Desktop Recommendation.

[lutzj]

I think I'm finally ready to pull the trigger and buy a new computer. I'd like some input. Here's what I want:

1. Less than $3000US, preferably closer to $2000
2. Capable of playing CoD4 on high (or something similarly powerful)
3. Not too flashy/ugly on the monitor/case side

 

[GVBN]

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R - $134.99
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 - $229.99
OCZ 2x2 DDR2-800 - $109.99
eVGA Geforce 8800GT 512mb - $239.99
WD Raptor 150gb - $169.99
WD Caviar SE16 750gb - $154.99
Antec P182 - $139.99
Corsair CMPSU-620HX - $169.99
Creative SB Audigy SE 7.1 - $29.99
Sennheiser PC166 - $83.99
LiteOn 20x - $29.99
Samsung 226BW 22" - $319.99
Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate - $179.99

That's $1993.87

 

[Zelig]

Nothing wrong with GVBN's build, here are the parts I'd choose instead, with a brief explanation as to why, I dropped a few things, so the price difference for the parts isn't as large as it appears.

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R - $134.99
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - $277.99
GeIL 2x2 DDR2-800 - $82.99
eVGA Geforce 8800GT 512mb - $239.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB - $179.99
Antec P182 - $139.99
Silverstone Zeus 750W - $159.99
LiteOn 20x - $29.99
Samsung 226BW 22" - $319.99
Windows Vista 64bit Home Premium - $111.49

Total - $1677.4

CPU - Quad core is where the future's at, IMO the performance gain between an E8400 and a Q6600 in situations where the extra cores are useful is greater in usefulness than the performance loss in situations where they aren't.
RAM - Same stuff, different brand, cheaper.
Video card - I'm not a fan of the stock coolers on the 8800GT cards, they hit over 100 degrees at load, but the 8800GTS cards are $70 more, so I left this.
Hard drives - Raptors aren't worth the price, modern 1tb drives have nearly identical performance, even more if you stick them in RAID 0. 2x 7200.11 Seagates will be nearly equal in performance as a Raptor, even without RAID 0, and with far more capacity. More drives can be added as needed here for space.
PSU - More power than the Corsair, better quality, and a bit cheaper.
Sound Card - Dropped, the ALC889A has better sound than the Audigy 1, although there won't be much of a difference on cheap speakers/headphones.
Headphones/speakers - Dropped, not sure if these are needed and I'm not a fan of cheap speakers or headphones, so I'm not going to bother recommending anything at Newegg. If you're looking for an entry level set of cans, the Grado S60 are good for the price, the Sennheiser HD 485 are probably the closest you'll find on Newegg ($58.99).
OS - Save some money if you don't need the features of Vista Ultimate.

 

[lutzj]

Thanks. Can't wait to replace my old one.

 

[GVBN]

If you're not going to use RAID you might want to get GA-P35-DS3L instead

CPU cooling: Arctic Silver + Scythe Infinity. E8400 should go over 4ghz easily

 

[kuukkeli]

Abit IP35 Pro - $174.99
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - $277.99
Tuniq Tower 120 - $44.99
GeIL 2x2 DDR2-800 - $82.99
ECS N8800GT - $269.99
Samsung HD501LJ 500GB - $109.99
Antec P182 - $139.99
CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX - $124.99
Samsung SH-S203B - $28.99
Creative SB Audigy SE 7.1 - $29.99
Samsung 226BW 22" - $319.99
Windows Vista 64bit Home Premium - $111.49

MoBo: Gigabyte has crappy 4-pin extra power while Abit has 8-pins. At least Xbit Labs has claimed that from now on they consider 4-pin extra power as a drawback. Also Abit seems to have least trouble with P35 boards.

CPU: With that big budget I'd definately go with quadcore for the reasons Zelig gave. Unlike others I recommend a better cooling solution for the CPU. Tuniq Tower is supposed to be good but it may require a little lapping. If it's not important to get everything from Newegg I'd recommend Noctua NH-U12P.

RAM: I trust that Zelig found a good price / quality ratio

GPU: If Zelig isn't a fan of 8800GT stock coolers I'm vehemently against them. My recommendation has the best available cooler for those cards. Other possibility would be to buy the cheapest 8800GTS 512MB.

