Thinkin bout new PC

[[THN]Buffalo_Hunter]

My Turion ML-42 gets to 82°C when under full load (mains powered). I was so alarmed I replaced the thermal paste with Arctic Silver - no immediate effect.

However, I did try a quick test using a couple of 40mm fans. Set to blow air into the laptop it made no difference. Set to suck air out of the laptop dropped the temperature by 5°C. so it appears the problem lies in extracting the hot air, not trying to force more in. I've got an 80mm USB powered fan on the way so I'll have a further play around.



B_H

 

[Pestcontrol]

Like RS said, reliability is everything.

Laptop CPU's (and other parts) differ from desktop ones at two things: Lower voltages and higher maximum die temperatures. These two cancel eachother out in lengthening and shorthening lifetime respectively, but work together in limiting speed.

So much for the theory. Anyway, as long as your laptop is not unstable, you don't really need to haul in more cooling unless you plan to run it at 100% load non stop for the next 5 years. Which i assume you don't. The only exception may be the class of "desktop replacement" lappies.

Bottom line is this: Laptops are built to run hotter, without jeopardising reliability.

As for assembling a PC yourself, service is still important, as your parts may fail and you would have to return them. The most likely candidates for failure in my experience are harddrives and PSU's. I recommend buying the case and PSU in a local shop so you can look at the options and pick a case you like, and can always return for easy replacement should it fail. Drives, especially the more exotic raptors can cost significantly more when bought locally, so that's up to you. With two harddrives and one of them spinning at 10k, i can also highly recommend placing a harddrive cooler in between.

Whether or not you want to go this route is up to you, i'd do it personally, as would a number of other forum members here, but the question is if you have enough faith in your computer skills and your friends', and how much you value the experience and cost savings. Ask yourself: What if it doesn't work, how are you going to discover which part is broken? How many BIOS'es have you seen, how many jumpers set? Do i need support?

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

Do I have a clue? No! But I do put faith in KC and Tbone considering theyve both built one, or had a hand in building one, before. Theres a few problems I can come up with, though.. One is that Ill need to buy all the parts at once, and I dont have all the money *currently* to buy them all at once. Since Ill have to buy them all seperately (temporally) itll probably take me the better part of a year to get it all together, which I really cant be bothered waiting for. Also, tbone and I went through most of the parts Id have to buy on a local company's part list and it all totalled up to the same price as, if not more expensive than, a pre-built system anyway.

Ive also done a little looking around on my own, and from what I hear Evesham are rather good for build quality and reliability of service, so I took a lil look at their website. I found a couple of prebuilt systems that I tweaked a little, and it came out at a reasonably affordable price.

I reckon Ill go have a gander at Novatech and see what they're like.

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

Novatech seem rather good! Cheap, too. I reckon with a little guidance and help I could get what I need pretty easily. Thanks for the heads up thatbloke.

Ok, under the assumption that I dont know what the hell Im doing and youll probably find that half the parts arent compatible with each other, Ive managed to smush together these components:

ASUS A8N SLi Premium nForce 4SLi 939 PCI-E DDR400 (SATA, Raid) - £123.38
AMD X2 Dual-Core Athlon 64 4400+ 1Mb Socket 939pin - £360.95
74Gb Western Digital Raptor 8mb Cache Serial ATA 10,000rpm - £123.02
Western Digital Caviar 250Gb 8mb Cache SATAII 7,500 rpm - £80.12
Corsair XMS 3200 2GB (2x1GB) 400MHz Non-EEC platinum - £190.35
XFX GeForce 7800GTX PCI-E 512mb Dual DVI/ViVo HDTV XXX Ed. (lol) - £494.68
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music - £93.77
Pioneer DVR110D 8x Dual layer 16x DVD+R/-R - £29.14
LiteOn CDRW 52X32X52X Smartburn - £16.60

All of the above for 1511.91 plus p+p, which isnt too bad as far as Ive seen.

Thats most of it. For cooling, power supply and case etc. id need a bit of help with that.

 

[SgtFury]

My desktop was from Novatech, my laptop from Evesham..... build quality is a lot better on the Evesham one, I get silly problems with the desktop while the laptop is teh smooth....

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

Aye, I heard that Evesham are supposed to have high build quality and good service, but they do cost more than novatech. Ah well, you get what you pay for I suppose. However, I was hoping to buy the parts from Novatech and then assemble it myself rather than them doing it all for me. I had a look at their prebuilt desktops, and they arent as customisable as I would have hoped.