Student - High end PC building

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NutterzUK

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Hey there,
I built my own PC about 4 years ago, enjoyed it and kept the comp for about 3 years ( on a laptop now ).

When I go to uni, as i'm studying computing and management, I want a fast, reliable computer. I've always been into them since tiny, always wanted my computer that little faster, always been upgrading the comp .. you know the feeling.
I'm going to be on it a lot when i'm not on the laptop.

Here is the scenario....
I have about $2k in my online poker account which I play to make money and will as a student. I'm wanting to keep that but withdraw when I win so to keep my bankroll and build a desktop. - I want it to be able to play games.. it just wants to be a monster.

I want to end up spending about £800 on it. I can afford that. I have the monitor, mouse and keyboard which is fine.

Today I have been over fixing someones computer and have been given an age old computer... 256 mb ram.. 1.8 Ghz yada yada.

My plan is to slowly upgrade the computer, although I know the mobo won't be upgradable enough. So.... 1st stop...

New motherboard - Requires new RAM, new processor and maybe new PSU - most expensive step I know.
I have about £500-600 to spend at the moment on getting started. I can live with on board graphics for a while, can live with the 40gb hard drive it has... and can live with the ****ty case.

What would you suggest? I want something that is going to be extremely upgradeable motherboard wise. Which processor is going to run the longest? ( It wants to be a quad core ).
Would I be wise in buying one with dual PCI-e slots?
The motherboard being the main part and the part that is going to allow me to keep upgrading... what is the best one I could buy for a reasonable price at the moment? ( remembering I need RAM and a processor ).
Should I buy a motherboard kit from savastore?

Your advice is much appreciated... i'll keep this thread going as I keep upgrading it!

P.S Intel.. or AMD? Oh and the reason I started wanting to upgrade from my laptop is that the thing burns my knees when playing PKR - an online poker room, won't play games and... just winds me up a bit. The new PC wants to run well with windows 7, which is what I currently have on my desktop.

GIGABYTE, GA-EX58-UD5, LGA1366, Intel® X58, 6400 MT/s QPI, DDR3-2000 24GB /6, PCIe x16 SLI CF /3, SATA 3 Gb/s RAID 5 /10, HDA, GbLAN /2, FW /3, ATX, Retail
INTEL, Coreâ„¢ i7-920 Quad-Core 2.66GHz, LGA1366, 4.8 GT/s QPI, 8MB L3 Cache, 45nm, 130W, EM64T EIST VT XD, Retail
OCZ, 6GB (3 x 2GB) Gold XTC PC3-10666 DDR3 1333MHz CL (9-9-9-20) 1.65V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC

That would set me back $765.07,.. that's £466.
A good start...? What do you think?
 
I have a full ATX, planning for re-use is very little to be honest, mouse, keyboard, monitor, speakers, the case.. I have an OS ( XP ), keep the hard drive for a bit... I don't need a graphics card for a while.
Will get there eventually.
I may actually now i've thought about it a bit more be able to just go out and buy a PC when I sell my car. If I'm not already building one in a few weeks i'll have about a £1k budget to buy a PC....
Anything you would suggest for that?
Just looking at ideas at the moment.

Thanks for your help!
P.S, if I spend 1k,.. i really want it to be futureproof for a good few years and upgradable.
Steve
 
most likely it would still be better to build one. i like how its listed that its cpu runs at 10.64Ghz, quite an overclock o_O ...

it comes with 12gigs of ram, half of which you will most likely not use. 6gigs would be good. and if you wanted to play any newer games with higher detail settings, youd be disappointed. so if you ever wanted to upgrade the graphics card to something higher end, youd also have to most likely upgrade from the (unknown brand) 450w psu.
 
Yeah I agree totally with the PSU, I did notice it's a unbranded 450PSU, and I would need to upgrade it. I also noticed the RAM was not anywhere near the best ram that could be put in it as it's 10666mhz.
I also noticed the graphics card was lame...
But how I saw it,.. it was a good start with a good enough mobo which can be kept.

I planned on buying a solid state drive fairly soon for it, and putting another of the same graphics cards in to run in SLI.

As soon as i'd put another graphics card in, improved the RAM ( or at least some of it not all 12gb ) and the hard drive, I couldn't think of much better. ( second graphics card probs needs a new PSU but thats not too expensive ).

I have about £1k to spend,.. well.. in all seriousness I have about £1.6k I could spend... but would rather not.

I'm just looking for a computer that would last.. a long time. I want it to be upgradable and that's what I saw in this comp even though I can see how he has gone cheap on a few componants. I put the same kind of stuff into savastore.com to buy the parts and it cost about £800 ( better RAM though ).

Muffin man, Thankyou so much for your advice, it's awesome of you to go out of your way to help other people such as myself, i'm glad you brought a few things to my attention and confirmed some others. You seem to know a lot about this kind of thing and I totally trust your judgement more than my own.

If you had £1k to spend on a new computer,... how would you spend it?
I know it's a lot and I can get some serious kit for it. Thing is.. I know i'm not going to play too many games on it at uni, but the thing is.. i'd like to be able to. Instead of me just wasting the money on booze i want to make a good machine I can keep and have throughout uni as a computing student. I will need to be programming on it,..I will play some games but I have an xbox for that,.. and I will give it hammer each and every day. I play poker for a living so I want something that is reliable.

If you could put together an ideal list of parts to purchase from places I can put it together myself that's fine.. or if you think I should buy the one from ebay... whichever you think is better value and more future proof.

I do realise the power supply unit is one of the first things that I would have to upgrade on the ebay pc, and also that eventually I would end up throwing all the old RAM out the window for new RAM, which is a bit of a waste.

The second I sell my car, I know what i'm like,.. i'll jump in and buy something,.. which is why i'm planning in advance what I should buy.

One last thing... is it worth getting water cooling? how is this set up? The last pc I made was a bog standard AMD 64 3000+, 2gb ram, some kind of saphire card, etc etc about 4 years ago... has anything changed I need to know about? Is it hard to fix a water cooling system? Is it neccessary? Are they loud / quiet? I just have this feeling i'm going to spill water on something I shouldn't!

Thanks again for all your help.
Steve

P.S... i'm after upgradable... is the i7 the way to go? Is there something I should be waiting for? I saw some dual AMD xenon motherboard or something, DELL precision 690, is that worth buying?
I really am not totally in the loop with this kind of thing at the moment but need to be.
Thanks again!
 
lol, you are giving me too much credit >.<

for that kind of money, these would be a good start, i would never buy a dell over building myself :)

Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66Ghz (Nehalem) (Socket LGA1366) - Retail
Biostar TPower Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 260 896MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card (Includes Batman: Arkham Asylum & 3D Discover Glasses)
OCZ Reaper 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C7 (1600MHz) Tri-Channel (OCZ3RPR1600LV6GK)
Corsair TX 750W ATX SLI Compliant Power Supply (CMPSU-750TXUK)

that would leave you with a little over £300. that would still be enough for a good case, optical drive, hdd, and most likely an ssd too.

you would be fine with that setup for a good while with room to upgrade. even though 6 gigs would be plrenty, you could add 6 more gigs in the future. that setup is also sli ready, so if one graphics card just doesnt cut it later on, you can add another one.

water cooling is not really necessary, unless you want to do some real high end OCing. then again if you just want to spend some money it doesnt hurt, but a good kit isnt cheap, and i personally dont know how easy or hard it would be, ive never done it, most likely not too complicated though. there are members here who have gone over 4ghz on air with great stability, so even if you are OCing its not necessary.
 
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