Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, JustAnEngineer
500 W is probably fine. But ~550-650W would protect you against having to upgrade if you did a GPU upgrade down the track.
hendos43 wrote:How much do you think I will notice the drop from i5 to i3 in the aforementioned usage the computer will undergo, by the way?
yogibbear wrote:500 W is probably fine. But ~550-650W would protect you against having to upgrade if you did a GPU upgrade down the track.
hendos43 wrote:@Firestarter
Thanks for this, too, I think I'm going to go with you here purely because it's justifying my being frugal with PSUs even if it's possible that I will need more wattage in the future. Do you have any tips on specifics i.e. model?
hendos43 wrote:Finally, just spoke to my housemate who reckoned that though it's now a bit of a lesser GPU, an easy way of shedding some pounds would be to go for a 6750 instead of a 6850. For all the praise I've heard about the 6850, I'm not hugely convinced that's true, but it sure as hell would save £30 - £40. Thoughts? I know it's worse, the clues in the name, but I'm starting to run out of places to cut costs down!
hendos43 wrote:I have just had another thought. Probably at some stage I am going to want to dual boot with Lion, since I use a few mac only programs - Vectorworks and the like.
Would the above rig be hackintosh compatible? And, if no-one knows, does anyone know of a fairly comprehensive list/site on which I could find out?
Thanks, guys.
MrJP wrote:If you still haven't ordered, then you can stretch the budget a bit further by going for a case/PSU package rather than separate items. For example, this Antec VSK 2450P is around £70 at Ebuyer. The entry level PSUs that Antec uses in these cases are fine, and certainly not disimilar in quality to the Corsair builder series that you initially selected.
You can then use the extra money to stretch to a 6870 rather than 6850 to give you a fair bit more headroom on the gaming performance. e.g. Powercolor 6870 for £135, with Sapphire and XFX variants at £140 if you don't like Powercolor (some people have a semi-irrational distrust of their products, but I've never had any problems and these cards are all reference designs anyway). The 6870 is right in the sweet spot for GPU value at the moment, a good step up from the 6850, and you won't get significantly better performance without spending a lot more money.
Note that I've only looked on Ebuyer because I tend to find they're consistently the cheapest relaible supplier in the UK, helped by offering free shipping if you're prepared to wait a day or two longer. You might want to look at pricing up the whole system there to see how it compares to Amazon. Scan are also very good, but shipping costs can be on the high side.
Happy shopping!
Edit - before someone else rushes to pont it out, I've realised that I've made a schoolboy error by recommending a graphics card that needs two PCIe 6-pin power connectors in conjunction with a PSU that only offers one. You could use a Molex adaptor to power the other port (one might be supplied with the graphics card) and this would work OK - the PSU has enough capacity for this system. However according to the Antec site the PSU only has 4 molex connectors to start with, so this might leave you short if you need them for additional fans etc. I still think you should try to get a 6870 if possible, but the case/PSU might need a rethink to get a tidier solution.
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This order contains the following items;
Item: Antec 300 Three Hundred Case
Qty: 1 Cost: £39.74
Item: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 Z68 Socket 1155 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard
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Item: Samsung SH-222AB 22x DVD±RW DL & RAM SATA Optical Drive - OEM Black
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Item: Seagate 500GB 3.5" SATA-III 6Gb/s Barracuda Hard Drive 7200RPM 16MB Cache
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Item: Corsair 500W CX V2 PSU
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Item: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz CL9 1.5V Non-ECC Unbuffered
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Item: Intel Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz Socket 1155 6MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
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Item: Sapphire HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card
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Item: HDMI Cable 1.4 Black 2 Metre
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Item: Xenta Black 2.4Ghz Wireless Keyboard and Optical Mouse - Nano USB Receiver
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Total: £583.33