Be Excellent To Each Other

My computer's in a bad way. Or rather, it's working fine.

The motherboard and processor like to team up and try a little joke every few months: the CMOS/BIOS thing forgets what kind of processor I have. It's an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, but it sometimes likes to underclock itself as a 1100, or some ridiculously slow Duron if I'm not paying attention. To get it back, I have to clear all the settings and put them back in.

This is somewhat strange as I'm not exactly sure whether it's designed to remember the processor name: I thought it was just supposed to read the label from whatever the processor says it is.

The CRT monitor has just today started doing its own funny thing: it'll show only yellow for the first five minutes from when it's turned on. After that it's fine. (Apart from when you put it on 1280x1024, when it shows a very faint white vertical line just right of centre.)

These two bits of funny business combined today to make me think my computer had seriously had it: the more severe form of the motherboard gag is to say that the 'CMOS memory size is wrong' and then refuse to boot up or enter the setup screen. With this unfamiliar error message and the screen going suddenly yellow, something was definitely up.

Here's the current configuration:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+, condition: unknown. Presumed to have a sense of humour.

PCChips M848A motherboard, condition: bastard. It'll work almost all of the time, until the odd time it completely refuses to do what it's supposed to.

PC2100 memory in sizes 512MB, 256MB and 256MB, condition: professional. It's Crucial memory, and it's doing its an exemplary job.

Western Digital Caviar 120GB IDE hard drive, condition: trusted yet suspected. This is my main drive, with all the documents and programs on it. Every time I suspect a problem with a file, I suspect the hard drive (No way!), but Spinrite has always given it a clean bill of health, and it hasn't done anything catastrophically bad yet. I got the drive when I got the computer, so it's had five years of constant use. I would expect the drive to last a lot longer, but it's not impossible that it could explode within a month.

Excelstor 80GB IDE hard drive, condition: good. This is my backup hard drive. A mirror of every document on the main drive. It's never put a foot wrong, but all I've ever used it for is to copy files to.

Lite-on LTR-52327S IDE CD-RW drive, condition: professional. It's a CDRW drive. As good as they come.

Lite-on DVDRW SOHW-812S IDE DVD-RW drive, condition: leftovers. It's a DVDRW drive. Pretty old and messed up. It was making coasters in another machine, so I decided to take it as my own and use it as a DVD reader. It can write DVDs at 1x, but I don't really trust it. According to the box, it's supposed to be a DVD+-RW drive, but it seems to have permanently lost some of it's powers over time.

Nvidia GeForce PNY Verto AGP FX5200, condition: it's an FX5200. The mid-rangiest of the mid-range graphics cards from years back. It doesn't have a fan and so there's really nothing on it to break. It does its job of playing Tachyon: the Fringe, emulators and my crap OpenGL and DirectX endeavours admirably.

300W PSU, condition: who knows. This is the PSU that came with the case. These days, it seems a little underpowered, and it's possible that this is the cause of every strange thing my computer's ever done. Though, if that were the case, I would have thought the problems would arise at the very instant of booting (ie. it just wouldn't) or under heavy load.

And that's it.

I've just about had enough of this stupid motherboard and this stupid processor, so I'm going to put it aside to use as a Mac OS X machine, if I can. (Blast Arena iPhone!!!!1!)

In its place, I propose a snazzy new computer.

Basically, I would like the modern day equivalent of the computer I already have... but I'm not exactly sure what that is.

My usual plan is to just chuck together the cheapest stuff from eBuyer and hope it works, but they don't seem to do the cheapest Intel Core Duo processors any more.

Here's how I see it:

CPU: The ubiquitous Intel Core 2 Duo something or other. There's quite a few in the range, though; what's the best value for money these days? Can ordinary Windows XP handle this processor, or would I need to go buy 64-bit edition or what?

Memory: The old memory is probably too old for this theoretical new computer, so it's going to go in the not-mac. If I get some respectable memory, I shouldn't be going too far wrong here. Two 1GB sticks of Kingston or Crucial in dual-channel, Super Mario mode, right?

Hard drives: Whatever's the most value for money these days.
DVD: I should probably get myself a DVD writer I can trust. The old DVD drive can go in a box and the CDRW drive can go in the not-mac.

Motherboard: Anything that works with all of the above. I don't really care whether the system uses IDE or SATA. The more USB ports, the merrier.

I should probably get a replacement motherboard for the not-mac as well. These should be a second-hand motherboard from that era somewhere...

Case: My limit is 57p.

