Advice and new system required

[j1mgg]

I am looking to build a new desktop machine.

Reasons being, I am hopefully going to be starting my 70-290 mcsa exam and taking a couple of courses for photography as I have recently got a dslr.

My current system is amd 5600+, 4 x 1gb ddr2 pc6400, 90GB SSD, 2TB Sata, Radeon HD3600 Graphics card, BDR Optical drive and a standard HP case.

With my studies I am guessing I will need more Ram and maybe a bit more processing power to run server 2003 and a few machines using VM software. With the cost of DDR2 ram i thought iw ould just upgrade to DDR3 system board.

I have retail win7 32 and 64 discs so an OS isnt needed wither

Hopefully should have about £300 maybe a bit more depending on how much I can flog my current machine for.

Any ideas as I have kept up with any of the new technology and who is leading the war between intel and amd.

Some stuff I have been looking at

G-Skill 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz RipjawsX Memory Kit.. | Ebuyer.com

Corsair Vengeance PC Memory 8GB 2x4GB DDR3 SDRAM DIMM 240-pin 1600MHz CL9 XMP | eBay

and possibly a new amd3 processor

All help much appreciated

 

[little_pob]

To be honest £300 is a difficult price point for what you want.

Even recycling the SSD, 2TB HDD and BDR drives from your current system, the lowest I'd go for is the Intel 2500K, Z86 1155 motherboard, 8GB DDR3, HD 6850 and Coolermaster 330 + 500W PSU combo, but that still comes out at ~£430.

The i5 2500K does have on-chip graphics, meaning you could leave out the graphics card; for now. Certainly it'll save you ~£100 on this build. But with PhotoShop still the de facto choice, and it having GPU acceleration, I would advise that you save for a HD 6850 or GTX 560/560 Ti.

Of course you could go for something like this: Zoostorm Desktop PC - Desktops | Ebuyer.com + G-Skill 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz RipjawsX Memory Kit.. | Ebuyer.com + XFX HD 6770 1GB GDDR5 VGA DVI HDMI PCI-E Graphics Card | Ebuyer.com for ~£305. You'd then swap the 320GB and DVDRW across to your old rig for selling on, whilst keeping the SSD, 2TB HDD and BDR drive. However, if your photography hobby takes off you'll probably be upgrading in about 18 months...

 

[j1mgg]

Thanks for the quick reply.

That was the processor a guy at work advised. I was looking at the amds but said they are pretty much behind on processor wise but still good for gpus.

Where do you think is best to sell the following?

P4 3ghz, 2gb ram, 80gb hdd, cd/rw, nvidia GeForce 6200 256mb with xp pro coa

Laptop core 2 duo 1.86ghz, 4 gb ram, 120gb, DVD/RW, WIN7 pro coa and office 2007 pro coa

Machine above amd5600+, 4gb ram, 320gb hdd, DVD/RW , RADEON HD 3600, win 7 pro coa

Is it best to sell the desktop as one or to break them up and best place to sell them?

Cheers mate and I will be back for more advice soon

 

[little_pob]

Probably get around £100 for the P4 system on ebay.

Laptop looks to be worth £230+ from ebay buy it now prices.

AMD 5600 system might be best stripped down. Sell the CPU, mobo and RAM as a bundle. Have the case, PSU and DVD drive as a separate bundle. But sell the HDD and GPU separately.

 

[oneman]

If you can spend a bit more then you can pick up a 2500K + Z68 motherboard + 8GB RAM for around £300 (using Aria super special page).

You mentioned that you want to re-use HP case, does it take standard mATX motherboards ? And make sure your PSU is up to the job as well.

As mentioned the 2500k has a 3000HD integrated video which will be fine for everything except game play. It should also over clock to around 4GHz if you need extra speed.

As mentioned previously photoshop supports GPU acceleration but adobe do support quicksync though I have no idea if quicksync is supported within photoshop. Regardless, the benchmark data for 2500k using photoshop indicate definitely make it seem more then usable with an extra GPU.

As for selling you old system, P4 you will be struggling to get £40. The laptop maybe £150 to £175 and. The AMD 5600 base unit might be worth splitting else around £100 to £125.

 

[j1mgg]

At the moment looking at

I5 2500K
MSI P67A-GD53(B3)
2(possibly 4) x 4GB gskill ripjaws 1600mhz
Gelid Tranquillo rev 2 cooler

This is just a quick look after seeing this months custom pc mag

Will probably do with the onboard hd graphics for amonth or 2

Still looking at PSU and cases although may swing to a antec 100 or a coolmaster elite 430

 

[little_pob]

From a PhotoShop point of view 16GB of RAM is overkill. oneman and Exos should be able to advise is VM environments would benefit from this much.

