cheers pilsey much help there.

i didnt get a cooler because i was waiting to see how well the one in the box comes. i checked out this amazing review of the case:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article810-page1.html


which basically showed that the cooled is sandwiched between two massive fans. and they did use a scythe ninja or something and said it was adequate. so wanted to realistcally how hot it would get, and buy an upgraded passive cooling block after.

as for the gfx card. acutally yet i had noticed the 216 cores and was originially going to get the evga card but then i figured may as well try and get in with the farcry 2 offer. but that was only gonna be on sunday when i was gonna do it before a coupel of offers run out. i think the initial adrenalin rush as worn out a bit and im settling on a post christmas purchase.

had indeed decided to drop quad core pretty early on. much liek the 64 bit processor hype, which i didnt wantto get sucked into again.

anyhoo so yeah i guess im gonna do the checking out again after christmass and someone mentioned ddr3 might be cheaper then. am i correct in thinking ddr3 is the only one running at 1333mhz? or will ddr2 come up to that in a few months?

also does anyone have an idea roughly how much i can expect to see stuff dropping by after xmas? as someome said their probably holding thier pricess high before xmas. can i expect something liek a tenner on the big components or more like 20-30?

Im having to reply to pm's here (sorry for the thread hijack inno) because I cant seem to pm anyone at the moment without getting some weird error. Anyway, this is for you SHP .


Hey dude . For a build I charge £50 (this will be going up next year, ive not increased my price in 3 years now!) including windows XP, office 2003 pro and symantec antivirus (free lifetime subscription). For an extra £30 I can supply a ghost licence and recovery disk as well. Usually gets nicely offset by my paying trade price on most parts. I did Jason's PC for him about 8 months ago - so far no complaints there . His is an E8400 clocked at 4ghz, 8800gt etc etc. I cant compete on price with the big names on pre-fab pcs, but I can make sure you get better quality bits and if you want a bit of overclocking at the end can give you a few free fps as well .

The way this usually goes is a person will either approach me with a figure in mind to spend and I quote a spec, or they have a list of components or spec they want to achieve and I come back with a price for them.

Basically I can go as silly or as sensible as you want . My record so far is putting together a tf2 pc for £180 that gets 50fps minimum @ 1280 x 1024. A challenge but it came in at £166 and plays perfectly .

So yeah, long winded ramble there, but hopefully that explains a bit about what I can do for you .

Monitor wise - 24" monitors can be found for under £170 these days. All depends on what you want really...

If you want a solid TF2 capable machine that can also play the new games out too you need to be looking at £400+ for your tower unit. That would break down roughly as follows :
Case: £30 - £200 // Personal choice.
Power Supply: £50 - £80 //650Watt min, branded!!
Motherboard: £50 - £180 //P35/P45/X38/X48
CPU: £80 - £200 //E7200 - Q9550
Memory: £30 - £100 //2gb 800mhz / 4gb 1066mhz
Graphics: £80 - £250 //9800GT - GTX260
Hard Disk: £30 - £80 //250gb/8mb Cache - 1TB/32mb Cache
DVDRW: £15 - £20 //Its a dvdrw mkay?
Heatsink: £10 - £35 // OCZ Vanquisher - Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme

The lower prices are what I would consider bare minimum for tf2 capability on a new pc. Higher prices are the point at which you start paying a lot more money for sod all extra performance. Spending over the higher end of the bracket is for the rich or stupid tbh .


Anyway, all very informal, if you want to get your pc via myself or if you just want to ask a few questions pm me anytime. Im sometimes a little slow on pm's if life is busy at the time, but I will get back to you .

Yeah get yourself a Quad core . The Q6600 Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) £140.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... 20(1066FSB)%20-%20Retail

Clocks to 3.0GHz just by changing the CPU clock to 334 x9. Get a nice cooler for it though. , the stock one is a bit pants. Ive got a Tuniq tower cooler and antec case (2x 120mm fans out, 2x in). Its been running at 3.0ghz for a year with no problems and perfectly stable. some people go even higher, 3.6 has been reported. But that does take quite a lot of fiddling. 3.0ghz is easy and stable and more than enough for any game out there.

Why buy 18 month old technology? An E8500 will hammer a Q6600 @ 3ghz in TF2 and pretty much everything else. And that's before you overclock it. Bigger amount of cache available per core and higher clock per core compared to the Q6600. TF2 is barely multi processor aware. Even in newer games you dont get a big benefit from the Q6600, you need to be at the Q9550 level to make quad cores worthwhile.

And the fact is you can get a e8400/8500 for little over 100 quid now a days

E8500 default clock is 3.16ghz how will that hammer a Q6600@3.0ghz? Also the price is near enough the same as the q6600.
Your right that TF2 doesnt really make use of multiple processors but future games will. I think Left 4 dead may indeed make a bit more use of the cores for all those zombies running about. I'd rather have a quad core for future proofing than a dual tbh, and the q6600 packs some serious bang for bucks. There are newer quad core options of course that are apparently just as overclockable, but that depends on the cash situation.

Show me a game benchmark with a Q6600 @ 3ghz beating an E8500 then.

Q6600 at lower fsb speed, lower clock speed, less cache per core.

And then if you apply the same sort of overclock to the E8500 (25%) to take it to say 3.75ghz the gap gets even bigger.

EDIT: Didnt mean to sound short - was in a rush! .

Pilsy I got to ask something. I think my 8800GT is dying so Id like to buy a new gfx card. Any recommendations? The price could be around £150 - 250.

Agent - Radeon 4850 @ £99.95 if you hunt around. Seen some 4870's at about £170 recently too. 9800GTX+ is £117.50 at scan, but not a big improvement over the 8800gt. Neither are the radeon's tbh, 10 - 20% at best, but for under £100 the 4850 is a steal. Not so sure of the 4870 because its not that much faster than the 4850, but its nearly double the price. Best value no doubt is the radeon 4850 atm.

Thx