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Post by Pass The Towel on Nov 9, 2006 22:37:05 GMT
Well my graphics card on my laptop (dell inspiron 8500) fried for the second time last week, and I'm not paying for dell to fix it this time so it looks like I'm out of action again! I've decided however to go ahead and build my own PC for the first time. I remember reading some hardware-type discussions on here (TS Jane??) so if I post the spec up once I'm done would you guys in the know assess it for GW compatibility? ;D On the other hand, as I've bought nothing yet, if you have any suggestions, that would be great too ^^ Thanks all, and hope everyone is enjoying Elona (+ Tyria/Cantha) while my characters are hibernating.
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Post by Zalis on Nov 9, 2006 23:43:53 GMT
Yeah, sure. I'm sure we can help you get the right stuff.
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Post by Tanin'iver BlindDragon on Nov 10, 2006 8:49:44 GMT
Building your own PC is fun, I've built all mine, but sadly it's not the cheapest way anymore. You can get a better specification for the same money by going for a ready made one.
That said, I will still be building my own for my next one. Let us know if there is any specific advice you want. What kind of budget do you have?
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Dana Hawkeye
Ally
I have many leather-bound books
Posts: 390
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Post by Dana Hawkeye on Nov 10, 2006 11:28:39 GMT
Towel - Building one or having one built is the 'only way' of having a computer.
I am currently on my fourth generation build since Windows 95. I generally have a new one made by my local PC company 'Island Computers', about every 3 or 4 years.
They know me and what I like out of a computer so the arrangement works really well. They are always on hand if and when things go wrong, very rarely (touch wood) I am glad to say.
Regards Dana Hawkeye - Ranger
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Post by Twisted Sister Jane on Nov 10, 2006 15:57:55 GMT
Good luck Towel, and I am sure a lot of us in the Scouts will be glad to help you.
Today, it is very easy to build your own PC. It is pretty obvious which components fit together, and the only difficulty is deciding what you want in your machine, where to buy it from, and what manufacturer to use. I did a lot of research online before building the machine I am currently using (and again before building the one for Kara), and this was looking at sites like Toms Hardware, and then posting questions on forums.
The main trick first is to decide what CPU you want, and then what motherboard for that CPU. In that decision will come things like what kind of RAM you want, what kind of special features, in/out stuff, bus speeds, etc. Then it all fits into some sort of case, and that decision will bring you to cooling, how many fans, etc. Then there is a hardisk that is fast, and pretty soon the entire machine is specified.
Then you need to decide what manufacturers to use. A graphic card or a motherboard having certain chips or features are produced by many different factories, and these vary in prices.
An alternative today is find a place that will put your computer together, but will let you specify just about completely what is in it.
Whatever way you go, just ask any questions!
Hmmm, my PC is starting to make some noise right now......
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Post by Radicc Tyranntt on Nov 10, 2006 16:15:52 GMT
Well my graphics card on my laptop (dell inspiron 8500) fried for the second time last week, and I'm not paying for dell to fix it this time so it looks like I'm out of action again! I've decided however to go ahead and build my own PC for the first time. I remember reading some hardware-type discussions on here (TS Jane??) so if I post the spec up once I'm done would you guys in the know assess it for GW compatibility? ;D On the other hand, as I've bought nothing yet, if you have any suggestions, that would be great too ^^ Thanks all, and hope everyone is enjoying Elona (+ Tyria/Cantha) while my characters are hibernating. One dude I go to school with has a Dell 8500 and it caught on fire last week. Hurray for dell!