Can any Beexy folks recommend reliable but inexpensive components that I can order for my new comput-o-rig? :)

CPU: For a regular everyday desktop, any old dual core Intel CPU will do the trick so just go for the cheapest (eg. Intel E1200, which can be picked up for under £40 if you shop around). No need for a 64-bit OS, regular XP will work just fine. If you buy a cheap OEM version then you'll need a cooler; check out Silent PC Review's recommended heatsinks to see what's worth getting.

Memory: Yep, get some DDR2 from a decent brand (Kingston, Crucial, OCZ, etc.) and you'll be fine.

HDD: Personally I think Samsung's drives are great; decent desktop performance and quiet too.

DVDRW: I've got an NEC IDE drive and an Optiarc (aka Sony/NEC) SATA drive and they both seem okay.

Motherboard: Gigabyte's motherboards are supposed to be pretty good; I've got a GA-P35-DS3R which does the trick (although it's been discontinued so it's getting harder to find; however I assume the replacement models are just as good, if not better). It supports 12 USB ports, too (8 on the back and a further 4 on motherboard headers for plugging into case front panels etc.)

Case: The Evercase 4252 is supposed to be a good "cheap and cheerful" case; you can get them from http://www.evercase.co.uk/ for ~£30 all-in. You'll also need a PSU; if you shop around then you should be able to get a decent brand of quiet-running PSU for under £40 (Seasonic, OCZ, Nexus etc.).

Graphics card: The cheapest Nvidia/ATI cards you can currently get should suffice.

Alternatively, buy an Xbox 360.

I've got a relatively expensive (over £40) Gigabyte board in my machine. I'm not sure if it's the board, a lack of power or something else but I've had a lot of trouble with my machine. It frequently hangs with he hard disk light permanently on. Well usually once or twice in 24 hours. It just seems generally sluggish in general operation, which isn't good. My machine at work is less powerful but works cleaner.

I went by this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bes ... 064-7.html

As a good rough guide for video cards, as I have fuck all idea what most of them are. I have the same video card as you, funnily enough. I bought a better one the other day, which I'm not at all sure will work on my motherboard, but if not I got it cheap enough to buy a new motherboard or simply sell it on for a marginal profit, or swap shop it for something I need.

ATI is currently King of the Hill, I think its 8450 or something is the 'best bang for buck' (tho tbh I can never remember the exact numbers theres so many of the buggers)
Avoid a motherboard with an nVidia/nForce chipset - I've had nowt but problems with these. Asus, MSI or Gigabyte are decent brands tho, cant go far wrong if you find a good £50-£60 one from them
Just make sure you get memory as 2x1GB (2 sticks) for dual channel, and if you want 4GB you should use a 64bit OS

I'm not gonna touch ATI cards. I've only ever seen them fail and CCC is a pile of cack.

He used to be in NVidia's pocket, is he still?

I suggest either:

Anandtech or Ars Technica

Malc

I wouldn't be surprised if he was biased, but that specific page has a good visual breakdown of the relative 'power' of the millions of stupidly esoteric cards out there. It's nice to just have something that you can look at and know that x is a bit beefier than y and roughly as good as z, instead of having to wearily click bak and forth between thousands of different settings and brands and prices and numbers.

The Caviar drive has died. Twelve days before I'm due to hand in a very large report. Glonk. :(

Hmm, if you are stuck for an IDE drive let me know, I gave away a few out of BT Vision boxes (160 GB or so).

Re DVDR drives, always spend the few quid extra and buy a Pioneer. I find it remarkable that despite my Mac Pro being a top drawer rig, the built in DVD drives get sniffy all the time. Stuff like reduced speed burning that never happens in the rigs I have with Pioneers. In fact my duplicator is rigged out with Pioneers as well.

If you really can't afford a Pioneer, take a look at the LG drives. But really you want a Pioneer.

For an HD, take a look at Ebuyers deal of the day (or whatever it's called). Usually bargains to be had.

If you really are super stuck for cash take a look at these guys:

http://www.blackbarncomputers.com/

Refurbed PC's (usually Dell's) that come with clean installs of XP and AVG installed. I bought a Dell to replace an old box that failed for about 70 quid and it's doing a fine job. Although note that the one I had features integrated graphics so if you want to game you'll need to check which model you buy.

That's very kind of you, but I'm good. I saw it coming, so there's many a backup plan. (And I'm ordering a complete whole new computron soon anyway.)

Righty, I'm finally getting a shopping list together for this new computer.

Can anybody recommend a good computer component place? The only ones I know of are ebuyer, scan and dabs.

PC world.

You are fined one credit for a violation of the verbal morality statute.

I buy a fair amount from all 3 of these companies for the business. Ebuyer are usually pretty good, just watch out for dodgy grey import kit. Dabs suck and Scan are pretty good.

