New PC - Opinions
Dearly beloved wants a new PC for her birthday so bearing in mind that I am a tight git and she needs something that will fly on Win 7 and Office, no games or anything like that, and no need for loads of storage (I have a few spare HDD's so I will fit one of those) this is what I have come up with.
1x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2
1x 128GB SanDisk Ultra Plus, 7mm Slim 2.5" SSD, SATA III
1x Asus H81M-PLUS, Intel H81, S 1150,
1x Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258 S1150 Haswell Dual Core 3.2GHz, OC up to 4.5GHz
1x EZCool NJ-710B Black Mid Tower Case with Black Interior & 500W PSU Fitted
2x 4GB Corsair DDR3 Desktop PC3-12800 (1600)
I will rescue the DVD writer and card reader from the old machine.
I will overclock to 4.5GHz (hence the poncy cooler) and I think this should fly for the basic usage she wants. No idea why she wants 8gig of ram but she does so there you go.
Total cost is ?237 so any suggestions for bringing the price down without taking any performance hit?
1x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2
1x 128GB SanDisk Ultra Plus, 7mm Slim 2.5" SSD, SATA III
1x Asus H81M-PLUS, Intel H81, S 1150,
1x Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258 S1150 Haswell Dual Core 3.2GHz, OC up to 4.5GHz
1x EZCool NJ-710B Black Mid Tower Case with Black Interior & 500W PSU Fitted
2x 4GB Corsair DDR3 Desktop PC3-12800 (1600)
I will rescue the DVD writer and card reader from the old machine.
I will overclock to 4.5GHz (hence the poncy cooler) and I think this should fly for the basic usage she wants. No idea why she wants 8gig of ram but she does so there you go.
Total cost is ?237 so any suggestions for bringing the price down without taking any performance hit?
Post edited by ADJB on
Comments
says its for christmas aswell, thats what my parents used to do. :-D
The SSD and decent memory alone will deal with the speed so the processor at stock speed with supplied fan will do the trick.
Maybe he just likes a quiet PC? I have an Arctic fan in my desktop and it is inaudible.
For even more speed optimisation you could go for Windows 8 over 7. Upgraded mine over the weekend and it's gone from quick in 7 to crazy-fast with 8. Yes, the Metro interface is crap, and initially the lack of a Start button is annoying, but get over that and it's a very good OS. Mine's definitely running cooler too.
I am overclocking it so I get mid range i3 performance, without overclocking it's a bit tardy. Also the overclock will liven up the graphics response thus saving me the cost of a separate card. Apparently you can get 4.5GHz without overvolting it so it's life span shouldn't be affected so long as I keep it cool. I shouldn't need to overclock the memory so that's not an issue. I am also looking fo a sub 20 second boot time if I can.
Dell generic budget PC... which model are you thinking of ?. To the best of my knowledge I can't get 8gig memory and an SSD at anything like that price.
This is pretty much the spec Custom PC magazine used to build their 1080P gaming rig (obviously minus the GPU) so it should be great little computer. The only saving would be get 4GB RAM as I doubt you would see any difference in normal office work. Also if you are overclocking the PSU will be a cheap generic so might not be up to the task, although guessing you will only find out once it is all in and running.
TomD
So, unless she's an avid photoshopper or video editor - in which case you should consider treating her to an i5 - and leave the overclock as a later upgrade.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Yes. You could probably shave another ?20 off the price by going for an AMD A4-4000. However, that has much weaker single-threaded performance and rather limits your upgrade options down the line.
I just looked up the Custom PC article and they are very similar. Besides the GPU, which I don't need, the only real difference is the PSU. My theory is that as I don't need to power anything with grunt like a GPU I will only be running at ~120W max even at 4.5GHz and a tweak to the memory if I need it. The PSU I get is 500W which I take with a large pinch of salt but most of these generics are OK at low power and I will be running at 25% of the quoted power at worst. I should be OK but if I need to I have a spare decent PSU I can use. I was going to use the AR01 cooler but Scan haven't got any in stock and it was too tall for the case so I went for the Freezer Pro instead. That will handle 130W and I shouldn't get to half of that so it should be OK. I compleatly agree about the 4gig / 8gig but she wants 8gig so that's the end of that conversation. Although I very much doubt I will be able to measure the difference in theory the 8gig should be faster as it will be working in duel channel and I would have fitted a single 4gig to leave some room just in case.
I suppose it depends "which" i3 your talking about. According to the benchmarks its actually faster than some of the very early i7's so I shouldn't complain. If I bump it up to 50% over stock I am at the higher end i3 going on i5 performance so I think it will be worth it. I will benchmark it as I do it using the apps she uses and see how much difference it makes.
Sorry but I see no redeeming features of any of AMD's CPU's at any price point. Plus, and this is part of my overall thinking, I am trying to cut down on the 'leccy bill, not subsidise a new power station.
It would cut about ?30 off the bill but would be a far inferior machine in most if not all other respects.