HD: I have the impression that Samsung HDs are both fast and silent these days. Also I don't see need for more than 500GB.

Case + PSU: P182 is supposed to be good so I go with the rest. Also I keep my style and recommend reasonably sized PSU

DVD: Samsung got great review and I like my drive. Besides it's a dollar cheaper.

Audio: Even a cheap audio card is better than integrated.

I trust others on the monitor (haven't read reviews about them in ages) and I think Home Premium is enough of a Vista.

Unless I miscalculated this totals to $1716,38. It leaves room for extras like those huge PSUs others are recommending. All in all $2000 gives you a heck of a machine.

 

[Zelig]

Random thoughts/replies/comments, mostly to kuukkeli:

Intel OEM Q6600 - $255.00

CPU - If going with a third party cooling system, an OEM processor can be procurred more cheaply, as it doesn't come with a heatsink/fan. I love Thermalright products, they're consistently the best (although pricey) aircooling available, but Newegg doesn't seem to have the 120 Ultra Extreme in stock, so no link on it.

GPU Coolers - With exceptions for high airflow cases, or water cooling, I generally prefer GPU coolers that blow hot air out the back of the case, and although I don't like the evga card's cooling, they have a lifetime warranty, so if they overheat and die, it's evga who's providing a replacement. (FWIW, for my current build, I paid few extra dollars to just get a GTS card)

Hard Drives - Needed size depends on how much stuff you keep, I'm pushing 2tb used on my various drives, not counting backups. Past 750gb per drive, the $/gb drops a lot though. Chances are the new Seagate 7200.11 drives are going to be faster (and more expensive) than the Samsungs. Some of the 7200.11 drives had some performance issues, Seagate issued a firmware fix for these, and I think currently shipping ones are unaffected.

PSU: Nothing wrong with the Corsair power supplies, but the Silverstone Zeus line has amazing build quality, they're built like server power supplies designed to be run 24/7 for months at a time. I just picked the 750w one because it was closest in price to the Corsair, the Zeus line ranges from 560 watts to 1200 watts.

Audio: Not necessarily true anymore, the onboard audio on that board has better specs than the Audigy 1 (106db snr vs. 100 db snr), and from my limited listening with each, I'd rate them comparably. And Creative still struggles to make proper drivers, I've wasted more time getting my Audigy 2 ZS working in Vista 64-bit than all the rest of my hardware combined.

CPU cooling: Arctic Silver + Scythe Infinity. E8400 should go over 4ghz easily

Some don't, depending how you qualify "easily". Some scale up to 4GHz with minimal tinkering at around 1.36V or less, but I've seen a couple that only make it to 4GHz with 1.50V, which I would personally feel uneasy about running 24/7 if I couldn't afford to replace the processor in case of death.

 

[kuukkeli]

CPU - If going with a third party cooling system, an OEM processor can be procurred more cheaply, as it doesn't come with a heatsink/fan. I love Thermalright products, they're consistently the best (although pricey) aircooling available, but Newegg doesn't seem to have the 120 Ultra Extreme in stock, so no link on it.

OEM processors have worse warranty. Noctua, Tuniq and Thermalright are all good and very equal in quality. Tuniqs often require lapping, Noctuas are usually well finished and of Thermalright's situation I'm not sure. Anyways, any one of those will cool well enough.

GPU Coolers - With exceptions for high airflow cases, or water cooling, I generally prefer GPU coolers that blow hot air out the back of the case, and although I don't like the evga card's cooling, they have a lifetime warranty, so if they overheat and die, it's evga who's providing a replacement. (FWIW, for my current build, I paid few extra dollars to just get a GTS card)

I'd rather have 2 year warranty with good cooling than lifetime warranty with bad cooling. A 3 year warranty is only nominally worse than lifetime - at least I haven't used a GPU for three years on this millennium. And just like you I also spent a little extra for GTS.

PSU: Nothing wrong with the Corsair power supplies, but the Silverstone Zeus line has amazing build quality, they're built like server power supplies designed to be run 24/7 for months at a time. I just picked the 750w one because it was closest in price to the Corsair, the Zeus line ranges from 560 watts to 1200 watts.

