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Building a MMO playing PC in the UK
SlickShoes
Member UncommonPosts: 1,019
in Hardware
OK first off please no links to newegg.com or any other USA websites.
Sorry but most forums i go on are populated with american advice and the prices are very different from the UK.
I am looking to build a PC of my own for playing mostly MMOs i have a budget of around £600 any more and i can't really afford it as i still need to buy a good monitor and mouse/keyboard after building the computer itself.
So far i have been looking on overclockers and novatech, does anyone have any other good websites or suggestions for what i should put in the machine to get best value for money?
Cheers
Comments
So the £600 budget excludes peripherals? Let's try something like this:
Processor: £76
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-268-AM
Motherboard: £55
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/motherboards/amdam3amdchipsetmotherboards/asus/90-mibca0-g0eay0gz.html
Memory: £69
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/memory-pc/ddr3-pc3-10666/1333mhz/corsair/tw3x4g1333c9a.html
Hard drive: £44
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/harddrives-internal/sata500gbto1tb/WD5001AALS.html
Video card: £109
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-122-HT&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1515
Power supply: £33, from either store:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-017-CS&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/powersupplies/corsair/cmpsu-400cxuk.html
Case: £47
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/cases/cases/antec/0761345-08300-3.html
Optical drive: £13
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/opticaldrives/satadvdwriters/samsung/sh-s223cbebe.html
Operating system: £82
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/software/operatingsystems/GFC-00599GFC-00977.html
That comes to £528 for a passable gaming system. I didn't see any shipping information on either site, so I don't know if those prices include shipping or not. If they don't, then that leaves some room for shipping or some peripherals that you may need. Well, it doesn't leave room for a monitor.
I would go with the the above poster if you are at ease with building your own system. When I built my current system I had even less money to play with (about £300 18 months ago) since I was a student, I just bought a refurbished system from PC world. Over time I replaced and added to it and is now a pretty decent system that will play any game without any trouble. Only thing I would add is that MMO's don't require great graphic cards and would instead concentrate on getting the best CPU you can buy as well as at least 4gb of memory. After a while you should always look to expand and improve the system, that way it's more economical instead of shelling out hundreds of pounds in one go.
I've just recently built a new gaming pc, my first.
I'm not an expert or anything and Quiz helped me alot out on the PSU to purchase.
But heres what I bought.
Notes: This is a UK website and the prices are constantly always changing.
Ebuyer.com
CPU - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/190673
Motherboard - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169532
Ram - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/178943
Graphics card - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/189741
Case - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/108280
I would suggest going with the one Quiz mentioned, this is a fairly good cheap case for the price, has back / front / side fan fittings although the case comes with no Fans so you have to purchase your own. Back and Side fans are both 80mm and the front can fit a 80 / 120mm.
It's fairly small so yes, suggest to probably purchase a different one
I purchased x3 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/23880 fans, give a good 2500-3000rpm and silent.
Also as I had help from Quiz with regarding a PSU I bought
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135514
Prices are always constantly going up and down so it's good to give it a browse before purchasing items from other sites you've seen.
mine all in all came too around £472, I already had a Monitor / Mouse / Keyboard / Dvd Drive / harddrive and windows 7 which I salvaged from my old computer till I have some extra cash to replace them.
Cheers guys a lot of similar stuff to what i was looking at so its good to know i was on the right track! I know novatech do free shipping which is pretty good!
Hopefully get something built soon, thanks for the advice!
I was not aware until today that AMD had slashed prices on the Phenom II X4 955. That will be about 20% faster than the Athlon II X4 I linked, which makes it at least worth considering--especially since it looks like prices on the processor I linked have since risen.
For what it's worth, the difference between AMD's 770 and 785G chipsets is basically that the latter has integrated graphics. You're not going to use the integrated graphics anyway, so you can just take whichever is cheaper.
That's a really, really cheap case and fans that Kokomobl linked. I have no idea if they're any good, but my guess would be that they aren't. The case I linked comes with a 120 mm fan and a 140 mm fan, both of which are pretty big. You could run the computer just fine with just those two fans pulling air out.
Reading the above posts prompted me to roughly cost out upgrades based on the detail provided. Any advice is welcome.
My aim is to upgrade my current components to improve graphics on Everquest2 (currently always on Profitui raid settings) and WOW WotLK (fps is about 20 atm) and be able to play WOW Cataclysm, GW2 and Old Republic in the future. I would also love to play Mass Effect 1 and 2, Dragon Age 1 and 2 and Starcraft 2.
Replacement components
Processor £107 AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Socket AM3
Motherboard £75 Asus M4A785TD-V EVO 785G
Memory £69 Corsair XMS3 TwinX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3
Video Card £112 HIS ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB
Hard Drive £44 Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 32MB Cache
Total £407
Retain the following component
Lian-Li V1000 case
Probably upgraded in the future unless advised otherwise
Should I alter the motherboard, memory and video card manufacturers, change the operating system, PSU, HDD and Monitor?
