A simple matter of…

Well sometime ago I was looking at getting a new PC, but held off for Intel’s Conroe CPU (aka Core 2 Duo). That worked very well as it’s a superb chip and even if I went with AMD, they’ve decimated their prices (they had dropped a lot already, they’ve just dropped another 50% apparently!).

Here’s what I’m getting so far (prices ex VAT):

Case: Antec P180 (£75). Big, heavy and hopefully capable of keeping everything inside cool and most importantly quiet.

PSU: Seasonic S12-500 (£70). Quiet decent quality PSU.

CPU: Core 2 Duo E6300 (£115 inc heatsink/fan). Cheapest CPU since the bottleneck for me is normally the graphics card. It overclocks well anyhow

Motherboard: ASRock 939 ConRoeXFire-eSATA2 (£54). There are better motherboards out there, but they cost £80. Passively cooled motherboard too which was important. PCIe x16, PCIe x4, PCIe x1, 3 x PCI. 4 x DDR2 slots, one IDE channel, 4x SATA, 2x eSATA.

GFX card: Nvidia 7900GS (£100). Well I’m going Nvidia since they at least half support Linux. DX10 cards should be out in 6 months so I didn’t want to spend a lot of money right now. For instance for Oblivion the pixel processing is fine, but the vertex processors get annihilated in the outdoor scenes. DX10 gives these vertex processors equal footing (at least on paper) so DX10 cards should increase the minimum framerate.

Memory: 2×1GB Crucial Ballistix (£140). Not bottom of the barrel stuff, but not expensive stuff either.

DVD-RW: Samsung SH-182D (£21). Newest model seems to have good reviews.

Disk: 2xWD RE2 3200YS (2x £65 = £130). The YS models are the latest, fastest, quietest RAID edition drives from Western digital which always do well. They will be in a RAID-1 configuration too.

Printer: Samsung ML1610 (£43). My printers very poorly. I also hate inkets and love lasers.

Switch: Netgear GS605 (£22). 5 port gigabit switch, could justify needing 8 ports for the more expensive GS608.

Monitor: Benq FP241W (£550). The really nice luxury item - a 24″ LCD running at 1920×1200 with HD-everything and all the inputs you need. I don’t think I’ll get on with 2×20″ monitors (so wide I’d strain my neck and I couldn’t have one in front of me).

Speakers: Creative Labs Inspire T5900/T7900 (£56). 5.1 or 7.1 depends on how many speakers. Note ebuyer comments saying an extra cable is normally needed for T7900.

Sound card: Using the onboard Realtek ALC888 7.1 CODEC. Is this a mistake or should I splash out £16 or more on an Audigy SE 7.1 card?

Game: Oblivion (£18 free P&P - amazon). The main reason behind the purchase

USB Flash: (£20). 1-2GB flash drive to replace my old (and now very small) 64MB one. Perhaps a cute “show me ” one with a display?

Media: Blank DVD+Rs (£10) For burning to. The samsung preferes +R not -R. pack of 50/100.

Total cost (say £15 for shipping):
£891 + VAT = £1047 (ex. monitor)
£1441 + VAT = £1693 (inc. monitor)

Specific sites used in selecting equipment (various others were used to narrow down search - e.g. ASRock from other reviews, Core 2 Duo from basically any recent CPU review

• http://www.silentpcreview.com/ - case, psu, fan
• http://www.behardware.com - speakers
• http://www.trustedreviews.com - monitor
• http://sg.vr-zone.com - motherboard
• http://www.cdrinfo.com - DVD-RW
• http://www.ebuyer.com - customer feedback for speakers, printer