Just to point out you cannot use the onchip graphics of the Sandy Bridge CPUs on the P67 chipsets. You'll need a discrete graphics card on building or the H61, H67 or Z68 chipset. If you don't intend to overclock go for the H6*, if you might overclock at a later date, grab a Z68 chipset mobo.

 

[j1mgg]

Definately looking to overclock.

Looks like i will use my current graphics card for a month and a half.

So as it stands looking at

Retail i5 2500k £150
MSI p67A-GD53 (B3) £96
Arctic Cooling Freezer i30 £30 also heard good thing about gelid tranquillo rev2 and the Be Quiet Dark rock advanced
8GB gskill ripjawx £40
Coolermaster Elite 430 £38
Coolermaster GX 650W PSU £35 when bought with the above case

Total £389, not really had a good hunt for prices yet, using ebuyer, arai, scan, overclockers, dabs and froogle(which is usually shite) would also like to hear of more places i might get a good price

Would like it if the 2 of you could have a quick look over and see what you think. If something is going to give me a 10% increase for about the same increase in price then i would be interested in hearing about it.

Thanks

 

[Exos]

From a PhotoShop point of view 16GB of RAM is overkill. oneman and Exos should be able to advise is VM environments would benefit from this much

I'm assuming here it's just VMWare Workstation; it depends on how many and what your running really, I was using VMW 7 with 4GB on my system prior to my upgrade and it killed my machine with just one OSX VM and 2GB allocated. Really 8GB as a minimum, but remembering that it reduces your host system memory when being utilised, generally more will give you better performance as you allocate memory within the VM itself.

I'm using 16Gb on my current setup.

 

[j1mgg]

Getting there.

Just realising that cases and psu arent cheap.

Was looking at the case in the earlier post as it gets decent write ups on ebuyer and you get £20 knocked off if you buy the psu. Just looking at tomshardware and it doesnt do too well in the tests. Antec 300 came first which isnt too bad plus it means i wouldnt have to shell out extra on fans as it comes with some. Now I am just lost in the world of PSUs and what rating to get. Looking to get 700W ish to try and future proof.

 

[little_pob]

You can pick up a case for £15, but the edges will be sharp and you'll probably be limited to a 12cm intake and 92cm exhaust.

I generally use this PSU calculator eXtreme Power Supply Calculator

However, keep an eye on the number of amps available on the 12v rail(s). A surprising number of current GPUs are close to the 12v rail amperage of many PSUs, and not just the cheap budget ones. That being said I generally stick to Corsair PSUs.

 

[oneman]

Are you sure that you want to be doing mcsa ? that is older certification based on windows 2003 technology. You might to be better off going for MCITP which is based on Server 2008.

If you are working on enterprise exams you will need to set up multiple servers to test AD replication and domains. Say two to three servers (@ 2GB each) and similar number of workstations (@ 1GB each), say 6 instances. But as you are not actually put much in the way of workload on the instances the 2500k will be fast enough. For memory, VM is pretty cleaver. When it sees the same O/S loaded on multiple instances it actually only loads read only files for one VM and provides a pointer in the other VM. So you should get by with just 8GB but if you have the extra cash then it wouldn't hurt to go to 16GB as prices aren't that high at the moment. You will probably find disk a limitation before you hit CPU or memory bottleneck.

 

[j1mgg]

Are you sure that you want to be doing mcsa ? that is older certification based on windows 2003 technology. You might to be better off going for MCITP which is based on Server 2008.

If you are working on enterprise exams you will need to set up multiple servers to test AD replication and domains. Say two to three servers (@ 2GB each) and similar number of workstations (@ 1GB each), say 6 instances. But as you are not actually put much in the way of workload on the instances the 2500k will be fast enough. For memory, VM is pretty cleaver. When it sees the same O/S loaded on multiple instances it actually only loads read only files for one VM and provides a pointer in the other VM. So you should get by with just 8GB but if you have the extra cash then it wouldn't hurt to go to 16GB as prices aren't that high at the moment. You will probably find disk a limitation before you hit CPU or memory bottleneck.

Going to do the upgrade exams when required. Our company stills runs on XP and 2003 and probably will do for another couple of years due to budget cuts. I Also have the books and cds at home aswell.

Looks like this will be the finished article and is a bit more than my £300 - £400

I5 2500 k £150 Aria
MSIP67A GD53 B£ £96 Ebuyer
G.skill Ripjaws XF3 16GB £80 Aria
Be Quiet Drak Rock advanced cooler £41 Aria
Antec 300 2 £55 ebuyer
XFX 750w Modular £90 ebuyer
Artic MX4 colling compound

Will use my current graphic card for amonth or 2 till I can afford a new one

Thanks for all your help and input