XP Home
Enermax Coolergiant 430W PSU purchased 6 Dec 04
(wiki quote generally 11years Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) for PSUs so a good few years left in it)
74GB Raptor 10k rpm, SATA 8MB cache HDD (my only HDD at the moment)
1 x CD RW, 1 x DVD player, 1 x 3.5” floppy drive, Logitech G11 keyboard, MS Habu and Trackball mice, 20" LG Flatron L206WU monitor, Sennheiser PC150 headphones with microphone
eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite v2.5
Calculation of 383 w for the above components and set up at 90% Thermal Design Power (TDP)
The point of the 785G chipset is the integrated graphics, which you won't use if you're also getting a discrete video card. You might be able to save a bit of money by going with a 770 chipset, which is basically the same thing minus the integrated graphics. That's just something to look into, and if the 770 chipset motherboards are more expensive than the 785G ones, then go ahead and get that motherboard. For what it's worth, AMD's modern chipsets are 800 series, so if you can find a good deal on an 870 chipset motherboard, that will probably be better.
If you replace most of the components, then Microsoft may or may not let you keep Windows XP with the same license. Do note that XP does not support DirectX 10 or 11 and never will.
I'd probably replace the power supply. You don't want to run a power supply until it fails, as it may well take other components with it. If you got six years out of it, then it had a good life, and was probably a pretty good power supply when you got it. Computers have transitioned to move nearly everything to the +12 V rail, and don't use the +5 V and +3.3 V rails much anymore, so your power supply was simply built for a different era, and I don't know how well it would cope with a modern computer. It may or may not have the necessary 8-pin CPU, 6-pin PCI-E, and SATA power connectors.
I don't see any reason to get a new floppy drive. I'd think the real choice would be between keeping what you have versus getting rid of it and not having a floppy drive at all.
CD/DVD combo drives are really cheap now. If the drives you have are SATA, I'd keep them. If IDE, a motherboard may not have room for both.
If you're happy with your keyboard, then keep it. Keyboards haven't advanced that much in the last 20 years, and they've been making good enough keyboards for a long, long time.
Likewise, if you're happy with your mouse, then keep it. If it's a mechanical ball mouse, then you might like a modern wired laser mouse better--and you can get laser trackballs, if you prefer that.
Similarly, if you're happy with your audio equipment, then keep it.
I'd keep your monitor as long as it works, too. The more interesting question is whether you'd like to buy another monitor and run both at once off of a single computer. It's very convenient to have two monitors running two different programs. For example, you can have a game running on one, and a spreadsheet on the other to keep track of what you're doing, or a browser opened to a wiki or fan site to try to figure out what you're doing. That's far more convenient than having to alt-tab between them.
Hard drives are designed to last 5 years. If your current hard drive is pushing up against that limit, then it's time to replace it. If you bought a Raptor last time, then you likely care about storage speed and may be interested to know about solid state drives.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
See the VelociRaptor at the bottom of those charts? That's basically what you have, except a couple of generations later with whatever improvements Western Digital could figure out in that time. And yes, longer bars are better.
Or an SSD might be out of your budget, as they run about $2/GB. Some people get a small SSD (~60 GB) for the OS and key applications and a larger hard drive for storage.
First of all thank you Quizzical for taking the time to write at some length to my post.
I noticed that Toms Hardware places the processor and graphics card near the top of the current ranking charts and Yougamers similarly with regards bang for buck. I will also look for the 870 chipset motherboard.
I appreciate the guidance on Windows 7 and PSU and will include those upgrades.
The hard drive is probably the area I am most unsure of because although I don't need much storage, I do appreciate a quick response while working or playing games. I had a read of http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=73087 as well, so it looks like I will go with your advice again.
My main question is what size of SSD to choose. I can manage with 60GB, but would appreciate more space (100/120GB would be better). This is a recent review of the market I found http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-ssd-trim,2705-22.html . I will need to do more research as these can get expensive.
Another monitor would be good, for the reasons you mention. I will have a read around... found LG M227WD for £181 which should do the trick, but welcome other suggestions. http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/monitors-and-projectors/monitors/lg-m227wd-605717/review
As a last note, I was reading that soon there will be UEFI http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/after-31-years-goodbye-to-bios-and.html and wondered if it will be just worth waiting a bit...months maybe, if the cost is right.
They've been trying to replace the BIOS for years, as it's so hacked together and so limited by various things that it's basically the electronic equivalent of being held together by copious amounts of string and duct tape. But it works with all the hardware out there, so manufacturers are terrified of moving to something new and losing compatibility in unpredictable ways. I don't think a widespread shift is imminent, and wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now, we're still trying to scrap the BIOS. I do hope that they're able to transition from BIOS to UEFI or something like it, but no company wants to be the first to adopt it and have to work out all the bugs itself.