I did look round but can't find anything even close to that spec in the ?200 - ?250 price range. Plus I enjoy building machines and at least I will know what's in it and how it all works together. The other big plus is that it can be expanded / upgraded one component at a time if required which most prebuilt stuff can't be.
I'd be very surprised if you see a difference of more than a few percent, no matter how much you overclock it, as the CPU will rarely be much of a bottleneck for office applications. At least that's for real world use; synthetic benchmarks may tell you otherwise.
And yes, a modern Pentium G will outperform an i7-920 in single threaded tasks. I'd still favour the latter for anything that'll actually use all eight threads though.
The sole redeeming feature is the price. I suppose the iGPU is a bit better too, but still some way short of gaming standard, so that's not much of a clincher.
If you're worried about electricity usage, that's another reason no to overclock. Mind you, you're probably only talking a couple of quid difference a year for the typical usage of a home desktop, probably about the same you'd pay extra for using the A4.
I bought a zoom station thing 2 year ago for my sister, since they already had the keyboard / mouse / monitor.. got win 8 , ?30 or something silly like that. don't think i even added ram.. BUT the case is easily dented.
if you aren't using it for "niche" power apps like music or video or rendering.. then take the easy life and just get one pre made.
as for office, open office .. if it's say wp or spreadsheets.
Besides the fact that it's black in what way do any of those machines compare to what I am building?.
For quite a long time now the HDD has been the bottleneck for most of the stuff the Mrs uses. (and in all fairness on most machines for most use cases). With the advent of SSD's that isn't as noticeable and I wouldn't consider a machine without one now, especially as the price is dropping very fast and your starting to get 10 year warranties. If your in a situation where the HDD isn't the problem then your in specialist use world like real time rendering and you have to start looking at bus transfer speeds but that is a very different conversation. Even in the world of gaming once the data is loaded into ram (i.e. at the start of a new level) then the CPU is rarely the problem and again your coming back to bus transfer speeds between RAM, GPU and CPU and not the time the data spends in any of those areas.
The real world benchmark is how much better is this machine than the one she is using now and will she notice it enough to at least pass comment.
Using the stock cooler I started playing and got it up to 4.5GHz no problem but it was running in the 90' - 95' region so I bumped it down to 4GHz for safety. Windows 7 SP1 with all updates and Office installed boots from power on to login screen in 13 seconds which I was well chuffed with. Once I was happy with it hardware wise I fitted the Freezer Pro and dumped the whole lot in the case with the generic power supply and fitted another 120mm fan as a case exhaust because I happened to have one handy.
A bit of tweaking later I ended up with 4.4GHz coming in at less than 80' and I bumped up the graphics about 10% just for the laughs. The only problem I have is that I can't get the RAM to run at 1600 for some reason. It refuses to recognise anything higher than 1400 and I can't suss it out at all, strange. It will be something obvious but I can't see it at the moment. The final power draw (at the mains plug) running at full load is ~110W which is nice, as it only boosts to that when its needed and a lot of the time the CPU underclocks itself when it can it means it's running at ~70 -75W a lot of the time.
All things considered a very good machine for the price and the misses even said the cheap and nasty case looked good which is a bonus.
EDIT: Just realised that's a refurb and have had bad experiences with those. Bit more expensive, but probably this instead.
However.....
Things to consider
Check the fan size - most have one or two 120mm fans on the radiator, check your case will take 120mm fans and...
2 fans and a radiator will be about 75mm thick, check it doesn't snag anything. IMPORTANT - check out the manufactures site for the full specs of whatever your going to go for. The radiator is frequently slightly bigger than the fan and you will need some clearance for the coolant pipes - check before you buy. (You can get them with 90mm fans so these sizes may vary)
Make sure you have enough fan headers to plug everything in or get/make splitters.
Decide what is more important for you, noise or outright cooling, some of these can get a bit noisy if your overclocking the nuts off your CPU.
Heat buildup - make sure your aware of where the hot air is going, some of these "suggest" you set them up as air intakes which can warm up the case very nicely - I always set them up to dump the air out of the case which slightly worsens the cooling (its passing hot air from the GPU over the radiator rather than getting cool air from the outside) and try to compensate by having a couple of big fans pulling air in from the front of the case. (the side would be just as good but not the top). Having said that it helps if you can top mount the radiator or at least have some output fans dumping hot air out of the top of the case.
Fitting is dead easy, no more difficult than fitting a case fan and normal CPU cooler - 15 minutes tops.
Although not normally an issue because they are generally universal fitting just check it will be OK with your motherboard chipset for the fixing holes. So if your using an 1150 chipset just check its compatible with 1150 mobos.
Consider if you really need one (of course if it's just a new toy go for it) or if your better off with a half decent air cooler which will be cheaper.
Its probably worth having a check on www.bit-tech.net - they review a lot of these so you can get a good comparison for cooling / noise / weird fitting ect.
Have a look at this - It's what I was using to do my graphics card and very effective it is as well.
and as a BTW - the refurbs for these are normally very good.
