Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm starting to feel old, because I remember when AGP first came out and it was all like 'wtf? This won't fit in an PCI or ISA slot? My Voodoo4 was 32mb of extreme graphical POWER back then and made me 50% paraplegic.

According to eBuyer my last upgrade was November 2005, so I suppose it's that time again. I only pay attention to hardware when it's time to upgrade, so I'll get a foot up by asking YOU, the viewer, what's decent nowadays. Do they still do socket 7? I bet 72-pin simms are getting WELL cheap now.

I've always bought AMD, on the basis that it was just-as-good-if-not-faster than Intel for a good £100 or so less, but I'm willing to break from tradition if reasons can be given.

Budget is reasonable, I'll lay out £300-400 on the essentials, which are CPU, Mobo, RAM. I still have a nice fat case with ATX power (I assume that's still the rage) and all other necessary components.

Get two 8800GTX and run them in SLi mode. Like a man.

Alternatively, the 8500GT isn't bad.

My new work Pc has an 8500GT. I'm glad to hear it's good.

The best price/performance is the ~£100 9600GT I'd say.

Mm, again, depends on your possibly bottlenecking processor, what you'll be wanting to use it for and how much brass.

8600GT is a fair bit better than the 8500GT for games, as the 8500GT is more for multimedia, and only a little more. If you're fussed about DX10 then neither will be fast enough really, but then who is really fussed about DX10?

9600GT is super value indeed and pretty future proof.

Don't bother with anything (gngh) 'uber' in the £100+ if you're just planning on having Eve, Lordy Lordy Online, Company of Heroes, CoD 4 fun etc.

I need a new computer really. Bah.

Ooh, yes please. I can spare bugger all money right now, but will happily exchange for something, if you like and don't want to hang about. I have 360 games! And er... books. And a couple of amigas. And a lamp.

The Jesuscomputer has an 8800. I don't use it for games, but fuck me the GPU is fast.

All bow down in the presence of the Jesuscomputer.

My PC has two of them. All bow down in the presence of the Godcomputer.

[edit]To fend off the upcoming questions: So I could play Crysis on "high", of course.

The proof of the existence of both of these computers is sorely lacking.

All bow down before the Nihilicomputer.

Bow down!

You can't fool me. That's an electric heater.

Actually "An electrical heater" would be a good description of both this computer and the Macbook Pro! Even the PC in that shot kicks out lots of heat.

Done! We'll work something out, you can send me awesome in the post. Or a few starbars. Man, that'd be ace. Starbars.

PM address, and I'll send it to you once I've bought something new. I have a nasty and unfortunate habit of putting old gfx cards back in their boxes and leaving them there, forever.

Also thanks for the tips chaps, I shall scrutinise my currently negative bank balance to ascertain how much more negative I can put it

This Jesuscomputer...does it hang for three days then mysteriously return?

As CG has since pointed out to me in IM that his PC has an AGP slot, I would recommend an GeForce 7950 GT, which seem to fetch £40-£60 on ebay but don't come up often enough for my liking.

I'm starting to feel old, because I remember when AGP first came out and it was all like 'wtf? This won't fit in an PCI or ISA slot? My Voodoo4 was 32mb of extreme graphical POWER back then and made me 50% paraplegic.

According to eBuyer my last upgrade was November 2005, so I suppose it's that time again. I only pay attention to hardware when it's time to upgrade, so I'll get a foot up by asking YOU, the viewer, what's decent nowadays. Do they still do socket 7? I bet 72-pin simms are getting WELL cheap now.

I've always bought AMD, on the basis that it was just-as-good-if-not-faster than Intel for a good £100 or so less, but I'm willing to break from tradition if reasons can be given.

Budget is reasonable, I'll lay out £300-400 on the essentials, which are CPU, Mobo, RAM. I still have a nice fat case with ATX power (I assume that's still the rage) and all other necessary components.

i have one gigabyte nvidia 8800gt and i can't complain. I play everything with everything maxed out (even if its only in 1024*768 as i have an crt 17'' monitor)

Something of spec roughly like this would be a good target I think. Depends on your budget and what you use the machine for. If you want to play games, a Core II Duo processor with a higher clock speed is better; if you do stuff like rip DivX or heavy duty multitasking you might prefer a Core II Quad. Graphics wise, I think nVidia's 9600 is a good price/performance compromise.

I'm not so sure about the mobo chipset on that one though. I'll get back to you.

I'd heard good things about Mesh but my brother's PC from them was badly built, damaged on delivery and seems strangely slow for the spec too but I'm buggered if I can find where.




Easy.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/125082
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131950
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132904

£228.85, leaving you plenty of money to spend £100 on a Geforce 9600GT and some on a PSU that isn't 3 years old.

(Someone double check my parts)

AMD are dead in the water. They haven't done a decent CPU for yonks. Intel are miles ahead and the dual and quad cores eat all the AMD CPU's for breakfast.

This looks like a good deal for a quad core:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-161-IN

I'd have to agree with the AMD/Intel thing. I was (and am technically) an AMD man through and through, the last Intel chip I owned was a Pentium Classic. 100Mhz of pure power. I'm rocking an Nforce4 with an AMD 64 X2 4200+, overclocked all the way to a rocksolid stable 4700+ish. That's an overclock of two cores at 2.2Ghz, to two cores at 2.7Ghz. It's way fast enough for the moment, and only cost me £50. It's now paired with 2GB G.Skill RAM, and an Nvidia 8800GT, which is overclocked to 700/1000 from the factory. Runs games at 1440x900 (19" widescreen) with no problem at all.

