building a pc

[paradise!]

So I just went to Dell online and came up with this for $703 (+tax, S&H):

My Components
Intel® Pentium® Conroe Dual Core Processor E2200 (1MB, 2.2GHz)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic Service Pack 1
No Monitor
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz- 4DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 256MB
Integrated Sound Blaster®Audigy™ HD Software Edition
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse
No Floppy Drive Included
No Modem Option
Internal PCI 802.11g Wireless Network Card
My Software & Accessories
Dell A525 30 Watt 2.1 Stereo Speakers with Subwoofer
McAfee SecurityCenter with anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, 36-months
Microsoft Works 9.0
My Service
3Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor, 24x7 Phone Support
Included 3 GB DataSafe Online Backup for 1Yr
Also Includes
Mouse included with Keyboard purchase
Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 8.1
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
Windows Vista™ Basic
No Entertainment software pre-installed

Pros: might meet processing needs and 3 year warranty
Cons: Vista (ugh), and lower-end gfx card

I hope u kept the receipt!, My neighbor uses Home Basic and let me say it is the worst piece of garbage on the face of the earth. It is really shitty, hardly compatible with alot of Apps. Really a shitty OS imo. I would visit your local staples for a solid Xp professional with upgraded Home Basics and stuff. Or even maybe one of those quad cores which i heard are good.

[DoTheFandango]

Spring for Ultimate or at least Home Premium.
At alot of Universities, if you are in an engineering program you can get Vista for free, check that out. I took one computer science class and got Professional for free.

[Noah]

I hope u kept the receipt!, My neighbor uses Home Basic and let me say it is the worst piece of garbage on the face of the earth. It is really shitty, hardly compatible with alot of Apps. Really a shitty OS imo. I would visit your local staples for a solid Xp professional with upgraded Home Basics and stuff. Or even maybe one of those quad cores which i heard are good.

Fit, I recommend you to ignore all help given previously and just go with this. This is just solid advice from top to bottom.

[Izor]

or just download it and pay nothing

[Displaced]

I think noah has some solid advice, listen to him.

forget quadcore, its not worth the premium.

if I were you id opt for something around a 1KW PSU from a reputable make, itl handle be able to handle your next upgrade, and a better PSU wont break your budget.

[Cops]

Noah, let me know when it's a good time to invest in a quad core.

[Noah]

I don't really know Cops. It would take a substantial change in the CPU marked today for Quadcore to be the alternative delivering the most bang for your buck.

What surprises me is actually how little the difference is, look at this:

It's mostly what I would expect-- only rendering and encoding tasks exploit parallelism enough to overcome the 25% speed deficit between the dual and quad core CPUs. Outside of that specific niche, performance will actually suffer for most general purpose software if you choose a slower quad-core over a faster dual-core.

Dualcore can pretty much deliver everything a quadcore can for normal computer usage. Quadcore CPUs will always be more expensive than dualcores, so as long as you don't have the specific need of more cores I'd say that dualcore will be the better choice untill quadcore somehow becomes cheaper than dualcore. Dualcores will always be the cheapest option of those two.

My guess is that the only thing that will change this is a new generation of software that can exploit the extra cores better than what we have today.

Why do you want a quadcore anyway?

Edit: AZHRAN I SEE YOU VIEWING THIS THREAD, HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU MAN?

[Doc Flabby]

The biggest bottleneck on systems it normally the diskdrives and memory.

Spending money on Faster memory and drives, rather than extra cores will be better value imo.

[Fit of Rage]

Thanks for the advice everyone. Now I actually have to make some money (???) and as soon as I can round up 700+ I'll make some newegg orders and get started. Potentially newbish question: do things like hard drives and video cards and fans have all the cables included so that all I have to do is basically buy the motherboard and all components and put it together with a screwdriver (no soldering involved?).

[404 Not Found]

noting your an aerospace engineering student and that the use of your computer will require engineering applications such as SolidWorks, Fluent, intensive MATLAB code, etc. I would highly suggestthat you do not cut corners and first of all go with an Intel Core 2 Quad processor. I have quads and duo's on our network and the quad's are hands down amazing when using multi applictaions at the same time.

We do work using AutoCAD, Illustrator, PSP, Inventor, Blender Solidworks, and still to this day...PowerPoint all open basically at once with no slow down whatsoever.

The use of a nForce 680iLT board with "SLI" matched 2 gig Ram and 2 GeForce 8600 GT video cards both are 512 and not the 256's...you can also use the 8800's but for what we do the 8600 was good enough.

This sytem is somewhat setup as a gamers system, but for the architectural work and graphics/3d' work we do,we can't complain.

w/o a monitor I got the parts to build this for under $800

[Ewan]

The biggest bottleneck on systems it normally the diskdrives and memory.

