Silkroad Online Forums

My brother needs a new PC for university. I told him not to buy a pre-assembled laptop and go for a good desktop as he needs to work with heavy graphics and images -not videos, just images-.

So we made a little list of the pieces he has to buy and we ended up like this:

- Case doesn't matter at all
- Hard disk ~250gb, but I doubt he actually needs that
- Processor is my doubt. Since he can't afford at all an i7, I suggested him a Q9550, is it good?
- Fan or cooler?
- Motherboard asus socket 775 -not compatible with i7, me thinks-.
- RAM 4gb DDR3, I think it's Corsair
- Power supply ~750 W
- Graphic card either ATI 4870 or nVidia GTS 250
- Audio card 7.1
- Mouse, Keyboard and Screen don't matter.

All of this costs about 600~650 €

Did I suggest him the right way? Or are there cheaper and/or better things?

il have a look over, whats his budget? and hard drive is important 'heavy images' uncompressed can be quite big

but you dont sound sure on some of the hardware id be sure to match it properly, moutherboard and processor are the 2 most important things to match

Budget doesn't matter at all, but I don't want things to be utterly expensive (estimate: ~750-850 €)

I know that motherboard and processor have to match and that's why I chose a motherboard with 775 socket after I decided not to get an i7, which needs a 1366 -I think it's that- socket.

not quite what i meant, some processors amd/pentium work better on certain motherboards, socket is just what they slot into.

try overclockers.co.uk they do good stuff

Well for starters, an 860 i7 chip is only $20 more than a Q9550.. go for the i7. You can get an i7 motherboard for ~$110. Or go with the $200 i5 ($89 cheaper than the i7). He's building a media editing rig... go for the i series.

Get as much ram as you can afford.

Hard drives are cheap... again, get as much storage as you can afford. Especially since he will be editing media. Get a nice big drive with a 32MB cache.. some of the larger drives actually beat out smaller drive raids, speed wise.

Either video card will work fine. Have a look at ATIs new 5850.. basically beats everything out there (if not it's close) at mid-range card price ($290).. was $250 couple weeks ago =/

Main thing.. if you're going with a Q9550.. might as well get the i7 instead. Would be dumb not to.

Edit: Forgot to add, don't cheap out on a psu.. get one that has plenty of watts/amps and good reviews. I've seen bad supplies fry components.

The kids here gave decent advice, ill let them roll with that. Though some of the comments were baseless.

MotherBoard : Intel BOXDP55WG £111.03
CPU : Intel Core i7 860 £215.25
Memmory : 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair TwinX XMS3 £79.47

GPU : 1GB XFX HD5770 £126.01
or
GPU : 1GB XFX HD 5850 £230.44

HD : 1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 £59.21
Power supply : 750W TX Corsair PSU £89.70
Case : CoolerMaster Stacker RC-832 V2 £114.97


This comes out a little more expensive than your setup but its pretty much future proof, I added a 1TB HD because if he is doing photo work like you said he will need alot more than 250GB.

He should also probably get a second HD and use it as a back up for his photos.

Sharp324 wrote:The kids here gave decent advice, ill let them roll with that. Though some of the comments were baseless.

Explain, hard to give concise advice when all you're given is; "he has no budget and it will be for editing..mostly pictures." Not much to go on. Unless you're not talking to me.. in that case..

"The kids here.." Ha, someone thinks highly of themselves.

Elements posted exactly what I was describing. Good stuff. I was between classes, didn't have time to look up parts.

I want a 5850 bad, mofo's jacked the price up after they realized how popular they were.

EvGa wrote:

Sharp324 wrote:The kids here gave decent advice, ill let them roll with that. Though some of the comments were baseless.

Explain, hard to give concise advice when all you're given is; "he has no budget and it will be for editing..mostly pictures." Not much to go on. Unless you're not talking to me.. in that case..

"The kids here.." Ha, someone thinks highly of themselves.

Elements posted exactly what I was describing. Good stuff. I was between classes, didn't have time to look up parts.

I want a 5850 bad, mofo's jacked the price up after they realized how popular they were.

Yeah ATI are raping gamers at the moment.... its cheaper to get 2 5770's from alot of places than it is for a 5850.