In fact, this is the setup we were talking about when I blasted your EvE framerates in to Oblivion (DYSWIDT?). That's partly because I'm running it in Linux under WINE, though - the XP64 frames are more like their XP32 counterpart.

Jolly handy info chaps, many thanks. I'll have a nose at the specs and check the bank balance. I'll also need a heatsink

Every modern chip comes with a sink and fan, as a general rule.

Indeed, but I've almost invariably shunned the generic inclusive one for a seperate super-silent or super-cooling alternative.

The CPU I linked is a retail pack and comes with both a heatsink and a 3 year warranty if you use it. As you say though, you might want to spend some money on a Zalman or Akasa alternative.

I can't remember the last time I got a fan with a chip.

Certainly all the intel Core 2s are generally sold in retail packs, which have a pre-heat transfer compound added H/S and fan.

AMD too, but if you're buying online, you're almost certainly going to be able to buy a cpu without all the extra stuff.
I think I've only ever bought one boxed processor.

I guess you technically COULD but they generally seem to be the same price and the retail ones tend to have a nice warranty.

All sorted now anyway, the shit should arrive sometime next week. Cheers for the fun info gang. I still remember going from a Cyrix 166 (at 133mhz) to an AMD K2-400. The speed, people, the speed!

It also just took me an inordinately long time for me to remember the name of my first AMD processor. Age

I discovered an old benchmarking prog going through my old DVDs today with my old K6-2-300's stats saved.

My PC now (and only using 1 core) is between 5 and 40 times quicker on cpuy things. More alarming, my hard drive then was also 20 times slower, but took 58% cpu to do that speed. Now? 0% to be 20 times quicker.

It's fucking aliens, man. There's no other explanation.

PC hardware evolves at an alarming rate.

So why does my Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB of RAM and a Geforce 8800GTS, running 64-bit Vista often feel so much more sluggish and unreliable (as well as offering a choice between whining fans or chip-frying, system-crashing heat) than my old Athlon XP 2800 with 2GB of RAM and a Radeon 9600XT, running 32-bit XP?

It's Vista, isn't it*? I've been tempted about once a week for the last year (since building the thing) to go back to XP, but I've got to the point where I miss things about Vista when I use XP. But then I miss XP's tendency to behave itself when I use Vista.

*Except for the fans/heat thing. I should investigate this further, but the thought of doing so saps my will to live.

I'm using Vista on a 2GB Core 2 Duo (4400, IIRC) and currently an ATI x1650 AGP (Half the time, the other half it uses an ATI 1950 HD PCI-E, which is obviously faster) 2GB ram. I have absolutely no speed problems with it at all (Except when running PIX, but I have yet to come across a computer which can run that without huge pauses. I don't think one has ever existed)

Overclocked? Check where it's dumping its heat. If it's dumping it over the Northbridge, that would be why your fans are fighting for their lives.

Not overclocked, but I'll have a look at that, ta.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Obviously, I didn't request to cancel the order, and every single item I ordered remains in stock by several hundred on their website. Despite this all record of the order has been expunged from my account and I have no fucking clue why. What the cunting fucking fuck?

Well, one cunting fucking 0871 call later, I appear to have divined the problem.

It would appear that Google checkout have taken my money not once, but twice. Since I'm not a zillionaire, there was only enough cash in the account to cover this order once, and I can see on my statement that the cash was taken yesterday. Since then however, a second attempt to take the funds has occured, and without there being enough money I can only presume Google have said 'Not enough cash, cancel order', which is why my order has been cancelled.

Meanwhile they've now attempted to take nearly £700 for an order worth half that, which has taken my available balance to Nil, making my account unusable, AND they've cancelled my fucking order so no goods are on their way either.

I am really, really not in the mood to be fucked around like this.

Bought components at a local supplier, so fuck you ebuyer.

Got it all home, feel like an old man. Alright, it's been a couple of years or so since I last built a PC but fuck me, for starters I can't get over the size of the graphics card and the fact it needs two inputs from the PSU.

I'm finding the whole thing pretty terrifying, but I'm almost there.

Good one, it clearly wasn't Google Checkout's fault.

Anyway - is there a website anywhere that let's you see what RAM you're currently using?

See also: buying a new car

Not actually a website but - cpu-z

Yes eBuyer did try to blame Google, and they might even be right, but I'm fucked if I'll accept this as an excuse. If I'm buying from eBuyer, they're responsible for the whole service, top to bottom. If they use a crap, prone to error payment provider, then that's their fault too. I'm sick of companies trying to deflect blame by pointing at a third party they themselves engaged to do business on their behalf.

Yeah, I'm sensing a pattern

Okay, thread hijack - WTF motherboards?
I want one that'll work with this processor (so socket 775, then) and this RAM. Fucking X48 and P35 and Nforce7 WTF?

[edit]Oops, must also be twin-SLi compatible and have a 1gb network card (although you're hard pressed to find one without nowadays).
[editedit]Shit! And SATA-RAID compatible.

Oh hell, and have firewire on it.
Okay, scratch the previous request - if someone could tell me which is best out of the following chipsets that would be great:
Intel X48
Intel X38
Intel P45
Intel P43
Intel P35
Intel P31
nForce 7
nForce 6

You're all rubbish