Self Build

[ultra violent]

Thinking about building an extreme PC myself. Never done it before, so would like some idea of the benefits. Mesh do a £3000 'extreme' PC on their website, how much cost would I save or extra performance would I get if I built something similar myself?

[UpTheIron]

Depends what you want from your PC...if your needs are very specific then you may be better off building your own to get the right spec, but you're not likely to save much money.

[spivvy]

comments removed due to ongoing dispute


>> Edited by spivvy on Tuesday 8th November 13:31

[aldi]

The thing about extreme stuff is that it's that last 10% in performance that costs you the £££ over something a bit more standard.. £600 quid for a P4 3.7 Extreme Edition when a standard 3.2 is £140? Anyone rushing out to snap up one of those bargains?? Likewise with video cards, and they're even selling RAM these days with little flashing LED's on it... chav'd up RAM FFS.

I'd leave that last 10% in performance in the CPU/graphics and get yourself a nice sexy aluminium case that matches your living room, nice quiet PSU/Heatsink, more RAM (without LED's), good quality display and an extra HDD or two. It'l make a much nicer system IMO...

[ultra violent]

Totally, agree that's what I did about 2.5 of years ago. I bought p4 3.2, 2*250GB HD, 2GB RAM, and FX5950. Ok, that graphics card wasn't the greatest choice but I lost my temper with ATI 9800XT and swapped it out.

Do you think there would be much advantage keeping that setup and swapping out the FX and putting in a 6800?

[aldi]

Bloody 'ell, that's still a pretty nice Pc you've got there, like someone said above I'd have to ask which areas you're finding it lacking in? A nicer GFX card would help games out a bit at higher-res?

[ultra violent]

It's not bad, but I run a 22" EIZO LCD and at those res. it kills the poor thing. To be honest I don't actually play that many games, just Generals and FarCry, in the main, but i'm starting to share the misses pashion for photography, and photoshop is a killer...

My 3DMark03 scores are only around 6500, which I thought was a bit low given the config. Guess it's what you get when you pay someone else (Mesh) to build your PC for you...

[_dobbo_]

ultra violent said:

It's not bad, but I run a 22" EIZO LCD and at those res. it kills the poor thing. To be honest I don't actually play that many games, just Generals and FarCry, in the main, but i'm starting to share the misses pashion for photography, and photoshop is a killer... My 3DMark03 scores are only around 6500, which I thought was a bit low given the config. Guess it's what you get when you pay someone else (Mesh) to build your PC for you...

Dunno about that, Mesh built mine and I run a 3dmark score of about 12000 - and it cost me less than £1k

[ultra violent]

What spec is your system?

[big_treacle]

I built myself a fairly strong pc this weekend. Spec is as follows...


AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400 1MB Cache per core (2.2GHz) Skt 939 Retail inc.fan (3 yr.warr.) 1

DELIVERY 1 20.89 20.89

Corsair® 1024MB TwinX XMS 3200XL X-Treme Low Latency Memory Kit 1

Asus A8N-SLI/Premium nForce4 Skt939 PCI-E +3GB/sec SATA +SATA/RAID 5 +Firewire +Gigabit LAN +8ch. audio +USB2 Dual Ch. DDR (up to DDR400) 1

250 GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 SATA2 7200rpm 16MB cache HDD 2

Lite-on SOHW-1693S-05C all black DL DVD +/-R/RW oem + software 1

Sharkoon 535W Silent Storm ATX12V version2.0 PSU +SATA +dual fan 1

Coolermaster RC-730 Praetorian silver aluminium case USB mic, audio, firewire NO PSU 1

Gainward GF 7800GT Ultra 3400PCX XP Golden Sample, 256MB DDR3, PCI-E, DVI, TV Out, Retail 2

Microsoft Multimedia keyboard (PS2) oem 1

Logitech® MX™518 Gaming-Grade™ Optical Mouse USB 1

SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum 7.1 surround sound, Dolby Digital® EX,Internal Retail 1

19" Hyundai ImageQuest L90D+ 8ms Silver/black Multimedia 700:1 con. ratio 3yrs onsite 1

Creative Inspire T7900 7.1 Speakers 1

Essentially tho, its a dual core amd 64 processor, on a good ASUS motherboard with 1 gig of quality ram, dual SLi nvidia 7800 GT graphics cards, 2 fast SATA hard disks in raid 0 & a load of bits that you need (case, power, etc etc)

cost about 2200 quid + windows. i think it could do with another gig of ram, which i'm gonna stick in this week which pushes the price up by about 150 quid.

ready built systems had a bit of a premium and not the components i wanted.

if you do this, make sure you research your components and get enough power etc etc. otherwise it'll all go wrong

the build wasn't too hard - make sure you plug everything in the right places. SATA and/or RAID arrays involve a bit of messing with drivers from floppy disks when installing windows unlike IDE drives. Then install all the drivers, do windows updates & any other software or driver updates and you're away.

on this machine i can run something like battlefield 2 with all settings at max including AA at about 1024x768. another gig of ram should see the resolution up to 1280x1024

cheers