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Post by Radicc Tyranntt on Nov 10, 2006 16:29:41 GMT
Building your own PC is fun, I've built all mine, but sadly it's not the cheapest way anymore. You can get a better specification for the same money by going for a ready made one. I don't consider commodity grade parts to be better. Why do you think dells break all the time. LiteOn cd-rom anyone? How about the super fast Fujitsu hard drive? Not to mention the Dell bios. Omg the sucks. They are not trying to make their money directly off of selling you the computer their profit margins are created off of selling you crazy different levels of warrenties, or two having you pay crazy amounts for the individual repairs since you didn't buy the warrenty. I've never had one computer I built myself actually break on me. I have had one computer die, but it got fried by lightning even so continued to work for about 6 months after that. I fix dells junk pretty much everyday on campus. Point being if your getting a dell get the warrenty or resell it within 3 years cause its gonna break. Oh and by the way dual core doesn't mean a whole lot. The intel dual core is about 10% faster the pentium-m of the same clock rate. and the dual core 2's that everybody is trying to claim is all awsome is only 4% faster than the regular dual core. My point being don't listen to marketing they are a bunch of liars. Just like the people in guild wars they have no shame either. Ug, too much knowledge about stuff nobody ever cared about. I want to go back to bed.
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Post by Pass The Towel on Nov 10, 2006 16:47:19 GMT
One dude I go to school with has a Dell 8500 and it caught on fire last week. Hurray for dell! Lol! Hooray indeed... Thanks for the replies all. Dana: I am going to have a go at doing it myself, for better or for worse! I've had one built before where we basically agreed on a spec and they put it together, but I want the experience (and learning) of actually doing it for myself. Jane: Basically I don't know what I want, except that I want it to last and handle GW (and any other game I might buy - though I don't play many) well, so budget is going to have to be on the higher side. I'll read some websites, forums, magazines etc and go from there. Hopefully everything will just fit together, the only thing I'm a bit apprehensive about is the cooling / clock speeds etc, and selecting a good motherboard. Raddic: Yeah I'm kind of sick of Dell now. It was good while it lasted, but their out of warranty service pricing is $$$ and only comes with a 3 month warranty then you have another $$$, etc etc. Now I just have to decide if it's worth buying the card from a 3rd party and risk installing (read: destroying) it myself. Thanks again, will keep you posted!
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Post by Zalis on Nov 10, 2006 17:51:26 GMT
Putting it together isn't that hard, but you may want to have someone more knowledgeable help you at that step. I've had Radicc come over in the past to help me when I wasn't sure about some stuff. I know more now, but I'm still not 100% confident w/ all of it. Some folks swear by Intel and others by AMD cpu's. I've been buying AMD processors for my past several systems, and I recommend them. And they're going to be a much cheaper solution than most Intel deals you'll find. (after ram and all, and depending which generation of cpu you buy) The AMD AM2 socket CPUs are the best they've got right now, which come in single or dual-core. Intel's got the Core 2 Duo or whatever. Some games have issues with dual cores, but those are being fixed now that they've been out for over a year. As far as graphics cards go, I don't recommend going SLI. (which is two linked cards) Just buy one fast card, since SLI (nvidia's 2-card solution) & Crossfire (ATI's) still have kinks to work out. Some games releasing these days have issues with fully utilizing the power of two cards. But that's not to say that all do... Most folks w/ SLI buy two medium-grade cards instead of the expensive stuff, but it depends on your budget. Obviously two cards are more expensive than one, depending on their market newness etc. BFG and XFX are good brands for Nvidia cards, while I hear Sapphire and Asus are good for ATI. Asus makes Nvidia cards too, but I've had some issues w/ that. Whatever card you get, I recommend getting one with at least 256MB of memory. 