New kit advice

[Pingue]

Hi all,

So I'm finally in a position to look at upgrading my current desktop and also to look at a shiny new touchpad, so I thought I'd ask you intelligent lot (hah! ) for ideas.

Touchpad-wise, I'm hoping for something with android 2.3 (or which I can at least flash android to), looking at spending up to £250/300. The Asus eee transformer looks fairly promising (I'm hoping to play with one this week), but haven't really been keeping track of what alternatives are out there.

Desktop-wise, I'm looking at a semi-decent gaming rig, as I'm slowly finding my current setup to be a bit sluggish on high-end games. I'm quite happy to build from parts if need be, and I'll probably transplant stuff from my current machine if it's still adequate.

Current desktop:
AMD Athalon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.90 GHz
4Gb RAM
NVidia GeForce GTX 260
1Tb WDC Hard Drive (95% full)

Peripherals are all fairly ok at the moment, so I'm only really looking at the tower itself - preferably with pretty good cooling/silencing (this thing's a noisy s.o.b. right now). Looking to spend between £700 and £1000, suggestions on parts welcome if you can't suggest an entire rig!

Any/all advice welcome - happy to provide more info if you want!

Cheers all,
Pingue!

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

Have you considered having 3 hdd, small solid state drive C, 2nd internal drive and a external backup drive. SSD's many times faster than conventional drives, and have a smaller airflowblocking profile.

Exactly this.
1 x 2.5" SSD for the OS 64GB is usually fine for this.
1 x 2.5" Fast Spindle drive >250GB for apps/games
1 x Slow/Cheap External USB/Network/eSATA drive for backups/archive. >1TB

You can get a caddy that allows 2 x 2.5" drives in a single 3.5" bay so space in your computer should not be an issue.

Hard drives; though i personally think that 250 internal is too small, my origin and steam folders have a combined size of: 630GB, now i am not saying you cant store some of the games on the external drive, that said you could go for dual internal, eg 1 fast, 1 slow(er) and large. This being in addition to an SSD.

 

[waterproofbob]

I'll do a proper build for you if I get a moment tomorrow. However I do have a CPU cooler and a psu you can have for much less monies than buying one retail.

 

[Tempscire]

Case: COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 Black Steel/ Plastic ATX Full Tower - £132

PSU: Antec High Current Gamer Series HCG-900 900W - £100

Motherboard: Asrock Z68 PROFESSIONAL - £200

Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz - £171

Ram: G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB DDR3 1600 - £46

Graphics: ASUS ENGTX580 - £375

Hard disk 1: Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F120GBGT 120GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive - £170

Hard disk 2: SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM - £40

Total price: £1234

That should give you a rather nice build that will chew through BF3 on high settings and last you a good few years in terms of not needing to upgrade again. You could probably knock off the solid state drive if you want to and get it closer to £1000. Most of those come from ebuyer too, which I chose as it's free 5 day delivery, so you might be able to shave money off if you shopped around, but then you might end up paying out more in delivery charges. As a nice little bonus, the graphics card comes with a code for Batman: Arkham City which can be redeemed when it comes out.

EDIT: Just seen that you have a 1tb hard drive already, so you might want to knock that off too. I also didn't mention cooling, which you probably want instead of the stock Intel fan. Cant go wrong with the Cooler Master Hyper 212+ for £27.

 

[Wol]

I also have a feeling hes got a new case too from 3dge after i42 iirc.... So can probably knock that off too.

 

[Tempscire]

Fair enough, so minus the case and both HDD's and plus the cooler you're looking at £919, which gives you a bit of cash to play around with for peripherals or maybe a nice sound card if you're bothered. But to be honest unless you're a real audiophile the on-board sound is going to be absolutely fine.

 

[Wol]

Fair enough, so minus the case and both HDD's and plus the cooler you're looking at £919, which gives you a bit of cash to play around with for peripherals or maybe a nice sound card if you're bothered. But to be honest unless you're a real audiophile the on-board sound is going to be absolutely fine.

Pingue's done enough sound stuff for events up at uni with proper full blown sound desks and racks..... so you never know

 

[3dge]

I also have a feeling hes got a new case too from 3dge after i42 iirc.... So can probably knock that off too.

Yah, I've still got it.
I should bring it to Soton sometime, but alas I feel a trip to Southampton isn't worthwhile unless there's Pilgrim House.

 

[thatbloke]

but alas I feel a trip to Southampton isn't worthwhile unless there's Pilgrim House.

This could be arranged.......

 

[3dge]

This could be arranged.......