As for the baseless comments I dont know what he was talking about, every comment was bassed in good theory from all the people in the thread...

you dont need a 1366 I7 as the socket will be dead by next year after the six core chips come out intel will be moving to the P55 chipset. so it is silly to build a S775 system when you can future proof yourself with a P55 set up for pretty much the same price and with better performance.

Yeah, I'm sorry if I haven't been more specific, but just the moment after I pressed submit - I usually preview what I write - my sister called me >.<

Anyway, all of your advices were great, BUT..it's kind of hard to find latest upgrades where I live. I think I found a good PC store at about 5kms from here but I've still got to check.

So, yes. Those pieces I wrote down were just some stuff my brother and I found on the internet and that I'm pretty sure I can find here.

I said budget doesn't matter at all because:
-this is just an idea, quite near to be concrete, but still just an idea
-our dad will probably pay :X

Also, I'm sorry if I'm not an IT expert and EvGa, you just reminded me of that i5 I read of, somewhere few months. That could be an idea.

If it was for me, I'd buy a gaming PC but I doubt my dad would ever pay that for me -I'm a student and I don't do little weekend jobs to earn money-. My bro studies Geology so I think he needs a good, but not extreme GPU to make maps and such, not to play Assasin Creed 2.

And I said

- Hard disk ~250gb, but I doubt he actually needs that

And I don't know how you could've read "He needs 1tb since 250gb is little". It's the opposite, lulz. He already has a 500gb external hard drive, anyway.

Furthermore, it'd be kind of you if any of you told me the difference betweeen P55, s775/1156/1366, thanks.

Again, thank you all. ^_^

If this is a worked based computer he should go for a workstation video card instead of a gamer related card...

Azilius wrote:If this is a worked based computer he should go for a workstation video card instead of a gamer related card...

Eh..but aren't those a bit..expensive?

You can find the proper workstation card for your price range and it will preform better in said field than a gamer card.


For example:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.as ... 6814195077

Not entirely sure how much better they would be than a gamer card..you'd have to find that out yourself.

I've looked around for a bit and these workstation cards seem to be quite rare or too expensive down here.

I've got two questions more, though:
-do they have same, if not better, performances even though they've got a lower memory?
-my bro is for sure going to install linux -beside windows-. Is there any contradiction with hardware? Or does it now support quite everything?

Whether or not he needs a workstation card will depend heavily on what programs he is using and how extensively. Most likely though, he would be fine with a gaming gpu. Workstation cards are a good bit overpriced..

I don't see how a 64-bit memory interface.. with 256MB ram etc is going to outperform something with 256bit interface.. GDDR5.. 1GB Ram.. Especially since they both do OpenGL. And since he is dealing with images...

I'd go with a gaming card.

EvGa wrote:Whether or not he needs a workstation card will depend heavily on what programs he is using and how extensively. Most likely though, he would be fine with a gaming gpu. Workstation cards are a good bit overpriced..

I don't see how a 64-bit memory interface.. with 256MB ram etc is going to outperform something with 256bit interface.. GDDR5.. 1GB Ram.. Especially since they both do OpenGL. And since he is dealing with images...

I'd go with a gaming card.

it depends the types of programes but a workstation card can outperform gaming GPUs in alot of image and video editing programmes because the workstation cards are better at the math and rendering required for those programmes, while the gaming GPU's can do it the workstation cards can often do it better, although as you said they are very overpriced on the most part.

~Mark~ wrote:Yeah, I'm sorry if I haven't been more specific, but just the moment after I pressed submit - I usually preview what I write - my sister called me >.<

Anyway, all of your advices were great, BUT..it's kind of hard to find latest upgrades where I live. I think I found a good PC store at about 5kms from here but I've still got to check.

So, yes. Those pieces I wrote down were just some stuff my brother and I found on the internet and that I'm pretty sure I can find here.

I said budget doesn't matter at all because:
-this is just an idea, quite near to be concrete, but still just an idea
-our dad will probably pay :X

Also, I'm sorry if I'm not an IT expert and EvGa, you just reminded me of that i5 I read of, somewhere few months. That could be an idea.

If it was for me, I'd buy a gaming PC but I doubt my dad would ever pay that for me -I'm a student and I don't do little weekend jobs to earn money-. My bro studies Geology so I think he needs a good, but not extreme GPU to make maps and such, not to play Assasin Creed 2.