512 or higher if you're aiming higher and willing to spend a bunch. The new 768MB Nvidia 8800GTXs are coming out, if you feel like blowing $600+ for top-of-the-line performance. I recommend at least 1GB of ram, though I'm loving my 2GB. It depends what you do, but chances are you'd upgrade from 1 to 2 GB in a couple years anyway, so... It depends on what cpu you get. Since the DDR2 etc is going to run you much more than the ram for an older generation cpu solution. DDR400 is much cheaper if you get an AMD Athlon 64 or X2. As far as memory brands, I recommend Corsair & OCZ. If you're going cheaper, maybe Patriot or Crucial. A 7200 RPM hard drive is going to do you fine, but some folks buy the faster (but smaller) 10,000 RPM drives for gaming. It's up to you, but these fast drives do reduce load times and the occasional hard drive lag you can get on slower drives. Sound comes on-board w/ your motherboard most of the time. But I tend to buy sound cards, or have in the past, because they usually offer better sound processing and versatility. (depending on your speaker setup etc) The Sound Blaster Audigy line has been good to me in the past, so look there if you're getting one. Just remember that slow on-board sound or a cheapo sound card can really bring your gaming to a halt... so buy wisely there even if it doesn't seem important. Power Supplies... You've gotta have enough power for what you're doing. I recommend Thermaltake, Enermax, and Antec for PSU brands. You'll probably want a 500 watt or higher if you're buying top-end stuff, but 500 is more than enough for most folks. (Mine's 495w) A case for your computer... That's completely up to you. Some folks really don't care about the case. I didn't used to, but I've found that one with good airflow can really help out with temperatures. (and quiet is a good thing too) You can find super cheap solutions for around $30; moderate for $75 or so; top-end anywhere from $100-200. Antec and Thermaltake are decent brands, depending on your tastes. Lian-Li makes some sweet cases too if you're willing to pay a little more. As an aside... For the love of Dwayna! Don't house your computer in a "computer desk" if it's closed in! Bad airflow = high temps. And lastly, make sure you buy hardware that isn't going to bottleneck. Example: Getting the fastest dual core CPU you can get but only buying a low-end graphics card. (like an Nvidia 6100 or 6200, yuck) You'll have plenty of processing power but be weak on power for gaming. (all of my estimated prices are US currency)
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Post by Twisted Sister Jane on Nov 10, 2006 17:56:13 GMT
When I put Kara's computer together, I was faced with the question of what hardware to choose. All this new stuff, and even newer stuff around the corner. I selected an AMD 3800+ CPU, not a dual core, just the normal one, because specs showed it was much faster with games than the 3500+ or 3200+ while the price was not much higher. I chose AMD for the first time in my life because the performance on gaming tests was great, and it was much cheaper than equivalent performance Intels. And it is a good choice, so far. I decided not to buy dual core or anything that is ultra new because of the price, and because gaming tests (see Toms Hardware) do not show that they are very much better for gaming.
I chose the mother board to fit the CPU of course, and I chose one a tad better than I really need (one that can take two graphic cards in an SLI arrangement) but I only did this because the board came with passive cooling for its chip set, and the other alternatives had reputably noisy cooling fans. It is an ASUS 32SLI or something like that. Takes DDR ram, not the DDR2 ram. But I think it is fast enough for the while.
The graphic card is the biggest issue, and can be the most expensive. I chose an Asus 7900GT which seems to work well performance-wise, but after the fact I read a lot of horror stories about it. My only beef is that the cooling fan is rather noisy if it needs to run much up above 20%, but fortunately it stays at a max 40% when gaming.
Everything else is just small stuff, what hardisk, what cabinet, etc.
One thing to note when buying an already-put-together PC, is what components AND what manufacturers of those components, are inside. I could have done a lot cheaper buying a ready made model with the same basic components, but then I would not have had an Asus mother board or an Asus graphic card or an Antec power supply, but instead some not very well known brands.
Regarding laptops vs. stationary machines, I never could figure out how cooling could be such a major issue with a standard machine, but then no one ever seems to talk about cooling problems with a laptop.
Hope this helps.