Overclockers are good for bundles of kit that is guarenteed to work together, but forget any hope of support or phoning them.

Or if you prefer something a little more civilised http://store.apple.com/uk.

I used to be keen on building PC's but worked out that it was a joyless task that barely saved you any money and just gave you grief. Fine when it all works but shit when it doesn't.

I've used both of these in the past.

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/
http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/

Grim...'s rule of thumb for budgeting your own PC build.
Work out your upper limit.
Spend 1/3 on the Mobo, 1/3 on the CPU, 1/3 on the GFX card, 1/3 on RAM & HDD, and 1/6 on everything else (CD drive, case, etc). Use one of the hundreds of PSUs you have lying around the flat.

I assume you know that 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/6 = 9/6, yeah?

Edit: which is clearly 150% of your original budget.

That was you point, wasn't it

Yeah I know, BIG STOMPY BOOTS.

That is, I swear, the best way of doing it.

Might I recommend to sir the Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor if you can still purchase it. It's what I have in my computer and it seems to offer a good deal of bang for the buck. Stock clock speed is 2.66GHz, but I have mine permanently overclocked to 3.4GHz, all perfectly stable with no problems whatsoever. I'm fairly certain it could be pushed beyond that too.

I've been having real trouble finding any Core 2 Duos that aren't the super mega new versions. I'm sure C2Ds were available for less than £70 somewhere. Maybe I imagined it.

I'm pretty certain the current "Pentium dual core" ones (as opposed to Pentium D) are the older core 2 duos and they're that price but do check.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/145259 - Cheapest Celeron badged

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139584 - Cheapest Pentium badged.

Keeping in mind that cheap and under spec PSU's are the number 1 cause of odd crashes and weird problems.

My systems did this but all I needed to do was replace the MOBO battery. Worth mentioning.

LOLZOROONY.

Indeed. I need to replace my current PSU because the amount of juice it takes to overclock the shite out of my PC appears to be preventing it from POSTing if I have any external bus-powered hard drives plugged in or anything like that.

Obviously the sensible thing to do would be to get something fairly powerful, so that when I inevitably upgrade the machine later on I'll be able to contine using the same PSU. But I'm not relishing spending £140-ish on something as dull as a power supply.

Ha, :that:. I took me a while to figure out why it was that every time I jumped into the water on Crysis, my PC reset. It wasn't the GFX cards overheating like I first thought, it was the amount of power they sucked up. I've got a 1100w (up from 750w) one now and so far, no more problems.

£140 is alot. 40 or 50 quid should do it. Also some cases can come with decent PSU's bundled. It's 4 years since I built a PC but I got an Artic Cooling case that had an integrated PSU that has been just dandy on heavy loads (3 HD's, 2 DVD's, lots of encoding and video editing jobs where CPU is near 100% for 12 hours +).

Mmm. I'm not convinced.

Balls... I was going to move up from a 520W to an 850W - think maybe I'll need more? I'm only running one gfx card right now (a lightly-overclocked 512MB 8800GT), but I have given some consideration to going down the SLI route in the future. Though to do that I'd need a new mobo, and if I'm doing that I may as well replace it for a Socket 1366 one. Which would then mean getting a Core i7 CPU. And DDR3 mem sticks to replace the DDR2 ones I have now.

With a little luck, I'd have completed my monster upgrade just in time to hand the completed PC over to the baliffs.

Well, I'd like to get a fairly decent make one. My current PSU is a Corsair 520W modular one and I was thinking of replacing it with an 850W Be Quiet! modular one.

1100W PSU!? I thought the 360 was bad but that's fairly mental!

I think the A1200 had a 23W passive brick didn't it?

It's not about wattage. It's about the available amperage on the 12V rails. You need to read and understand the spec stickers, and you need to buy from a brand who doesn't flat out make the specs up.

Dan's Data writes excellently about PSUs. Edit -- like here.

Grim..., have you ever put a Watt-o-meter across your 1100W system to see what it's actually drawing? It might well be less than the 750W rated PSU you removed.

Tell me about it. It tries to only supply the amount of power it needs to (or something), though, so it doesn't waste any.

All switch-mode power supplies (so, any PC supply) do that though.

I'd be interested to hear how much it'll really take under severe Crysis conditions though. B&Q have those energy meters for a tenner, Aldi have them for a fiver sometimes.

A power requirement calculator I used suggested my PC would be drawing aroung 380W - 400W. The 520W PSU I'm using does power the PC just fine, but it won't POST if I plug an external HDD into it. Also I can't lower the latencies on the memory sticks and still have it POST, despite the sticks I'm using supposedly having lower latencies possible if you overvolt them.

