experience yet.

intel i5-760 and the accompanying p55 motherboard. Hands down best bang for the buck.

I was also after a new PC; it's time my son's old machine was replaced. I was looking for something as cheap as possible but still adequate for gaming, went with a pre-built system (without OS) from Overclockers UK in the end.

Will probably put Win XP on initially, as I found some of his games (e.g. the "prequel" Lego Star Wars) and the drivers for the EMS USB2 (PS controller adapter) didn't play nicely with Vista. Maybe I'll move to Win 7 later.

Lots of Sandy Bridge (socket 1155) reviews out now. Its the tock cycle (die shrink) in the i3/i5 platform (socket 1156). Its got a range of chips from about 115 bucks to 320 bucks with the higher end almost going head to head, and in some cases beating, the more expensive ~$1k i7 980x.

How to Overclock the Intel Core i5-2500K

(Article is too long to reproduce here so just click on the above link)

SSD defo

You tube it to see boot up comparisons, very impressive!

Ive got a pair of original OCZ Vertex in raid0 and I can vouch its probably one of the biggest performance gains Ive seen. The difference is night and day.

I heard SSD drives don't last long, bullshit?
Coz I quite fancy one as a boot drive

Each 'sector' (for want of a better word) has a limited number of re-writes before it malfunctions and data is permanently lost. So not the ideal place to store programs or data which cannot be easily replaced.