PC PC building & spec check

550ti, and 55 if it exsited? Are no good really anyway, something like 560 or the ati equiv 6850 would be minium.


Of course newer cards out except for the new Nvidia mid range aka the GTX660. The GTX670, GTX680 out but you looking $480 odd for GTX670. ATI have there mid range cards out aka 7850, 7870 starting about $270...BUT Nvidia are killing ati in this newest genertion race. Im waiting for the GTX660 myself for my next upgrade, should be out by august. Low power use and decent upgrade for my 6850 that is getting near 2 year old.

By the way I bought on of those yamakasi 2560x1440 IPS monitors off ebay from korea...they are amazing for $300. I got no dead pixels too.


You dont need an i7 either unless your into multi tasking and associated bench marking. i5 performs equal if not better in all games to its i7 counter part. The bonus is i5 is cheaper. i7 just have hyper threading. I'll propose a solid midrange build that will out peform that and be alot cheaper from PCGC for ya this weekend.. Do you want a SSD hard drive?

Thanks for the extra info Tek. I don't know jack about graphics cards.

Is that even a question!? Of course he wants a SSD. I don't know how we got anything done without them.
Prices are very reasonable now too.

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart&sort=20 Something like that would be better than the alien PC, I havent included a SSD drive only a storage drive. Im not up to date on SSD. Possiably even getter a better GPU as well, the 560 better than 550 series still though.

Sorry Oz that link worked when I tried from here, must of been stored in my cache or something anyway.

Something like this would be heaps better for the price $1099 http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1411&products_id=20809 HAs a kick arse Cpu and a SSD. It has on board vid but for gaming It needs a GPU which would cost about $150-$300 (build above has a good PSU so will take what you want GPU wise) which you could ask them to put in. Take a look at some of there other pre builds too.

You pay alittle more with there pre builds than if you bought the parts indivually, I cant see an option at PCCG for them to assemble your own picked items. I know MSY do but they dont post they only in the capital cities really.

To put GPU prices in perspective the 550 in the 1st build u linked is $125 @ PCCG http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=193_1201

Looks alright Aussie. Do you want more than 128GB of storage though? Maybe get a standard 2tb HDD for general crap as well? Or do you have an external HDD already? All in all though, nice budget machine!

I would put a storage drive in anyway, like Chev said, for a number of reasons.
1. 128Gb doesn't go far these days.
2. While SSD's have come a long way, they don't have the same life as a platter drive and have been known to fail.
3. With an external HDD you've then got a bottleneck caused by USB. The drive can only be accessed at maybe 1/3 the speed as it could if it were internal.

Some other minor things IMO..
- Could probably get away with a lower wattage power supply, 600W maybe?
- The CPU cooler is a nice-to-have, not really a necessity. Unless you're doing a lot of hardcore gaming or video conversion I wouldn't bother. I've found the stock cooler to be fine.
- 8GB RAM would be enough. Anything more than that is wasted unless you're using virtualization.

Of course this is all IMO. Downgrading those parts isn't going to save you a ton of $$ anyway.

My hair is a bird, Flood. Your opinions are invalid.

Seriously though, what Flood says is true. Get an internal SATA HDD mate.

Yeah Aussie, if she's going to be playing many games I'd definately go for an internal hard drive, unless you've got a 256GB or larger SSD they're not really ideal for running games from, load times are great but you'll forever be uninstalling old to free up space, games are huge these days and large SSD's are bloody expensive.

you can get decent PCs for well under $1000 if you look around and maybe custom build. my friends brother got a laptop that can run BF3 on HIGH for $600, the same friend recently got a laptop for $800 which would be better than that with an i7 processor.
two other friends got good pcs for around that bracket as well, which is more than enough to handle iRacing.

That's always out dated,
e.g. 12k built has Samsung S27A950D 27" 3D Monitor for = $804
Shopping Express has it for = $425
Price match at Officeworks less 5% = $403.75 near enough to 1/2 the price hey? (thinkin of getting it at the mo, runs 120hz)

Always cheaper to do custom, why pay someone else's markup & labor etc, very easy to do, lots of tutorials & help online if your a noob, Hell if you live near me I'll do it for ya for a carton

Best value graphics card at the mo seems to be the Geforce 2gb GTX670 (clockable) = $395 http://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=Geforce GTX670&spos=1

Just a heads up guys that "AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta Driver" is out, it's fixed the updater issue from 12.8 and hopefully fixed the flash bugs from 12.10

I recommend the 2nd one "with .NET 4 Support" - http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst1211betadriver.aspx

I also recommend using this to update any other old drivers - http://download.cnet.com/SlimDrivers-Free/3000-18513_4-75279940.html it can occasionally show that an installed driver is newer than the one its suggesting so not perfect but better than spending a couple of hours searching through device manager etc


Cheers!