O/T building up a PC

[Little Mick]

Another recommendation for Scan, and locally RL at Watford, both of which I have used many times, depending on what you need you could also look at Dell outlet after the season, wait for a deal, last year I bought a unit from them and got £50 off and free delivery I don’t think at that price I could have sourced the parts let alone the O/S.

Regards

[Roger A]

I have also used Dabs and they have delivered goods very quickly though I have always made sure they are shown as 'in stock' - most of the poor ratings for them relate to out of stock goods and especially problems with returns of faulty products where they have been difficult to contact. Hopefully things will improve with BT now owning them - well they are a communications company aren't they? (Don't laugh).

You might also try LowestonWeb which is the parts business of Evesham computers. They always seem to have high customer satisfaction ratings and you might even get advice on which parts are most suitable.

Hope this helps.

Roger

[alnewall]

Little Mick has made a good point above.

Add up the cost of building your computer, and then see what Dell can do for the same price. Their computers tend to be well put together.
I sometimes wish i had taken this route.

[NickG]

Yes, Dell can have very good deals. Some of their prices are hard to beat, esp when you add in the cost of a MS Operating System. I have however had mixed reports about their aftersales service in the past.

[Bizzie]

One thing that you have to remember is the price of software, I used to build computers for friends and relatives and what always pushed the price of the computer up was the price of windows operating system. I ended up where I couldn't build as cheap as the likes of Dell Time ETC because they get huge discounts on the software. Another thing that you have look out for if using AMD processors is that they run very hot and sometimes a brand new processor can fail at first start up, I had to have three replaced under warrantee on the last one I built, its worth having the supplier install the processor on the motherboard so they can't argue that it wasn't installed properly.

[david counter]

the idea of building my own PC was that I could end up with a good machine with better quality components than would be available in the retail market, plus I would enjoy putting it together,

[BOONDI]

Don't be dispirited Dave......

The system builders will cut corners on memory size, processor speed, hard disk size, and motherboards made to measure their own brand cases.
Some even sell pc's that are not compatible with the PC ethos. Packard bell are the worst for this, by using different wiring on the motherboard power supply connectors.

There are good savings to be made by building your own PC. As for dual core processing, it's as the other members have said. However, in the future all software will be able to use the power of dual cores. You can buy motherboards that have a socket on them that will support AMD 64, 64FX, 64 dual core, and 64 M2 all using the same socket. This little bit of future proofing may come in hand.....

Not so sure what the situation is with the INTEL boards ATM tho....

I have used a DABS budget case that comes with a 300 watt PSU to run an AMD 64 3700 and 1GB memory with two DVD rewriters, two IDE hard disks, Two SATAII hard disks, 8 X AGP card, and Emu 24/192 sound card.
Power supply on this case is excellent and has been running for over 18 months, day in and day out. I have used it in about 15 builds on the cheap, and so far it has not let me down. It costs £20 from Dabs.
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx...ey=11145,50010

It has a two year garantee BTW.

[david counter]

as it happens I have a Packard bell at the moment I had a feeling it was a load of poo, honest Guv it wasn't my fault, my insurance company supplied it when my previous Dell died in a lightning strike

[Little Mick]

David fair enough, then I would say buy what you need as to processor memory etc as its virtually impossible to up grade realistically in the future as every thing moves on so fast, it’s a very easy thing to do the assembly that is and wont take long, I would go for a good box I have had a few cheep ones and it can make the seating of cards difficult with poor reliability, if you are going to use it in a noise sensitive area then I would pay the extra for a quite PSU.

Regards

[Cobblers]

I have been building my own PC's for the last 10 years or so but i'm a little out of it at the moment.

Read multliple reviews, don't rely on one review of the various components.
Get a motherboard with decent processor and memory upgrade potential.
Look at the layout of the board. Check that the MB has decent cooling and possibly fans on the north and southbridges if you going to make it work hard.

Do not skimp on Memory, it is cheap these days. the machine will be much quicker and will tax the hard drive less if you have 768mb or more.

Buy a decent power supply. Do not skimp on this. You can almost weigh power supply quality!
If it feels lightweight it probably ain't much cop. If your getting a decent graphics card get a beefy PSU, with a decent large fan on the bottom of the unit.
Power supply rating is a thorny subject as spec's can be fanciful on
el cheapo units and does not tell you about real world performance. a top flight 300watt psu could problably happily run the latest uber spec pc with dual HD's and dual sli grfx cards, beefy sound card et al, where a cheap 600 watt unit will fall over. Check what your prospective graphics card requires and go above this spec.

Onboard sound and graphics are perfectly acceptable for basic office tasks and little more.

AMD processors pound for pound are better value than Intel and technologically allegedly have the upper hand again. Real world "clock for clock" speed performance is much higher than in Intel chipsets.
However Intel proc's are far cooler running and it is easier to make a quiet cool running system with them.
I have never had any reliability problems with numerous AMD systems but I have with Intel, but i'm sure that's simply down to luck.

When building the system check that the case does not short on the Motherboard at any point.

Multitasking
In truth single core desktop PC's have been swap tasking very quickly, not multitasking.
Obviously now we have two cores (effectively or literally 2 computers on one chip) allows a computer to be vastly superior at doing multiple tasks.
question is do you do expect to do multiple things at once?

My 2 year old GF 5900 AGP card died recently so I bought the latest £90 AGP
Nvidia 7600GS. Relatively speaking a cheaper more basic gfx card, but notably better despite being half the price. It's performance is only very subtly inferior to it's pci-x brother. So performance bottlenecks must still lie elsewhere.