So I can't help but think I'm simply pushing my PSU a bit too much. I did read that under normal usage, a PSU should only be expected to supply half of it's rated wattage, so maybe that's where I'm going wrong.

It's all a bit stupid - I don't even use the bloody thing that much. I just enjoy pissing about with it and doing upgrades, etc.

http://forums.slizone.com/lofiversion/index.php?t405.html

Has some figures. A system with 8800 GTS SLI consumed 405W under 3dMark (i.e. full load). Cross referencing with Anandtech suggests a 880 GTX (what Grim... has) consumes around 100W at full load.

He also shows some common CPU power consumptions:

• FX-60 stock has TDP = 110W
• FX-60 @3006Mhz at 1.45v = ~147W
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300-6700 = 65W
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @3600Mhz at 1.45v = ~113W
• Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 = 75W

This is a rule of thumb largely prompted by PSU manufacturers lying on spec sheets. The overall wattage of the PSU is pretty meaningless really. You need to know the maximum wattages of each of the various power lines the PSU supplies, and what your system will draw from them. It's usually the +12V line that is hit the hardest.

I had to get an absurdly huge and heavy UPS for my Mac Pro as it kept on tripping out my old UPS which, on paper, should have been able to handle it.

Now that you've PROVED THAT with SCIENCE, I'll plug my old PSU back in again, and tell it that "Gaywood said you should work. DO IT!"

Perhaps you should read and understand my other posts, foo'. I theorise that the reason your 750W PSU doesn't work is because it doesn't have enough juice on the 12V line, not because your system is drawing more than 750W. I'm not disputing it doesn't work. I'm explaining that the fact it doesn't work doesn't mean your system draws more than 750W.

Your other posts don't say that, foo'.

Foo':

That's the same post, foo'.

Gah. Having enjoyed my new video card and stuff for a month or two now with no problems, I've suddenly had a blue screen of death that won't stop. And my (usb) wireless thingy suddenly refuses to connect and stay connected to the internet half the time.

With some jiggery pokery, I am fairly certain I've determined the problem - wonky RAM, which has been removed and I've been on for about ten minutes now with no problems. Oddly, this has corrected my wireless problem, too.

I suspect my heat sink fan needs replacing, as the RAM is right next door and it seems a little warmer than it probably should be. However, I may be wrong. And I haven't changed my processor or added anything but a new motherborad and video card - should the load on the processor really be noticeably different?

I also noticed that one of my hard drives (the smaller of two, which contains the OS and most programmes, with my second, larger drive acting as storage and game instally space) no longer appears under device manager by its "WDC Whatever" bran name/number, but simply as "disk drive". This perturbs me. Should I be perturbed? The manufacturer's site is as helpful as a glass hammer, and windows sees no problem with the HD. The HD doesn't seem to be misbehaving, but I am suspicious.

Oh, and "since you activated windows there have been significant hardware changes, blah blah you must re-activate windows in 3 days". Fuck off, arseholes. Is it true that you only get a limited number of activations of XP? If so, what is the number?

There seem to be a lot of cheap MSI and ASUS motherboards with integrated graphics. Seems like all of them, in fact. GO AWAY. >_<

What the HELL?

I paid £8 for my original case, which came with a PSU. (YES this may be why it doesn't work any more. But I think it's just the hard drive being old, and the motherboard being crap myself.)

Now it seems that I can only get similar quality for £20.99 + £12.99. I didn't pay that much for my graphics card last time round!! (Edit - Actually I did. I paid £37 for this. Man, was I had.)

WHAT THE HELL. And I don't want black either. Where did all the cheap, coloured Casecom cases go? BASTARDS.

And where did all the sub - £10 cases go from eBay?!

Have I slipped into some retarded expenso-universe sometime in the last five years or something!?

Looks like I've found my processor though:

Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200. It's a chunk cheaper than the E5300 on amazon and cpubenchmark.net says that it has a lot of bang.

Edit - Seems like it's the third most powerful 'Dual Core' you can get (behind the 300 and 400), before you have to move up to a Core 2 Duo. Coolo. (It seems to knock the socks off a lot of the older C2Ds as well. Yay!)

Edit - Whoever bought the 8800 GS card for £41 on Amazon: BLAHAHHHAHAHAHHAH >:(.

Here's what I got from eBuyer in the end:



The number before the price is the eBuyer quickfind code if you want to buy the same item.

I also got this graphics card:

MSI NX7950GT Graphics Card, 512MB DDR, 2 X DVI outputs - £32.50 including postage! I think that was a bit of a bargain!

Thanks for the advice, everyone. :)

Has this turned into a foo' fight?