To try and illustrate what I am wittering on about have a look at this and you can see how much room one takes up and the fan arrangement I use to vent the hot air. (That's a Fractal Design R4 case which is quite big)
And to see one being used as a GPU cooler have a look at this
P.S - Anybody want to buy a watercooled MSI GTX 660Ti ?
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php
Don't worry though, it's mineral oil and perfectly safe. It could be a bit of a messy job when you want to upgrade the graphics card though.
Ah yeah, I saw something like that a while back. Someone actually did it with cooking oil, believe it or not! As a scot, I can't help admiring the idea of a deep fried PC :lol:
Thanks for the info, that's really useful, but I'm still undecided! The whole point of this exercise is to try and reduce the noise levels as the stock HS&F I got with the CPU is getting very noisy now when under load with the latest games (I play at 720P as the TV I use can't go higher than that so I'm not playing at ridiculous res's.). I initially thought it was the GFX card (a 7870) but after using Speedfan I've figured out it isn't - lucky I double-checked as I was going to get an aftermarket cooler for it.
The CPU itself is getting on a bit - AMD Phenom 2 X4 - which I know isn't that great, but it's still a 3.2Ghz quad core that other than the noise copes with anything - and I don't overclock anything. Really all I'm looking for is a relatively cheap way of reducing noise levels without losing fidelity.
I'm not 100% sure of the clearance for an "air" HS&F as I've seen some of these can get pretty big which was why I was looking at liquid cooling. I'm pretty sure the case could easily cope with it as I bought it specifically as a gaming case. This is it.
This is not good for air coolers.
If you look at Scans site which is good for getting specs of things, a half decent cheapish (~?20 - ?25) vertical air cooler will use at least a 90mm fan, add that to the housing and you can forget it.
The other option is a low profile air cooler but these will still come in at 60mm high. This is OK but then to get the surface area for cooling they tend to be quite wide, in the case of the one above 116mm x 105mm which may cause you a problem. You will have to check that yourself depending on what else you have round the CPU. Sometime these can get a bit close to the Ram chips which is worth noting.
That means you coming back to water cooling.
However....
Again according the case specs
and all of these are populated.
You can get all in one water coolers with 90mm fans so in theory you could fit it in the front of the case but I doubt it will fit because you have to take into account the depth of the fan and radiator which would then impede on the drive bay and thats assuming you could route the tubing to the CPU.
I am not aware of any all in ones that use 60mm fans so the back exhaust is out.
As far as the roof is concerned I can't remember anything using 230mm fans. Normally they are 200mm so there is a good chance it can be made to fit but it will be a right bitch as you have to take the roof plate off to access everything. I am confident it could be done but expect lots of swearing to be involved and once its fitted it's going to make accessing the case very difficult. Also if you add up the depth of the radiator (~25mm), the fan (~25mm) and the contact plate on the CPU (~25mm) it's not leaving a lot of spare. this means the front to back airflow your case relies on is going to be trashed which will almost certainly cause hotspots within the case. Not good.
I think all things considered your best bet is either to get a direct like for like replacement fan or look at one of the low profile air fans.
Interestingly if you look at the actual cooling specs
those dBA figures quoted should be near enough silent in a quiet room. If, and its a big if, those figures are true or even true-ish then I would be very tempted by a direct replacement fan as I think you will struggle to get a better 3rd party fan noise wise.
Have fun....
Edit - It can be done
Under idling it is pretty quiet so all the case fans are absolutely fine. I will however check that they're all working as they should be because the airflow should be pretty good considering.
Looking at that link you provided, comparing my CPU temperatures, there's not a vast amount of difference under load (I've not seen CPU temp above 65) so something isn't quite right - and it is loud (like a jet engine) under load. I'm wondering now if didn't put enough thermal compound between the heatsink and CPU. Either that or the fans just got a bit knackered, there's no ball bearing clanking though.
On that case link I sent, if you look at the top right image - the vent on the top right was where I was thinking of installing the radiator, above where the cards would protrude. The big open space to the left above the 2 fans is where the PSU is. Also, looking at that I don't believe the front fans are connected - I don't recall any blue leds there!
I'll do a bit more research on that case and report back!
Firstly I was talking nonsense about the front fans, they're working fine, as are all the case fans. However, looking at the H/S+F, firstly it's VERY close to the RAM so a particularly wide replacement is a no-no. Secondly the main power cable from the PSU is hanging over the top of the fan, it's not touching, but it's bound to be restricting some airflow.
But probably the biggest one is the PSU. That's about three inches above the H/S+F and completely restricts access to the big "top" fan on the case. However the exhaust of the PSU is blowing out through that so maybe that's a moot point.
I'll have a look at some of the low-profile H/S+F's but I have a feeling the RAM will get in the way of it so I think the only alternatives are to either put up with it or just try one of those cheaper refurbs and see how I get on!
However, I'm going to run some stress tests first.
EDIT: Ran a CPU stress test (Prime 95) which toasted the CPU up to 67C and as expected the fan was whirring away. It wasn't as noisy as expected but I bet that's due to everything seeming a bit louder at night when the house is asleep anyway. I'll run some GPU stress tests and confirm it's not that.