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Post by Radicc Tyranntt on Nov 10, 2006 19:41:28 GMT
I wouldn't recommend trying to work on a laptop yourself if you never worked on a computer before. Laptops are worse to work on than desktops because everything is crammed in there. If budget is going to be the thing your going for probably want to go AMD on the processor. AS far as speed AMD vs Intel your not gonna see much difference but your gonna pay more for speed on you intel chips. Amd has a risc style approach but still uses the same instruction set as an intel chip does. Windows wouldn't work on it if they didn't use intels instructions set. Intel processors use microcode build right into the chip to make up for the fact that their design sucks. So its pretty much like having a risc processor built into a cisc processor. Anyway big overhead is the point. Graphics cards I'd say go to Tom's hardware and see whichever one provides the best performance for what you can afford. Thats what I always do. Seems to tend to be an ati card though. Oh well less power consumption that way. Euros are not running 110 power so you may not care. Funny how electrical systems are setup since 12v dc is all you need. Anyway if its any help I pretty much listed whats in my computer back on this thread: scoutsoftyria.proboards41.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1160708143I'd say my junk is about a mid-range definately not a high end at all. The only reason I even upgraded was my old pc got fried. I probably won't need to buy anything new for at least 5 years if not more. If your only playing guildwars my system is overpowered. If your playing some other 3d games though it will get you by. I don't see any point in buying the newest thing out there because its just gonna be obsolete soon enough anyway. I don't know where to recommend actually buying stuff from since I shop USA. The easiest way to start out getting your stuff if your not sure is to get a barebones system. If you got to someplace like newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com and check out their barebones systems that would at least you give you something to reference. Picking out your junk is the hardest part of building your own computer. At this point in the game you probably want to go for a pci express setup. Depending on what you go for I'm guessing anywhere from $400 - 800 for a whole system, but thats just the box and what goes in it. A good monitor is important too.
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Post by Zalis on Nov 10, 2006 21:58:50 GMT
I recommend the Viewsonic V922 if you're looking to buy an LCD display for gaming. Excellent bang-for-buck ratio since it has a 2ms response time. The lower the response time number, the less "ghosting" you'll see when things move. (blurring and after-image when the screen's moving fast) Mine has 4ms and I never see any of that.
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Post by Pass The Towel on Nov 11, 2006 1:39:50 GMT
What can I say, you guys are so helpful. Will definitely be taking all of this on board I already have a monitor but I suspect it's crappy - I'll live with it until I notice it being crappy however.
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Post by Twisted Sister Jane on Nov 11, 2006 8:23:46 GMT
I recommend the Viewsonic V922 if you're looking to buy an LCD display for gaming. Excellent bang-for-buck ratio since it has a 2ms response time. The lower the response time number, the less "ghosting" you'll see when things move. (blurring and after-image when the screen's moving fast) Mine has 4ms and I never see any of that. I am still using CRT monitors so I am no expert in this field. But I did some netsurfing about monitors, looking at some reviews, and was quite shocked about all this business about refresh speeds for flat screens. You need to be careful. The reviews I read said some not so good things about Viewsonic. It sort of is like this: To get a response time means you measure how long it takes to go from one state to another for a "pixel". Let us say to go from black to white. It takes time physically for the state of the "pixel" to change, either from black to white or white to black or black to yellow or whatever. In order to speed this up, the manufacturers of these monitors build in an "overshoot". If you know anything about basic control theory you would understand what this means. If you have a temperature regulated water tap in your home, and you increase its temperature, it will first "overshoot" and get too hot before it settles down to the temperature it should be at according to the new setting. It is the same with these "pixels". The overshoot means they are designed to get "too bright" at first, in order to increase the speed to get to how bright they should be. The problem here is that this overshoot can cause visual distortion. According to what I read, this all means that a flat screen that is good for one purpose may suck for another. A screen that seems to work well for gaming may produce terrible results when seeing a DVD video, and vice-versa. What it all comes down to is that when you consider a flat screen monitor, you need to consider more than this "refresh rate" number. You need to consider the algorithm that is behind achieving this refresh rate, and different manufacturers will handle things in different ways. This is not to say the ViewSonic is a bad choice. I never had one so I cannot say. But what I read in the article I found, it seemed to me that ViewSonics technology is currently a bit lacking, at least for an allround screen that can handle all purposes. I am in desperate need myself for a screen, am still using a 10 year old KFC 17" monitor, heh heh, rather small, rather too much on the dark side. But the "refresh rate" is tops!
