Advice on buying a new PC

[zeealice]

wow sounds cool

[JohnTC02]

Everything is now installed and working fine, the only problem I had was with Nero, I normally use Nero 8 but for some reason this version didn't want to work with Win 7 so I upgraded to the latest version v10, now all is good.

For those that are interested there are two screenshots below taken from GRAW2, on my old machine I was getting around 30 to 40 fps, take a look in the bottom right-hand corner of the images and see the difference, so no more lag in GRAW2 then!

I'll get some pictures of the PC soon and post them here.

[zeealice]

what specs did your old one have out of interest?

if you dont mind me saying the screenshots made me think the old machine was pretty cruddy not meaning to offend you it probably just the fact i havent really played the PCversion of GRAW 2only the 360 version in any way im sure the new one is amazingly fast

nero 8 on windows 7 just has slight compatability issues as all just so you know

not my place to judge so i pass it off as an opinion

Edited July 2, 2010 by zeealice

[JohnTC02]

I can't remember the exact specs of my old machine but I think it was a AMD 3000+ dual core CPU with a 9800 GTX+ video card running with 8gb of ddr2 ram.

The screenshots above were taken with my new machine using the free version of Fraps, I've never been that happy with the screenshots from GRAW2, it just doesn't do the game justice.

Maybe I'm using the wrong software for taking screenshots.

[KRP 56]

Any thoughts on your GTX 480 about the heat and fan noise issues many other consumers have complained about?

[JohnTC02]

That was my main concern, I also read the reviews about the GTX480 running very hot and being noisy.

The weather here has been very hot over the last few days with temperatures rising to 31c, I thought this weather would be a good test for the GTX480 and I was surprised to see that it didn't get to hot, after over four hours in the GRAW2 editor (which used to stress my old GTX 9800 causing it to shutdown) the temps didn't get over 80c, with my old PC the video card would get to over 90c in the editor, so I'm quite pleased with the results so far.

Same thing applies to the noise issues that I read about in the reviews, I could hear my old GTX 9800 fan screaming away when using the GRAW2 editor but for me the GTX480 is completely silent, so far anyway.

I think a lot of it depends on your choice of case, I went for the Coolermaster HAF 932 which is a full size tower, reviews for this case were very good saying it's one of the best on the market for keeping the pc cool, the only downside to this is it's size but I think that's what makes it good at keeping things cool as there are four large fans inside it which again are very quiet.

[ROCO*AFZ*]

One people dont' understand about big cases are they have bigger lower rpm fans

This is the case i have...

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/ttarmor/

Note that huge side fan. It runs completely silent @ 800rpms but because of it's size and huge fan blades, it cools all the components. Also the 120mm front and exhaust fans run @ a low rpm. This reduces fan noise considerably and also provides the cooling of noiser smaller fans without the high rpm whirrl

If anyone hasn't seen John's new case ... here is a good picture view

http://www.bidorbuy.co.za/item/15051184/Coolermaster_HAF_932.html

I didn't fully read the posts but did you get the liquid cool option? I could have for mine but didn't.

[MeanMF]

I've found the easiest thing you can do for heat and fan noise is to occasionally open up the machine and blow the dust out of the heat sinks and fans with compressed air. It really makes a big difference.

[JohnTC02]

If anyone hasn't seen John's new case ... here is a good picture view

http://www.bidorbuy.co.za/item/15051184/Coolermaster_HAF_932.html

I didn't fully read the posts but did you get the liquid cool option? I could have for mine but didn't.

At the moment the PC is air cooled but as it already has a built in water reservoir I hope to convert it over to a liquid cooled system at a later date.

This should be an interesting project, I have built a few systems in the past but I don't know anything about liquid cooling, I assume there must be a kit you can buy with all the parts needed to do the conversion.

[Anthony]

John

It may not be necessary to add water cooling. The Noctua is one of the quietest and most effective fan coolers you can buy. I would suggest monitoring the CPU temps over a period to see what they are. If you're running at default clock speeds the Noctua should keep the temp right down and even if the processor is overclocked I think you'll find the Noctua can do the job.

My i7 920 is oc'ed and the temps are always controlled well by the heatsink.

If you want water-cooling to remove any noise issues then I think Zalman and Thermaltake both do a full kit system.

For temp monitoring software try Realtemp or the Nvidia system monitor dl'ed from Nvidia site

Good luck

Anthony

[Cpl Ledanek]

+1 on the Noctua being quiet....(may not be the same model)

going watercooling doesn't really relieve you from the noise (from what I read fromwatercooling threads), still depends on the fan and how many will you add.

I can only testify with Yate Loons from Petra shop....I hear my central air conditioning more than the 6 fans I have going.

monitoring your system can be too time consuming, you'll spend less gaming

[JohnTC02]

Thanks for the advice folks, much appreciated.

