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[Brahms]

Bit of hypothesising:

I don't (really) need a new rig right now, but I will need one in the future. However in the future I may well be unemployed. How much money do you guys think I should put away to build a machine? I want it to be water cooled, but I'm not OTT about running high end components. I prefer mid range stuff, under the old nVidia numbering system I always bought the "x600" model in the range (9600, 7600).

So bearing that in mind, assuming a build from scratch, what do you guys think? £400 - £500? Not including peripherals o course.

[DeadlyAvenger]

Well, if you're going watercooled - I think the watercooling stuff alone costs about £100, if not more so you're losing that money that you could be spending on better components.

As a rough, top of the head estimate (without looking anything up) I would probably say the following:
Case: £30-40
Motherboard: £100
Processor: £150
Decent Air Cooler: £30
RAM: £60
PSU: £50-70
Graphics Card: £100-£130 (for a mid-high range card)
HDD: £70 (for a single 7200 rpm drive ~1TB)
DVD-R/RW Drive: £20
Total: £610-£670

That would get you a pretty decent rig, from scratch. If you're re-using parts obviously it'll cost less, and you can obviously spend much more in area to get higher-end components.

I think the way I would do it would be to try and buy a motherboard that's as new as possible, so it's not going to go outdated too quickly - leaving you plenty of room to upgrade if you get some more money.

Things like the PSU, DVD-Drive, HDD, cooler are more long term components - so long as you buy to a certain standard (e.g. 700w psu) then it will last you for a few years etc.

[Zarf]

Building a PC for a mate atm, was going to give phenom II a go(managed to get an awesome second hand deal on some Intel kit though)


Drop it down to 4GB RAM and a Phenom II x3 720 and you'll be pretty much on budget.
That system should be pretty quiet, If you're going water cooling you'd have to spend a LOT of money to get something quieter and better performing. Cheap Watercooling isn't worth it.

[claws]

Personally I'd forget the water cooling, get a cheaper motherboard from a decent supplier and go for about £100 ish - if you're sneaky you'll get in for £500. If you really do want water cooling, I'd imagine you're looking nearer £700 rather than 400-500.

[Teatime]

Most likely you'll have to approach CPU/motherboard/RAM as a single unit, since the rapid development makes it either impossible or (performance-wise) inadvisable to reuse any older component. So you will probably have a core figure of £ 250-300 to take into account. (And you should spend some money on a decent motherboard).
The rest might depend how good your current components are (Graphic Card, for example). Secondary components like hard drives or DVD-Rom drives can easily be upgraded later.

[Brahms]

I just.. I really hate listening to my fans scream all the time. It sounds like the machine is in pain. I don't mind paying more, the £400 - £500 estimate was from the current rig that I built in my student daze. Think it was actually closer to £350. Had an extremely raunchy AMD3000 though, which was dilapidated from the day i bought it and only got worse.

[Chaos]

chances are that if you have a phenom x3 you can unlock a 4th core
AMD have been releasing quads as tris due to demand
but if you happen to get an actual tricore, youd be just as well off having a good dual as most multi threaded games cant run 3 threads (2/4/8)
although some can and have been modded to do so its quite a hassle..

AMD chips are cheap as hell compared to intel (although the price point is about right compared to performance) so why not just get a quad?

Also, watercooling isnt that great unless your gonna clock the balls off your stuff.. So I would stick to passive cooling
even if you do go water, youll still need fans for the rads and case.. especially if you want to cool the GPUs (which have the loudest fans in your case usually) with your water rig

[Brahms]

I'm not too worried about specifics as I'm seriously thinking like, five months down the road.

Also, Chaos, this is a 939 motherboard, I doubt I could plug a phenom in here. If anyone's interested (I'm certainly not) I run:

9600 GT overclocked some amount by BFG
AMD Opteron 180
2gig cheap ram
two 80 gig harddrives

And JUSTICE.

[Chaos]

You should be good for a little bit.. Maybe a CPU/MoBo/RAM upgrade will breath lots of new life into your system.. (and maybe a fast OS HDD to make it feel faster)

But you should be good for some time

[DeadlyAvenger]

I just.. I really hate listening to my fans scream all the time. It sounds like the machine is in pain. I don't mind paying more, the £400 - £500 estimate was from the current rig that I built in my student daze. Think it was actually closer to £350. Had an extremely raunchy AMD3000 though, which was dilapidated from the day i bought it and only got worse.

Even getting yourself a decent, quiet set of fans, a decent fan controller and some sound insulating material would probably be cheaper

For water cooling you're looking at needing the following parts:
CPU Block - ~£30-40
VGA Block - ~£40-70
Northbridge (if desired) - £20
Pump - £30-40
Radiator - £40-60
Reservoir - £20-30
Fluid / Tubing / Connectors - £20
That's about £180ish going upto about £280 for the higher end.

Kits range from £200-300 and come in both internal and external flavours. And don't forget - you still have the fans on the radiator, PSU and the noise of the pump/hdd to contend with. It's an expensive way to get your computer quieter - and since you're only looking at mid-range you won't be getting the best benefit out of the water-cooling anyway

[Brahms]

Hmm, how future proof is water cooling? Like how much would be good for the next (Super hypothetical) rig?

[Terror]

I'd say £700 should be adequate, I built this rig on £350. (with an old processor and HDDs).

[DeadlyAvenger]

I think you need to replace the fluid from time to time - so you were to upgrade later you'd need to get a new cpu block (if using a different cpu socket type (or some can fit multiple types)) and if you were to get a new graphics card you'd need a new block for that.

I think the pump, reservoir, radiator, maybe the northbridge block and the fittings etc would be ok.

You'd also probably want to get a silent PSU too - I think that's one of the loudest fans in my pc although many these days only use as much fan speed as they need to keep it cool.

[Zarf]

chances are that if you have a phenom x3 you can unlock a 4th core
AMD have been releasing quads as tris due to demand
but if you happen to get an actual tricore, youd be just as well off having a good dual as most multi threaded games cant run 3 threads (2/4/8)
although some can and have been modded to do so its quite a hassle..

AMD chips are cheap as hell compared to intel (although the price point is about right compared to performance) so why not just get a quad?

Also, watercooling isnt that great unless your gonna clock the balls off your stuff.. So I would stick to passive cooling
even if you do go water, youll still need fans for the rads and case.. especially if you want to cool the GPUs (which have the loudest fans in your case usually) with your water rig

Nah, threads don't work like that Chaos.
Apps don't (usually) have any preferences about which cores/processors their threads are run on, the scheduler in your OS does all that and assigns threads to the most available core. If you have a program creating 4 threads and a tricore chip it will just run 2 threads on one core and one each on the other two. If you have a dual core chip it'll run 2 on each (or three and one, depending on the individual thread workloads). How effective it is is down to how the workload is split up between the threads, but tricore is def better than dual.

[Junta]

Building a PC for a mate atm, was going to give phenom II a go(managed to get an awesome second hand deal on some Intel kit though)

Have to be honest, Phenom (1 or 2) just isn't worth it yet - the X3 doesn't really offer much extra over standard Core 2. Read the reviews if you don't believe me, but when I see so much evidence of the same thing I generally pay attention.

I'm not an Intel fanboy, I like AMD, just that there is no compelling reason to buy (unless you already have an AM2 or AM3 motherboard already)

I have heard of AMD releasing "undamaged" X4 chips as X3 ones, but overall they'd lose money doing this I think if they did it for any length of time. Normally a damaged X4 die will be turned into an X3 one if it passes testing with one of the cores disabled.

You can't choose which core runs a process - as Zarf said, the OS and lower level management takes care of that.