Spec me a new PC
 

My PC is dying and as it's about 8 years since I built it I guess it's time to think about building another. The problem is things change a lot in 8 years.

I don't need a mega ninja top gaming PC, but I do the odd bit of video encoding and so on so I'm thinking a mid spec CPU like i5 8400.

But, how much memory and what size SSD for Win10? And what brand? What brand of PSU is the most reliable? Motherboards: I favour Gigabyte as this last one has lasted the longest out of any that I've had (it may be that it's failing now or it may be the PSU). But interested in anyone else's thoughts.

At the risk of sounding like a fan boy, have you considered a mid range mac at all? My iMac is like 10 years old atm, is running the most current version of High Sierra and hasn't given me a days problem since I bought it...

You know what, when I thought about writing this thread I thought "I bet CS or someone suggests I buy a Mac!"

No I like to be able to build the thing myself, so I know what bit goes where and what I can upgrade and so on. I can probably do the whole lot for about £600 as a bare bones PC, depending on what size RAM and SSD I go for.

Fair enough mate :thumbsup

When I first got into computers you had to build you own. The computers you could "buy" were too expensive back then. Somewhere around 2004 or 2005 I completely stopped building computers. The last computer I built was a nightmare. No matter what the computer just would not work. After a month of fucking with it.... It turned out to be bad memory. It's just not worth it.

The computer I have now is an I7, 3.6 ghz, 16 GB of RAM. Good enough.

my brother built mine 2 yrs ago, all the parts came from Are you a human?

SAMSUNG 840 EVO 500GB SSD
ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Professional Gaming i7
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - CPU Cooler
CORSAIR Series 750W power supply
G.SKILL TridentZ Series 16GB DDR4 SDRAM
Intel i7-6700K 4.0 GHz

great machine will do anything, video editing, photos...

OK, so heres what I would do in your shoes, if I wanted to make one myself... Goto somewhere like https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/intel-computers/ and choose your budget, then configure the machine you want, part by part, just as if you were going to purchase it.

As you go along, adjustments will be automatically made based on the parts you have chosen. ie if say the MB you choose doesn't support a certain speed of ram, only supported speeds will be displayed in the ram section. Likewise if the MVB supports a fast ram, then fast ram will be offered etc. Follow it thru right to end, where you would hit purchase, but then stop.

You now have a list of parts, which are all gonna be compatible with each other, and you can source them individually from amazon / ebay etc for home build. OK so it wont come with a version of windows and it wont have a warrantee (as such) but at least you know all the bits will play nicely with each other.

In other words, use one of the PC config sites to get a list of compatible parts to buy separately.

this lot´s well over a grand, nearly 2...


you don´t need a 500gb ssd, you can hang with a 200gb ssd and a 1tb hd. the ssd is enough for programs...
you don´t need a huge cooling system if you have enough cheap fans and use the right cooling glue on the cpu and other important areas.
the I7´s needed, & the 16gb, or 2 x 8gb gskill. They´re reliable. & while the asrock is a great make, there´s others to be considered for your mother board. You´ll need a separate graphics card too, i´d at least push for 4gb, maybe 6 or 8, depending on if you´re using it alot to edit 4k and stuff.

Good luck & don´t forget, some of the stuff you can save by getting second hand. Not so much the ssd or hard drives, but graphics card & ram´s worth looking into to save 150 quid...

both these can be purchased many times by mistake, so the seller hasn´t used them or, they came already in a machine and they´ve upgraded say to 2 x 16gb from 2 x 8gb etc...

for a motherboard make sure you have enough USB 3.0 ports and not just USB 2.0, also enough hard drive connectors, you cant ever have to much hard drive space, also if you use firewire make sure you have a 1394a connection, I forgot to check that on my board so had to buy a seperate firewire card. SSD's are getting cheap now, they also have .m2 ssd's that are twice as fast as normal SSD's