Do we still build, is this the right place?

[Bartinili]

So any of you who may still peruse the MM forum (May it rest in peace) will have seen my rather ill-timed and unfortunate enquiry.

Does any body care for such things these days or should i go and seek the answers to my questions else where?

The old and wretched E4500 2.2 with a GTX750Ti
Macbook Pro 2015 (i am a grown up now -.- ), Travelmate 8371G
IPad Mini 2, Asus Nexus 2012

[The Duke]

DaveR is your man for all things PC hardware, he is now over here, so will likely be along soon.

There is no real savings anymore in building , and most people would be better buying a pretty built system from one of the places that let you configure. You also get a decent warranty all from one place, and you know it all works.

Saying that, I won’t be buying a pretty built system when I’m next in the market. I never did build to save money. I loved the weeks of fine tuning what I wanted and all the research, all the way though to the moment it [doesn’t ] post lol .

I use to love clicking through the old mm adds that was just pages of tiny text components. Who didn’t make their dream build out of them lists. Then have to settle for what your wallet could stetch to. (Plus 20%). Then tell the wife it was only half the cost  :whistle:

[Bartinili]

the viceral joy of clicking things into place, seating a CPU or finally getting that sodding 4th stick of ram to go in is the joy of the hobby. thats why i did it and why the FAILBOX is sat under desk adorned with stickers and still wheezing its way through internet browsing even with my MBP on the desk.

I dont want to spend too much money as its a maybe tertiary hobby now with cycling and Extreme old volvo repair taking top billing but if i can scratch that wonderful itch and serve up some nostalgia pie with delightfully red faction, Command and Conquer topping then sett the memory timings to 6 and crank that FSB clock speed to maximum!

The old and wretched E4500 2.2 with a GTX750Ti
Macbook Pro 2015 (i am a grown up now -.- ), Travelmate 8371G
IPad Mini 2, Asus Nexus 2012

[Ed P]

I probably had the same ‘joy’ of self-build as the OP. I now get my kicks from the *Raspberry Pi. If you make use of ‘HAT’ products these are essentially plug and play, but if you want to save money you can always learn to solder. (not that hard with a good solder station and third hand.)

Some of these bits of kit do need a few lines of code to make them work, but in the main these are ‘cut and paste’ jobs. For example, this link is the description and  ‘code’ to get a simple DAC to talk to a cheap £4 pi zero. This combo + a £6 speaker & wifi at the very minimum gives you a fairly good quality Internet Radio, add in a monitor and small mouse/keyboard combo and you have a very useful little kitchen computer . This is possibly a ‘bad’ example as it either needs soldering or connector crimping to build this, but HATs have similar fulsome code support, and generally require little or no soldering.

• and the Arduino but that does need some real building and codeing. Maybe Steve can comment on this latter as he and his son have used it as a learning/teaching aid.

[Anonymous]

I’ll always build my system. It’s a lot of fun putting it all together, forgetting to plug something in, and tidying the cables away. Pity I don’t have too much reason to upgrade though!

Buying off the shelf, last time I looked for someone, there is always a compromise in there somewhere. Only way of getting a good balanced system is DIY.

 

As EdP though, most of my joy is making my own little circuits and playing round with the Pi and an Arduino.  I’m very much looking forward to tricking out my house with a lot of home-automation projects.

[Robin Long]

I was going to build my last system and did some research, then went to lidl and realised the shop opposite was https://www.utopiacomputers.co.uk/ .  So I went it for a nosey and ended up with the Warmachine https://www.utopiacomputers.co.uk/warmachine. Best made plans and all!

 

 

Cheers Knight,

RIP Spike09 Your Missed
If I'm not here, I'm there.

Finally joined Twitter! longr79

[Bartinili]

they do look fancy but im slowly economising on what i can reuse and seeing what £200 quid will buy me.

And an hour later comparing component prices on different websites im already at the 300 quid mark for a CPU, MB and memory.

The old and wretched E4500 2.2 with a GTX750Ti
Macbook Pro 2015 (i am a grown up now -.- ), Travelmate 8371G
IPad Mini 2, Asus Nexus 2012

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I will stil build my next PC when upgrade time comes but it wont be to save money. Reusing parts may save cash but by then my SSD will be too small my PSU will be getting on my graphics card will be outdated who knows if ill need the BD drive and I will want a new case so the PC looks new ! A new version of w10 will also be required as even though i upgraded from the retail version of W7 its not transferable. In short i will be doing it for fun and the practical experiance. On that note who knew it took so much force to push down the lever on a socket 1366 till they tried it ? Or is that just mine.

[Dave Rice]

I gave you a £200 shopping list on MM!

You never did listen to me  :yahoo:

[Bartinili]

I think you will find that i did listen to you all those years ago and thats why i have an e4500 crunching the electrons under my desk as i type. But just like then i’m probably going to opt for a different chipset because i am one of the few people ever to have 5 years after getting an dual x16 PCI-E motherbaord actually buying a matching 8800gt and having sweet SLI Gainz! Also the p5n32e-sli was a superbly robust board with onboard sound and dual LAN and a few other rather nice features.