The reasons for water-cooling my system was never one of noise, it's so quiet it's never been an issue.

Reading the reviews for the GTX480 there were quite a few reports of this card running very hot so I thought that I might have overheating problems, that was the main reason for looking into fitting a water-cooling kit.

After using the PC for a few days I was surprised to find that it actually ran cooler than the one (GTX 9800) in my old PC, so it looks like I won't need to make any changes.

As to the Noctua NH-U12P, I've never heard a peep from it and it's doing a great job so far, my CPU temps average at around 45c.

[zeealice]

I can't remember the exact specs of my old machine but I think it was a AMD 3000+ dual core CPU with a 9800 GTX+ video card running with 8gb of ddr2 ram.

The screenshots above were taken with my new machine using the free version of Fraps, I've never been that happy with the screenshots from GRAW2, it just doesn't do the game justice.

Maybe I'm using the wrong software for taking screenshots.

i think to take a screenshot on GRAW 2 is just the insert button is it not?

[Anthony]

Glad to hear that you're happy with your new setup and it's running nice and cool - and quiet. My CPU temp has hardly ever been much over 40C with the cooler - the twin fan version of the NH-U12P doing a good job. I would recommend this unit to anybody looking for a new heatsink but I would say that a) it's not the cheapest solution and b) it's big. If I ever want to add more memory sticks onto the mobo I might have a problem as it seems to interfere with the nearest slot but that remains to be seen and with 6Gb I don't feel the need to increase that anytime soon.

I saw the FPS in one of your screenshots and I bet you're happy with that. I'm sure most folks would be. I'm looking forward to seeing the first new mission that comes off the "Beast" production line. With all this new found processing power you'll be knocking them out two a week.

Take care

Anthony

[2nd Ranger]

Hey John, everything still going well with this?

I am in the market for a new PC and I've been looking at one with a spec very similar to yours. The baseline (customizable) unit looks like this

Intel Core i7-930 (2.80GHz) 4.8GTs/8MB Cache

ASUS P6X58D-E: DDR3, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI

6GB CORSAIR XMS3 TRI-DDR3 1600MHz (3 X 2GB)

1280MB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX470

CORSAIR 850w PSU

Coolermaster HAF 922

Although I think I'll probably go for the i7 960 3.20GHz and the GTX 480, so it will work out at around £1600-1700.

I need a bit of advice though because I'm not sure if some components will be overkill or the opposite. For example, the base unit, Here if anyone would like to take a look, comes with a 'COOLIT Advanced liquid cooler'. I don't know much about water cooling but I don't really want a risk, however small, of water leaking into my machine.

So is a liquid cooler neccessary? Would I be okay with a standard cooler or would one of the other listed CPU coolers be better? I'll probably also downgrade the hard drive from 1TB 16mb cache to a 640gb 64mb cache, because I'll never come close to filling that thing.

So if anybody has any advice or experience with any of the listed components then I'd love to hear it. I'm also glad to hear that John's GTX 480 isn't getting hot or anything because I've heard horror stories about that too.

[MeanMF]

Leakage isn't really a problem with cooling systems as long as you fill them with distilled water or another non-conductive liquid. If a leak does happen, it won't fry anything.. Personally though I think it's overkill and you can get perfectly good performance out of an air-cooled machine. I wouldn't spend extra money on liquid cooling - between that and upgrading the CPU or video card, it would be at the bottom of my list. Downgrading the hard drive isn't going to save you more than £10 so you might as well stick with the 1TB drive.

[2nd Ranger]

Ok that's about what I thought, I'll ditch the liquid cooler. But should I stick with what that site describes as a 'standard CPU cooler' or maybe spend £19 on "Triple copper heatpipe CPU cooler"? I have no idea what that is.

About the HD - isn't 64mb cache better though? The 1TB HD is 16mb. I just thought that since I will most likely never even use 200GB space then it was better to get a lower capacity with a higher cache.

Another thing is the optical drives - the selected option is 4x Blu-ray ROM, 16x DVD ROM, then another drive with 24x dual layer DVD writer+R/+RW/+RAM. Since I will most likely not be watching Blu-Ray movies or burning them, should I just stick with the second option, or do I need that first one for some reason?

Thanks for the advice so far!

[MeanMF]

The standard cooler is fine and is designed to keep the CPU within its normal temperature range under any kind of system demand. But your CPU will definitely run at a lower temperature (10-20C cooler) with a good aftermarket system. That gives you more margin for error if you're overclocking, or if your fans/heatsinks get a little clogged up with dust, or even if it's just really hot out. I typically put a better cooler on systems that I build, but I wouldn't spend a ton of money on it - again CPU and video card are by far the two most important pieces in a gaming PC and where you want to spend your money. But £19 sounds very reasonable to me.