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Post by Twisted Sister Jane on Nov 11, 2006 8:33:24 GMT
There is a lot of good advise in the responses by Radicc and Zalis, Towel. Just to add: do try to get a sound card and not make use of the sound chip that comes on your motherboard. According to reviews, that takes a significant amount of your CPU power and you can save this and get just as good results with an inexpensive sound card. Another thing is to consider the graphic card technology that you want. Things get expensive quickly, but there is a major difference in what you are looking at due to the in-the-card technologies. Kara's GW world with her 7900GT is amazing compared to my older Ti4200, despite the fact that the Ti4200 gives also an amazing display. The newer and more expensive cards simply allow the newer textures and technologies to be shown to you. If you are in Europe, check out some internet sites for seeing what is available. A good way to start is to find an online shop that offers you a complete system, but lets you fine-tune it by exchanging parts. You can see what they seem to offer as standard systems, and see what else can be used and what it costs. If you can handle a bit of Danish or can do without the words, check out www.edbpriser.dk. This is a site that maintains a database of computers and components, and you can browse to a particular component and see the cheapest 10 shops that sell it online. I use this a lot to get an idea of what something should cost, and there are a number of shops that will let you "build your own system" using their site.
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Post by Tanin'iver BlindDragon on Nov 11, 2006 8:58:41 GMT
The thing about response times for LCD monitors became a bit overblown on tech sites. There isn't a lot of information there, but check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_time for more info. In short, anything below 20 ms is fine. My screen has 16 ms, and I've never seen any kind of ghosting or smearing, even on very fast action scenes.
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Post by Zalis on Nov 11, 2006 19:38:21 GMT
I love my quick response time for gaming. But my PC is mainly used for that as well as Design & just web browsing etc. If I watch movies or videos, I'm sending that feed to my tv so it doesn't really matter. But I haven't noticed it being bad on the LCD... I just don't watch stuff on it anyway.
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Post by Pass The Towel on Dec 12, 2006 14:46:28 GMT
Just to let you know, my work in progress is here: komplett.co.uk/k/shoplist.asp?mode=receive&si=410903&su=A801C8D0-562F-4917-B43B-15E4C0689C63That'll be updated as I have time to play with it. Things I still have to do: Hard Disk Graphics Card Sound Card - Asus motherboards look like they have good onboard sound, not sure how much this affects gaming. There are a couple of memory, mainboard and PSU options I've left in as this is still very much a rough spec. Anyway it's there if anyone wants to take a look, any comments are appreciated
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Post by Twisted Sister Jane on Dec 13, 2006 16:02:18 GMT
I have Asus boards, but take my advice and disable the onboard sound and go for a sound card. They use too much of your CPU power. Getting a card will just relieve that, and a sound card is not expensive unless you are into some elite sound editing. A simple one from Creative would do, but I bought one for Kara's machine that gives superb sounds, and it was not too expensive. If I find out what it was, I'll post it here.
For PSU, I once asked on a forum about what to buy, and a nice guy gave a detailed lesson on what to look for in PSU ratings. It isn't all about the size, or at least not the size given in total watts of power. What is important is the amperage supplied for each of the various lines. To do it correctly, you could look at what your equipment requires, for the video card, for the CPU, for the fans, etc., and buy a PSU that supplies this. Try to do some surfing for some information about this, it sounds like it could be important, because a lot of cheaper PSUs are just sold on the basis that they have some total power rating, but then may not do the job for you.
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Post by Pass The Towel on Dec 13, 2006 16:57:19 GMT
Thanks, Jane
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