Chosing a new PC

[Huge]

Did you omit a couple of zeroes? Or perhaps you mean TB?

[Steve Firth]

Dang yes TB. It's been a long day.

[Huge]

Pah. I dug out and filled 17 potholes in the last 2 days. 600kg of sand and cement, all moved by hand. Don't talk to me about long days.

[Tim Streater]

Oh, it was *you* was it? I didn't know that the Kent County Council site for reporting potholes just emailed 'em on to you!

[Huge]

Dang. *More* potholes? And I was about to go to bed.

[Tim Streater]

Don't worry. I just slalom to avoid the one on Iffin Lane, that can wait. It was the one in that narrow lane in Crundale I was pleased you'd filled up. Bastard was nearly a metre across, very hard to avoid.

[Steve Firth]

No children involved, that means you had a relaxing weekend, unlike some.

[John Stumbles]

Just phoned Novatech. Useless fsckers won't sell me their box with 8G, I'd have to shell out c. £80 on 8G and throw away the 4G supplied.

Just spoke to

who seem to start around the £400 mark for anything like what I want :-(

Somebody mentioned Chillblast. Their "£799 or lower" category wasn't encouraging.

Still looking....

[tinnews]

Take a look at Lambdatek, their 'PC Designer' is how I have bought my last two or three systems and has worked well for me:-

[tony sayer]

phone number. Yep could have spent time writing it all in a mail but a 3 minute phone call would have resulted in a £1500 odd sale..

[Theo Markettos]

This test pits the i5 661 against the Athlon II X2 240e (energy efficient). Notice how it beats the Athlon by 40% at idle power, and 7% at peak:

so it's an i5 not an i3, but I think the difference is that in the i3/i5 series the GPU is on the processor module and so inside the TDP, while Athlon boards need a separate (potentially onboard) GPU.

The i5 also happens to trounce the AMD chips at pretty much every test, in addition. Though it's a rather unfair comparision for performance as there's about 100 quid price difference (and Intel mobos are a fair bit more expensive too). i3 has a similar power consumption to i5, but at about 30 quid more than the X2 245e (+mobo tax).

Theo

[Davey]

It seems that you just assemble it online. Simple, I would think, especially if you know what components you want.

--=20 Davey.

[Folderol]

Novatech were really good at one time but over the last couple of years have gone seriously downhill - grew too big and forgot who the customers were.

--=20 Will J G

[John Stumbles]

Celery, and I don't have a spare lifetime to read up on it all.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Neither do I these days.

That's why I usually ask here..

[Theo Markettos]

Try starting here:

leave all the boxes to get the cheapest system they'll offer, or select what you want and leave the rest at 'cheapest'. It'll give you the cheapest system that fits the criteria. They you can tweak components further if necessary.

For a midrange spec, I don't think you can go much wrong with an Athlon 64 X2/X4 or a Core-something. I wouldn't bother with a Pentium, Celeron or Sempron unless extra-cheap is the order of the day or you really don't care about performance (eg it's a wordprocessing machine, when a nettop might be more sensible).

Rough performance range of Core: i7 (fastest/most expensive) > i5 > Core2Quad > i3 > Core2Duo (slowest) For Athlon, larger numbers are faster. Take all this with a Very Large pinch of salt!

Theo

[The Natural Philosopher]

Barfs if you don't want windows.

[Skipweasel]

Not here it doesn't - just don't select an operating system at the outset and it doesn't blink.

[John Stumbles]

Their system builder/pc designer seems broken: if I specify 8G RAM (either as 8000 or 8192 MB) and leave everything else set at cheapest it says "ERROR! unable to find a suitable Memory with Size = 8000 (or whatever) for this spec". :-(

[Chris Whelan]

[...]

Presumably because the cheapest MB's won't work with 8GB?

Chris