Spending money on Faster memory and drives, rather than extra cores will be better value imo.

Calling bullshit on this.

Reviews and benchmarks I've seen have noted that you get a minimal performance increase with Raptors or RAID 0 arrays. Secondly, yeah buying MORE RAM is often the answer for people with slow computers, buying faster RAM will see little difference. There's no real reason to really go for superfast RAM unless you're into overclocking. Just get DDR2-800 (also referred to as PC2-6400) and you will be fine.

As far as 3D gaming, your bottleneck will be your GFX Card, assuming you get a decent, modern (Core 2) dual or quad core processor, the CPU shouldn't bottleneck your gaming much.

For 3D apps (Solidworks etc) you needn't worry really. They're not that intensive, and any modern hardware will run it no problems at all. The computers at Uni are Pentium Ds with integrated graphics, and have no problem.

For MatLab, it'll be RAM & CPU, I know MatLab can do multi-threading (i.e. run on more than one core simultaneously), so perhaps Quad Core will suit this.

Hard-drive speed will only really affect app-loading time, and perhaps boot time. The speed increases will be barely noticeable, and definitely not worth the extra bucks for a Raptor, or the risk of going for a RAID 0 array. Just get a decent 7,200RPM hard drive from Seagate/Western Digital and you'll be fine.


My housemate just bought a PC about 6 months ago:
Core 2 Quad Q6600
2GB RAM
8800GT 512MB

And it runs all the modern games on max settings (even Crysis) at 1400 x 900.

[Ewan]

Thanks for the advice everyone. Now I actually have to make some money (???) and as soon as I can round up 700+ I'll make some newegg orders and get started. Potentially newbish question: do things like hard drives and video cards and fans have all the cables included so that all I have to do is basically buy the motherboard and all components and put it together with a screwdriver (no soldering involved?).

They should come with all relevant cables unless you're buying them OEM.

An OEM processor won't come with a heatsink/fan.
An OEM hard-drive won't come with SATA cables (Although, you can get away with an OEM hd, cause your motherboard should include IDE/SATA cables).
Graphics card will come with the relevant power connector if it needs one.

Most cases will come with a little bag of screws.

Also, I don't know what you're doing for a case. If you're just getting a crappy cheap one, you'll probably have to buy a couple of fans. They're not expensive for just standard ones, just get a 120mm and a 90mm, or two 120mms. I know mine didn't come with screws, so they're held on with cable ties. A typical fan set up would be one at the front drawing air IN, and one at the back kicking air OUT. It should be fairly obvious where they go. If you get a decent brand case (Antec, Lian Li etc) it'll probably come with a fan. Should be simple to tell on Newegg whether it has fans included.

Finally, if this is your first ever computer build. Make sure you put on the spacers! These are little things that stop the bottom of the motherboard contacting the edges of the case. It's one of the main rookie mistakes, leading to people ripping their hair out cause their computer won't start.

Also, I'd recommend having a friend who's done this before with you. It's not that hard, but you don't want to go trying to put things in places they shouldn't, and stuff like connecting the case wires (for the LEDs, power switch and front USB slots) can get a bit fiddly.

[Noah]

Offcourse, if the programs you will be using is the ones needing more from your CPU then as 404 said don't cut corners on that. My recommendations is more in general, I don't know what the specific needs of engineering is.

Another note on cooling: Get yourself a new CPU cooling system rather than the stock shit you get. You don't need to get the extreme stuff, just a decent cooler like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835118223

Do not underestimate the importance of having the proper cooling your computer needs. Get atleast two fans for your cabinet, one in the front and one in the back.

[Noah]

My housemate just bought a PC about 6 months ago:
Core 2 Quad Q6600
2GB RAM
8800GT 512MB

And it runs all the modern games on max settings (even Crysis) at 1400 x 900.

That has to be bullshit. I did not manage to play Crysis at high (not very high) settings with a decent fps (30+) without gimping the resolution. I got a better gaming setup than that, and I used the nVidia driver released for Crysis. If Crysis would run well at max settings with that setup, then there wouldn't be much need for SLI and better cards for gaming.

[Ewan]

That has to be bullshit. I did not manage to play Crysis at high (not very high) settings with a decent fps (30+) without gimping the resolution. I got a better gaming setup than that, and I used the nVidia driver released for Crysis. If Crysis would run well at max settings with that setup, then there wouldn't be much need for SLI and better cards for gaming.

Well, 1400 x 900 isn't a particularly high res (less than 1280 x 1024). He could run it at the hacked VeryHigh (he's on XP) at a very playable framerate.

Hell, even on my PC (E6420, 8800GTS 320mb) I could run it on High at 1280 x 1024 @ 30fpsish for most of the game, only having to turn it down (to a kind of custom mix of high and medium) when all the ice and stuff appeared (after the zero-g level).