But i’m weighing up the G4400 vs I3-6100, the latter has a fairly decent rep as a budget gaming CPU and then that got me on the think, hmmmm, how much ram could i buy? perhaps a matched pair of 4gbs now so that in a couple of years i can get another and have 16 Gbs, with a secondhand i7?  So its coming down to:

g4400 vs i3-6100 (doesn’t the I3 have a power saving throttling feature where as pentium no?)

h110 vs b150

4Gb vs 8Gb

and then an SSD

You never did answer the PSU question, re: have any of the plugs and sockets changed in any major way in the past few years?

 

The old and wretched E4500 2.2 with a GTX750Ti
Macbook Pro 2015 (i am a grown up now -.- ), Travelmate 8371G
IPad Mini 2, Asus Nexus 2012

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

The motherboard power sockets havent changed in ages, 24 pin main and 4 or 8 pin CPU 12V. The PSU may have more or less SATA and 6 or 8 pin PCIe plugs. You will still get a few molex too but you may loose the floppy power.

[Robin Long]

Well Dave didn’t say otherwise, and without knowing what make your PSU is I can’t help though I doubt it’s changed much.

If you’ve got the ££ then 8GB would be the route I took.

Cheers Knight,

RIP Spike09 Your Missed
If I'm not here, I'm there.

Finally joined Twitter! longr79

[Dave Rice]

Only kidding with you Bart.

No PSUs haven’t changed at all unless you own a Dell. They have gone back to doing their own thing.

Yes the i3 is a great CPU, it’s what I use in my main PC – with a GT750Ti, 8GB ram and a 240GB SSD (sound familiar?). It boots in 15 seconds.

But for what you listed a Pentium would do just as well as there’s not going to be a lot of multi threaded action going on and it was the sameish Ghz for single threads.

The 6 core AMD PC has been relegated to the workshop. “Cores” 5 and 6 were usually parked every time I looked at Task Manager. Surprisingly little makes use of even 4 cores.  Despite a lack of innovation Intel CPUs are still scorchers in straight line speed and it’s that that still counts for “every day” workloads.

So i3 if you have the dosh, but if you haven’t I don’t think you’ll be missing out much with a Pentium.

[The Duke]

Do Intel still do that,or a version of, that really cheap brillent pentium they had out about 4 years ago. It’s name slides me, bit it was about £50 with fan, and was a stonker.

Iirc it was a stunted i5 2500 or similar, but still hit high , it may of been a non mititheaded quad core. So in real life it made little diffence to everyday tasks.

Probaly remembering it all wrong , but it definitely existed.

[Dave Rice]

Not that I know of. It was AMD that had unlockable cores from quality checking failures.

Recently Intel did an FSB unlocked “K” Pentium Haswell, the G3258. I suspect you were thinking of that.

Whilst they seemed to offer good value, of course you needed the rest of the hardware to be top spec to get the best out of it so it wasn’t cheap.

More of a marketing excercise than anything like the old AMDs.

[Ed P]

The optimum amount of ram depends what use you make of your desktop. For just office work 4GB is more than adequate but Windows is becoming an increasing memory hog. I seem to remember a study a year ago that showed 6GB was (at that time) the sweet spot for games. I expect this has grown so I would opt for 8GB of ram.

Some blogs are more positive in recommending a minimum amount of 8GB.

[Anonymous]

They also say you need a beast of a card for 4k gaming, whereas I have 6gb ram and a 7970 and was comfortable at 4k, on around 30fps. Sure you need to drop a few settings down, but it was awesome.

[Rob]

I like to build, but where do you guys go for the caparison reviews of hardware as ‘used’ to feature in MM?

Is it all on line or is there another mag?

Rob

PC1512 shipped with 512K of RAM 8 MHz Intel 8086Two 5.25" floppy drives Colour Monitor with CGA display extra 640×200 16 colour mode MS-DOS 3.2 and Digital Research DOS Plus Cost £1049.

[The Duke]

All online. But you need to not listen to one source, especially with the big sites, as the will rarly say bad stuff against the big companies as they don’t wasn’t to be dis communicate.

Think apple and the fanatical apple bias on some of the site .They are terrified of being taken off the list. So year on year everything is fabulous darling .

I like to read a few reviews, ask her (Or was mm), and watch some YouTube videos of realword reviews.

Also Linus tech tips is a big YT channel but they offer impartial reviews, you can see this as the will praise one item and distroy another but the same OEM. If you ever watch there live show, they often talk about the inegraty of the channel is what OEMs actually like now. They are realising the old ways of paying for review with either money or emotional blackmail hurts their brand long term. I just wish more sites would realised this.

 

Lather good YouTube hardware show is TWICH as in this week in computer hardware , it out dates Twitch the service lol . It’s run on the TWIT network , with Ryan Shrout and Patric Norton .

https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-computer-hardware

[Ed P]

As said, the web, but when looking for a one place comparison I normally gravitate to Toms Hardware for things like graphics cards.

[Author]

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