A heatpipe is a completely sealed copper tube with a liquid inside that is good at transferring heat from the CPU into the heatsink. It's different from "liquid cooling" since the liquid inside the heatpipe isn't circulated with a pump - it's just there to help move the heat. It's a pretty standard fixture on most coolers (and even good motherboards) these days. Having three may be overkill but they're cheap so who cares.

I don't think I've ever seen a benchmark that shows that the size of the cache on the HD makes any meaningful difference in performance. If anybody has any information to the contrary, please post it because I'd like to know too. But if you know you're never going to use that extra 360GB of space, then it certainly can't hurt to have the extra cache.

The blu-ray drive is there to play blu-ray movies. It doesn't sound like you need it. If you change your mind it's really easy to add one later.

[JohnTC02]

Hi 2nd Ranger,

If you take a look at the specs posted in this thread you will see that I went for a better CPU cooler but the GTX480 is running out of the box with no other form of cooling.

I suspect that due to the size of the CPU cooler (which is quite large) and the fact that it has a cooling fan each side of the large heat sink this is creating a good air flow inside the case and is keeping the video card cool as well.

We have had temperatures of over 30c here for the past seek or so and the temps for the GTX480 has not gone above the low 80's when running games, so no problems here.

You shouldn't have any problems with the case you have selected, I am very impressed with my Coolermaster HAF although it is very large but then that just goes to help keeping things cool.

I was thinking about upgrading to a water cooled system but after using the pc for a week or so I really don't think it's worth the extra expense or the hassle fitting it.

John

[2nd Ranger]

OK great. The more advanced cooler listed on the site seems to be similar to the one you have, so that should be fine.

Although I just noticed that the company offers overlocked PCs, and I can get basically the same system for about £200 cheaper using an i7 930 2.8 overclocked to 3.8. Does anyone overclock? I understand it can lead to instability but I guess it should be ok if you have decent cooling?

[Pave Low]

Yes, with a quality aftermarket CPU cooler and a good case they should easily be able to get a very stable overclock.

See what they say they can overclock an I7 920 to, as that will save you a lot more ££

[2nd Ranger]

The 920 isn't available with this build, it starts with the 930. That's ok though, I'm fine paying a bit extra for a newer model.

I'll probably do that then. The case has three fans and the CPU cooler has four heat pipes so I think I'll be covered for temperature.

Thanks for the advice, everybody! I'll be sure to come back and blame you all if something goes wrong! ; )

[Cpl Ledanek]

@2nd Ranger

Take the Corsair H50 into consideration if you want to get semi-wet

ask owners here

MADSHRIMPS review here may interest your CPU

BUT, if you want to remain air cooled:

checkout the gallery

or join silverphoenix on his quest to get some decent cooler

good luck

[JohnTC02]

Thought I would post an update on how the PC is going.

As it turns out not to good, a few days ago I noticed some strange things accruing first of I was unable to render the lightmaps when making my missions, no big deal I thought, if I reinstall the game that should cure it but I was way off the mark.

Next day I couldn't use IE, it would fire up but then it would hang with a blank page, next up all my email accounts were unaccessible which was probably due to IE not working so I installed Firefox which worked for a couple of hours then that went the same way as IE then to finish it all off Xfire gave up the ghost and stopped working.

I have a 1tb hard disk which is partitioned into three different drives, I then noticed I was unable to access any of the partitions apart from drive C.

I couldn't find anything obvious wrong with the hard disk so I did a quick format of drive c and reinstalled Windows 7, installation went ok but after it was complete and I fired it up all my problems came back again.

Looking at the hard disk in Partition Magic I noticed an extra drive, it was labelled as being drive F: and had 100 mb free on it, looking at windows explorer I could see the drive there but it was reporting as being 10 mb in size and again I was unable to access it.

The only option left was to delete all partitions and wipe the disk back to it's raw state then I did a full format of the drive which took about 4 hours.

I then reinstalled the OS, with one eye shut it fired up and...... YES!! it all worked as it should and has been ok for about two days so it's looking good so far.

All I can think of here is that the disk may had a problem with the boot sector which was causing these issues, I'm no PC expert so I could be wrong but whatever it was the complete format cured the problem.

I lost quite a bit of data here but was able to recover some of it from a backup I had for my old PC.

So the lesson of the day is no matter how new your PC is don't take it for granted it will work ok for the foreseeable, as I have found out to my cost this is not the case, now where is my backup software.

[Anthony]

John

Glad to hear that you have resolved your problems. Have you considered installing a second hard drive for back up purposes. With drive prices coming down it seems a bit of a no-brainer these days.