£2500 for a Desktop.. Gimme Some Specs!?

Question

Gonna get a new desktop for about £2500.

I want this PC to be a great all rounder, but with added number-crunching capability (so a quad-core processor is likely :P). This figure needs to include a monitor, case and everything. I'd do this myself but I'm lazy, and I haven't been paying much attention to the kinda components out now (and what kinda flaws they may have).

Cheers!

Answer 1

It's a generous enough budget, enough to build quite a special machine, but you have to be careful with your money nonetheless. It would be quite easy to burn through that money buying expensive "latest, greatest" tat and end up with very little to show for it.



I'm not going to recommend specific components in preference to general advice. You can get a good all-rounder but you still need to decide where to spend money - you could blow all that money on a graphics card or a disk subsystem if you really wanted to. For certain specialised uses it may actually make sense too.



Get the peripherals out of the way first. I'd budget £220 for a top-notch monitor, about the same for a printer, maybe £70 for a good keyboard and mouse. The speakers are troublesome since it depends what you want. A 5.1 from Logitech, Creative or the like will set you back maybe £70 but will sound quite poor. A good hi-fi surround sound set up will cost several hundred pounds. I'm going to budget £150 for a good pair of hi-fi speakers (and possibly an amp if you go for passive speakers) - they will sound infinitely better than a cheap surround set up even though there are only two speakers.



That leaves us with £1780 for the base unit. Round that down to £1600 with a decent case and PSU. You can get cheaper than £180 but quality and expansion space cost money. I'm thinking in terms of plenty of disks which will take space. At the top-end you may want to consider redundant power supplies but I don't think you're quite into the price range where those are justified. A UPS certainly is though - that'll be another £80.



A £200 graphics card will be enough to play any game out of the market now or in the near future. That budget is enough for e.g. an ATI Radeon HD 4870 - not to be sniffed at.



System memory is awkward - do you want the most memory or ECC memory which is more reliable? I would tend to go for the latter on a system in this price range. £180 will get you 8GB ECC memory - going higher doesn't really make sense in my opinion since most apps at the moment and in the near future will never have any use for it - even for number crunching.



Motherboard and CPU - Quad core is probably the only sane way to go right now. Dual core is slightly limiting now and you will be paying disproportionately for more cores. Budget perhaps £400 for the pair, again you can go cheaper but you have the money for something special.



Disk subsystem - this is invariably overlooked by hardened gamers but it deserves not to be. If there is a single difference between big iron and an expensive toy it is in the disks. Whenever a regular machine becomes sluggish and non-responsive it is usually because it is I/O bound. Hook in a decent disk subsystem and they carry on acting snappy and responsive under loads that bring most machines to their knees. I'd set aside another £400 for a decent disk controller card (e.g Adaptec) and a number of drives in RAID-5 configuration for performance and reliability. 500GB drives are to be had for under £40 these days and maybe six of those in an array will give you plenty of capacity.



What's left? An optical drive for £30, a card reader for £15 and £10 for a floppy if you still want one of those. £100 for a copy of Windows.



That leaves at least £215 - our prices have been generally been slightly on the generous side so you should have a little more left over. That is enough for any sundries (cables etc) and should still leave some over for a couple of roomy USB hard drives for backup. Don't neglect backup. Even with the reliability measures we have taken, RAID, UPS, ECC memory there is still the room for operator error or complete loss (e.g. theft) of the system. You need backups of your data for those eventualities.

Answer 2

sorry about the copy n paste, but i couldn't be arsed to write it all out!

this little lot is about the best you can get for the money. you could get a cheaper graphics card and another harddrive or a cheaper case. but this will give you an idea anyway.



Logitech G5 Laser Gaming Mouse, 2000dpi, USB 1.1/2.0, 7 Buttons, Black - Gamers Choice £29.79 £34.26

LN20543



Logitech G15 New Rev.2 Gaming Keyboard, USB, Wired, Silver/Black, GamePanel LCD, Illuminated £54.95 £63.19

LN20669



1500W Xigmatek NRP-HC1501 80%+, Modular, Output Protection, ATX 12V V2.2, EPS V2.92, QUAD SLI PSU £149.00 £171.35

LN23525



27" Dell 2709W UltraSharp Widescreen LCD 1920x1200 , 3000:1, 6ms, DVI, Adjustable Height/Tilt/Swivel £422.99 £486.44

LN24684



Silverstone TJ10B-WNV NVIDIA Edition, Black, Full Tower Case w/o PSU £189.99 £218.49

LN26184



1TB (1000 GB) Samsung HE103UJ Spinpoint F1 RAID Class, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ £108.97 £125.32

LN26294



1792MB Gainward GTX 295 55nm, PCI-E 2.0 (x16), 1998 MHz GDDR3, GPU 576 MHz, 480 Cores, HDMI £309.29 £355.68

LN26454



Asus P6T Deluxe V2, Intel X58, SLi/Xfire, Sok 1366, PCI-E 2.0, DDR3 1066/1333/1600(OC), SATAII, ATX £183.17 £210.65

LN26793



12GB (6x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24 £161.97 £186.27

LN26865



Pioneer BDR-203BK-SW 8x Blu-Ray Writer x8 DVD±DL x16 DVD±R x6 DVD±RW Writer internal Black SATA OEM £138.99 £159.84

LN27179



Intel i7 950, Socket 1366 (B), Nehalem, 3.06 GHz, QPI 4.8GT/s, Cache 8MB, 22x, 130W, Retail £374.17 £430.30

LN27458



Samsung SH-S223B/BEBE 22x DVD±R, 12x DVD±R, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, SATA, Black, OEM £14.85 £17.08





Recalculate Basket



Net Total



Carriage



VAT

£2,138.13



£19.54



£323.65

Total£2,481.32

Answer 3

Thermaltake Armor+MX VH8000BWS Black Aluminum / Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Cas



Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drives



Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS 150GB 10000 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive



Acer H213H bmid Black 21.5" 5ms HDMI Full HD 1080P Widescreen 16:9 LCD Monitor



EVGA 01G-P3-1180-AR GeForce GTX 285 1GB 512-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card



CORSAIR CMPSU-1000HX 1000W ATX12V 2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Compatible



Logitech X-540 70 watts 5.1 Speakers



RAZER Lycosa Black USB Wired Standard Gaming Keyboard



RAZER DeathAdder RZ01-00150100-R3M1 Black 5 Buttons 1 x Wheel USB Optical High Precision Gaming Mouse



Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound



CORSAIR XMS3 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory



RAZER Goliathus Alpha RZ02-00210400-R3M1 Mouse Pad-Control



EVGA E758-A1 3-Way SLI (x16/x16/x8) LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard



Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit for System Builders



LITE-ON Black 4X Blu-Ray DVD Drive SATA



Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor



COOLER MASTER V8 RR-UV8-XBU1-GP 120mm Rifle CPU Cooler



Total: $2,421.69 off newegg



DO NOT BUY ANYONES ELS MINE IS THE BEST BELIVE ME! IT INCLUDES EVERYTHING FROM PC TO MONITORS AND ETC!!!!



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