And I said

- Hard disk ~250gb, but I doubt he actually needs that

And I don't know how you could've read "He needs 1tb since 250gb is little". It's the opposite, lulz. He already has a 500gb external hard drive, anyway.

Furthermore, it'd be kind of you if any of you told me the difference betweeen P55, s775/1156/1366, thanks.

Again, thank you all. ^_^

you cant work off an external too slow thats why a bigger onboard drive is better

EvGa wrote:Well for starters, an 860 i7 chip is only $20 more than a Q9550.. go for the i7. You can get an i7 motherboard for ~$110. Or go with the $200 i5 ($89 cheaper than the i7). He's building a media editing rig... go for the i series.

Get as much ram as you can afford.

Hard drives are cheap... again, get as much storage as you can afford. Especially since he will be editing media. Get a nice big drive with a 32MB cache.. some of the larger drives actually beat out smaller drive raids, speed wise.

Either video card will work fine. Have a look at ATIs new 5850.. basically beats everything out there (if not it's close) at mid-range card price ($290).. was $250 couple weeks ago =/

Main thing.. if you're going with a Q9550.. might as well get the i7 instead. Would be dumb not to.

Edit: Forgot to add, don't cheap out on a psu.. get one that has plenty of watts/amps and good reviews. I've seen bad supplies fry components.

sick of people suggesting i7 for new system builders. most retarded waste of money ever, i5 will mirror its performance while costing 33% less. also go for the 4870, the 5850 is way overpriced and doesnt have that much performance for the money. you should be looking at a 5870 if you have a budget for a 5850 in the first place. for hardrive try the spinpoint 3 500g, great bang for buck and crazy performance.

Love wrote:sick of people suggesting i7 for new system builders. most retarded waste of money ever, i5 will mirror its performance while costing 33% less. also go for the 4870, the 5850 is way overpriced and doesnt have that much performance for the money. you should be looking at a 5870 if you have a budget for a 5850 in the first place. for hardrive try the spinpoint 3 500g, great bang for buck and crazy performance.

The reason why people say get an i7 is because they are faster than i5's doesnt matter what you think.... I7 has hyperthreading which means it runs faster as well as the fact that depending on which socket i7 you select you could use tripple channel memory, although the performance boost is minimal.
The fact is a P55 i7 is a better choice than an i5 yes they both use the same socket and yes the i5 is in some cases cheaper, but not by much and an i7 of the same clock speed can pull out almost 10% performance boost over the i5.

As for a 4870 I understand your reasoning but I wouldnt buy one simply because they are last gen... the 5770 is around the same price and is fully DX11 compatible... and as soon as they release the to level cards and the X2's they will drop in price even more and you could run Xfire.

Love wrote:

EvGa wrote:Well for starters, an 860 i7 chip is only $20 more than a Q9550.. go for the i7. You can get an i7 motherboard for ~$110. Or go with the $200 i5 ($89 cheaper than the i7). He's building a media editing rig... go for the i series.

sick of people suggesting i7 for new system builders. most retarded waste of money ever, i5 will mirror its performance while costing 33% less. also go for the 4870, the 5850 is way overpriced and doesnt have that much performance for the money. you should be looking at a 5870 if you have a budget for a 5850 in the first place. for hardrive try the spinpoint 3 500g, great bang for buck and crazy performance.

I suggested the i5.

5850 = $300...5870 = $400... hmm. The 5850 beats out the GTX285 and keeps up with the 295, a $500 card. I wasn't saying he couldn't get away with a 4870, it's a great card, but the 5850 is a damn fine card also. It was a sweet deal at $250.. it's too bad they raised the prices. The 5850 is not overpriced. At all.

don't go with a 775 socket for the cpu its going to be out dated very soon.

there is nothing wrong with prebuilt but like this one

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=4920

ALL its parts can be bought off newegg or something. these are the type of prebuilts you can go for (or just buy all the parts yourself and save like $100)

also how big is your screen? the graphics on the one i listed is good for like 19" screens and so on and can play all the games on high graphics.

Thanks again.

As soon as I've got time, I'll visit this store and look for another configuration, then I'll let you know. :p

@Amarisa: I don't know what kind of screen he's gonna use.

oh yeh if its for art dont forget simple things such as tablets and what not, some computers you can get a computer screen that is a huge tablet