Silverstone is quite unfamiliar brand to me. It may be good (based on your posts I see no reason to doubt it) but I decided to suggest a brand I know. Also the suggested budget leaves a room for upgrades and bigger PSU never actually hurts

Audio: Not necessarily true anymore, the onboard audio on that board has better specs than the Audigy 1 (106db snr vs. 100 db snr), and from my limited listening with each, I'd rate them comparably. And Creative still struggles to make proper drivers, I've wasted more time getting my Audigy 2 ZS working in Vista 64-bit than all the rest of my hardware combined.

Have you tried playing games with both audio solutions? Because the major reason why I dislike integrated audio is the fact that they tend to be quite a resource hogs. E.g. in Oblivion it was a very common solution to big stutters to disable integrated audio and buy a cheap audio card. I'm not familiar with Vista issues though as I still use XP.

And about E8400. Like Zelig said it's not guaranteed they reach 4GHz+ easily. And in case you'd get a good one you'd also need to get faster, more expensive memory because most of the cheap 800MHz memories can't be pushed to 900 - 1000MHz or so required.

 

[Speedo]

Unless you *know* you'll make use of a quadcore CPU, go with the E8500 instead of a quad (unless you plan to overclock, of course). The number of apps where quadcore currently shows any *significant* advantage over dualcore is very, very small... but to get that quadcore you have to sacrifice a significant bit of clock speed, FSB AND L2 cache.

IMO looking at it from a gamer/general user perspective, the E8500 is a no-brainer.

 

[duckmanbro]

Mate, with a limit of US$3000, you will be able to build a super computer capable of staying up to date for at least the next 3-4 years!

Even with US$2k, you will be setting a pretty good level!

 

[Whomp]

I'm thinking of setting up my home office and this is what's on my desktop at work with dual screens. Good deal or not?

Base Unit: DellOptiPlex 755 Desktop
Processor Core 2 Quad Q6600/2.40GHz
Memory: 4.0GB 800MHz DDR2
Hard Disk 80GB SATA 3.0Gb/s and 8MB DataBurst Cache (upgradable)
Monitor: No Monitor in base price, but 1 or 2 monitors can be added
Operating System Windows XP Home, Service Pack 2 with media (upgradable)
Peripherals Keyboard, optical 5 button mouse, 16x DVD-ROM (upgradable), 9 USB ports
Price $755
Shipping/handling $20

 

[kuukkeli]

I'm thinking of setting up my home office and this is what's on my desktop at work with dual screens. Good deal or not?

Home office means it's going to be for work only? Then it depends on what kind work you're doing with it. I have a hunch that it's not very balanced in any case (processor seems to way more beefy than the rest of the system).

 

[Zelig]

I'm thinking of setting up my home office and this is what's on my desktop at work with dual screens. Good deal or not?

Better off going with Vista for a rig like that, unless your using programs that haven't been updated in years, which require XP. Vista (64-bit) would also allow use of all 4gb of ram.

And the hard drive seems puny, I've seen 500gb drives going for as low as $80, you can't be saving much money going with the 80gb drive.

Does the video card, or onboard video have dual DVI? A lot of monitors really suffer if they're not used with DVI ports.

Other than that, the computer would be great for anything other than gaming.

 

[Whomp]

OK thanks for the info. I need to find out more from my inhouse tech guy regarding connectivity and such. I'll ask him some of the questions you guys have posed.

 

[lutzj]

Would the new ATI 3870 be a good buy? It costs about the same as most nVidia cards, and seems better on paper.

 

[Speedo]

The 512MB 8800GT cards are about the same price (slightly cheaper most places) but are faster.

 

[kuukkeli]

Would the new ATI 3870 be a good buy? It costs about the same as most nVidia cards, and seems better on paper.

I'd remember that in most tests ATI 3870 was 15-20 percent slower than NVidia 8800GT. Also majority of 8800GT cards on sale today seem to have better cooler than the original stock version so 3870 doesn't seem very inviting buy at the moment.

 

[2222love3333]

I agree. 8800GT is the way to go at this time. recently I just got my MSI Geforce 8800GT 512MB for only $192 on sale, It's easy to install, this card has worked perfectly ever since! No problems - all settings are easy to adjust.