New computer parts

[IBBoard]

I'm looking at upgrading my old machine to a nice shiny new Core i5. The old machine is an Athlon 3500+ and is about four and a half years old now. It isn't completely useless, but it is getting a bit creaky for running virtual machines on!

The current idea is the following:

• Intel Core i5 750 (the quad-core one) ~£160
• Quiet cooler (Artic Cooling Fan Freezer 7 Pro or a Coolmaster Hyper TX3 or similar - ~20db noise) ~£20
• ATX mobo (e.g. Gigabyte GA-P55-US3L) ~£75
• 4GB memory (2x2GB) ~£95
• 40GB Intel X25-V SSD ~£100

That's a grand sum of around £450, and with the HDD, graphics card (GeForce 7950GT), case and power supply from my old machine I'll have a code-crunching beast that'll play the important games as well

All I've got to do is a) activate my new credit card, b) order it, c) check that the mobo is reasonable (it is cheap, but it is a Gigabyte) and d) possibly wait until June to build it, when openSUSE 11.3 hits the first RCs.

[IBBoard]

I've been discussing this with people at work and I'm probably going to drop the SSD. It's nearly an extra 30% on top of the price and given the increase in speed from the rest of the hardware and newer versions of Linux then it probably won't be necessary. It'll also be easier to notice any performance increase when it isn't done at the same time as everything else, plus it is still quite new technology and there are some reports of it slowing down with time.

[NBKFuzzy]

I have never used an i5 only an i7 which is a beast and a half. I am using a gaming computer however, and the i7 paired with the nvidia gtx260 and 16gigs of ram makes me a happy man.

[IBBoard]

16GB? How much of that do you ever use? As for the Core i5 vs i7, the 7xx series i5s have quad core and good stepping/turbo buckets on them and can actually beat the i7 920 at times (presumably because the i5 gets better turbo while the hyper-threading - which looks like an extra four cores but isn't - has a bit of an overhead in some scenarios). I thought the i7s were slightly overkill and very quickly expensive for what they'd gain me

I had been considering getting a Geforce GTX 260 as well, but decided I could save the money because I don't game much at the moment. I also read that it was "on its way out", so I think there is a new nVidia release in the imminent future.

In the end I'm looking at about £350 for the motherboard, processor and memory. I did find a nice bundle at CCL Online (my dad and his work colleagues use them and have good reports) but by the time I came to check it in the evening then they'd decided it wasn't "out of stock - 2-4 days" but "sorry - no more stock" It wasn't overclocked, but it was a pre-built and tested bundle for pretty much the same as I was paying for assorted components.

[NBKFuzzy]

Going overkill is always what you should do when upgrading a pc, so you can use it for a long time. Eventually 16gigs of ram and an i7 will be trash... but for now I can run any new product coming out of the line.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, but there's levels of "overkill". There's "more than I need so that it'll last a while" and "more than I need so I'm paying a horrendous premium".

I'm going to be paying about £350 for upgrades to a five year old £800 computer and expect to be using them for another five years more (with possibly another £150 on a graphics card when I get to actually gaming). Even 8GB of memory seems to cost as much as my processor and mobo, never mind 16GB! And the top-end Core i7 has such a premium on it that it costs more than my entire last computer!

If only I had that money...and a reason to shell out for it.

[NBKFuzzy]

Well, my PC I bought with its parts at $1200, not sure the conversion but it is very expensive. I had the money and used it... like I did 5 years before on my old pc which is now out of date.

[IBBoard]

$1200? That should, in theory, be £800 at the current exchange rates. More likely with the price of computer components (which is £=$) then you're talking £1200. Core i5s with 4GB RAM easily come in at £800+, so that sounds like a bargain machine compared to what we get.

My wife's computer was bought for the release of Oblivion. It cost us about £1100 and came with a Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB RAM and a Radeon X1950XTX, and I'm sure the whole raft of Core 2 Quads were out at that time as well (there were certainly options for faster Duos and more memory, at a premium). That was about three and a half years ago and it can manage Fallout on quite good settings with the occasional stutter, but it is definitely falling off the bottom end by now. That said, I think the PC/Windows is slowing in general, because it stutters on Sims 3 as well, which isn't exactly intensive.

[IBBoard]

Okay, I've finally gone for it and laid down £320 on a new motherboard, memory and Core i5 750 at eBuyer, plus another £15 for a DVD-RW (since my machine only has a CD-RW/DVD at the moment).

I was looking at the £100 Gigabyte motherboards with USB3 and SATA3 support, but I decided against it for two reasons: 1) they need the 24-pin plus an 8-pin 12v, but my power supply only has the older 4-pin and 2) enabling USB3 or SATA3 drops your PCIe x16 down to a x8. The first one is workable - you can get adapters that combine the 4-pin with molex for PATA drives, but the second one makes it seem like you'd be throwing your money away at the moment: "yeah, you can have a powerful processor on a board with next-gen storage connectors, but you've got to hamstring your graphics card a little to do it". Seriously, why? It just screams bad design.

Now to see when it turns up on free delivery - the current shipping estimate is the 9th, which probably means delivery on the 12th.

[NBKFuzzy]

I have some friends in britain and australia and I know they have many over priced computer parts and even the video games themselves are 40-50 $ more with the exchange rate ( in australia), and when I was in canada I noticed the same thing. Silly commonwealth!

[IBBoard]

Prices aren't any cheaper in Europe either It's just that America manage to get stupidly cheap prices compared to just about every other nation (except, perhaps, Japan).

Games are expensive for consoles (£40-£50) but PC games tend to be £35 unless they're a console port when they will be £40. I did get Soulstorm for about £17 from Amazon when it was first released, though.

As for the computer specs in general, I've had a look around at a couple of sites and £1500 PCs only have 8GB memory (2x4GB) and some £2000 PCs only have 6GB (3x2GB, but with a high quality Intel SSD). Really, you'd be paying way more than the £800 conversion or £1500 1:1 price for those parts in the UK!

[NBKFuzzy]

I know, in Australia, that games are released at $100 new and $50 new here, with the conversion correct. In aussy dollars I believe its $120 they release at. For PC, anyway.

[IBBoard]

Gah, some people are useless with information. eBuyer sent me a notification on Thursday evening at 5pm that they'd dispatched my parcel. I tried checking the tracking link at 11pm but the ParcelForce site was down for maintenance. I tried checking the tracking link at 7am on Friday but ParcelForce just said "Express 24 delivery - estimated delivery on the 9th". Finally, at 7pm on Friday ParcelForce had more info on the site - it had reached their central hub about five minutes earlier. Fat chance of it reaching me that day, then. Checked this morning and it arrived at the local depot at 7am, but won't be shipped to me until Monday now because I didn't pay Saturday delivery.

Through all that the eBuyer website was also giving me conflicting info. Some parts just said "payment taken", some parts said "awaiting dispatch" and others said "dispatched and with ParcelForce". Even worse was that I send in an "eNote" asking about the order and whether it had actually been dispatched or not because their site wasn't clear only to notice that the auto-response said they take up to two business days to reply. TWO DAYS! That's horrendously slow for a first response in this day and age for a tech-based company!

Admittedly, I did go for the free shipping option, and the original estimate was for delivery on Monday anyway, but the fact that no two sources could give me matching or correct info was annoying. Next time I'll just ignore eBuyer and watch the ParcelForce website.

Oh well, I'm guessing Athlong 3500+ -> Core i5 750 and 2GB RAM -> 4GB RAM is going to speed things up a bit!