Honestly, I don't know what monitor you should get.
-----
Solid state drives will help tremendously for load times with just about everything. People sometimes cite boot times because those are easy to measure, but those are also easy to get around by turning the computer on a few minutes before you expect to need it. What's a far bigger deal is getting rid of the constant delays where you have to wait a couple seconds here and half a second there. Think of it as the offline equivalent of reducing your ping times dramatically. Doubling your Internet connection's throughput would be nice, but cutting your ping times in half would be a whole lot nicer for most purposes.
Some games try to read stuff off of the hard drive to load things in the background while you're playing, rather than only doing that at loading screens. If coded well enough, the game can hide it and it isn't a problem. If the game is badly coded, this causes "hitching", as the frame rate stops for a fraction of a second while waiting for data off of the hard drive. Vanguard had a severe case of this. Intel showed off how it can be a problem with Assassin's Creed 2. An SSD can avoid this.
Anandtech has by far the best coverage for solid state drives. Tom's Hardware doesn't seem to know what to do with them. I mean, performance per watt under some artificial test? Really? Even for people who are going to put tens of thousands of them into a data center and obsess about power consumption, that's still a worthless measurement.
There are four major measurements for solid state drives. Pick any combination of sequential or 4K random, and reads or writes. For example, sequential reads is one of the four main measurements. Maybe you could make it six by breaking the random measurements into low queue depth and high queue depth, I guess, even if high queue depth will never happen on a desktop. What happens at high queue depth is very important for servers running databases, though. I suppose you could also break SSD performance down into fresh versus used, but used is really the only one that matters unless you're going to wipe the hard drive every week or so to keep it eternally fresh.
There are a lot of different tests that one could do, but they're all various combinations of these basic measurements. If one test decides to do 80% random reads and 20% random writes, another does 70/30, another 50/50, and another 10/90, do you really need four different tests for that? Just test random reads and random writes once each and be done with it. An SSD that is good at all of the basic measurements will also be good at all combinations of them.
Anyway, the basic situation is that everything is good at sequential reads and sequential writes. All hard drives are bad at random reads, while all SSDs are good at random reads. All hard drives are bad at random writes, while SSDs vary wildly at random writes. If you get an SSD that is good at random writes, then you have an SSD that is good at everything. I take the view that the difference between 20x and 50x as fast as a hard drive in random reads and writes isn't that important, as neither will make you sit there and wait. What matters is the difference between 20x and 1x, as it's the 1x that bottlenecks your system.
The performance of an SSD is mostly determined by the controller, though the speed of the NAND flash also has an effect. Actually, the capacity of the NAND flash has a far bigger effect than its speed, as one major reason why SSDs are so much faster than USB flash drives is that they can read from and write to many NAND flash chips in parallel rather than just one at a time. Once you go beyond every channel having its own flash chip, there's no further improvements from having more of them, though.
The four "good" controllers to consider are the Indilinx Barefoot, Intel second generation, Marvell's dual-core ARM, and SandForce SF-12** that they seem to have given a zillion different names to. The performance hierarchy goes like this:
Random reads: Marvell > Intel > SandForce > Indilinx
Random writes: SandForce ~ Marvell >> Intel >> Indilinx
Sequential reads: Marvell > SandForce ~ Intel > Indilinx
Sequential writes: SandForce > Marvell > Indilinx > intel
If you look at that and say, why would anyone want an Indilinx, it's because it's often cheaper, and they're all fast enough that there isn't a big difference between them. The Marvell controller is only faster than SandForce and Intel in sequential reads if you have SATA 3--and preferably SATA 3 in the chipset. If you want to go that route, you should get a motherboard with an AMD 800 series chipset, and probably 870, though you can look at 880G in case one happens to be cheaper.
Anyway, a few choices for your based on price. If about 55 GB of capacity is enough, here's one based on the Indilinx Amigos controller (basically a cut down Barefoot):
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/204304
Or here's one of about the same capacity based on the SandForce controller:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/225415
Or if you need a little over 100 GB, then this one based on the SandForce controller is the cheapest good one I could find, so there's no sense in paying more to get something slower:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/236497
If you get an SSD, you should get Windows 7. Windows XP doesn't know what to do with SSDs, as they didn't exist when it launched. For that matter, Indilinx and SandForce themselves wouldn't exist until several years after Windows XP launched. Intel and Marvell are much older companies, but probably didn't get an SSD division until around that time, either. Vista does somewhat better with SSDs than XP, but doesn't support TRIM, which is useful for preventing performance from degrading too much on an SSD as time passes. Windows 7 works just fine with an SSD, at least so long as you don't try to put them in a RAID array, which can still cause issues.