Building a new PC

[Justin]

Found a new Shuttle ready built for £199. Intel (oh well) E5300 2.6 Dual Core, 50Gb HD, 4Gb RAM. I know its not as good as building with seperate graphics card but I reckon it would do the job as well as my P4.

I think it's VGA only with single output as well.

Justin

[bms]

50gb hard drive???? Surely 500gb?

[Justin]

Oops, yes 500Gb!

I asked about putting in an SSD and a 40Gb (Yes, 40 this time!) would be £80 extra.

Justin

[bms]

40gb will soon get filled up with other files. If you're going for this then I'd suggest a 500gb external usb drive for backing up files. I have this on our main pc with a small dos batch file for backing up files to the other drives (one spare internal and another external drive). The batch file just checks for new files created on the main pc (within a specific directory and sub-directories) and backs them up to the other drive.

[Justin]

Yes, I have a couple of large external drives so 40Gb would be plenty. That said, the standard HD would probably be quick enough, no need to spend anymore, I think £199 is a good deal having looked around.

Justin

[JSR]

Yes, I have a couple of large external drives so 40Gb would be plenty. That said, the standard HD would probably be quick enough, no need to spend anymore, I think £199 is a good deal having looked around.

Justin

That's kind of how I work. My netbook has just 12GB of internal drive space (4GB on C:, 8GB on D:) but that's more than plenty for my purposes. Barely 5GB is used up with Windows and apps.

My portable apps and immediate documents are on a 16GB SD card (mirrored nightly to a duplicate card), and my accessible-but-less-immediate files are on two 320GB USB drives (host-powered so they're accessible in the event of a mains power failure). Everything is backed up onto a 1TB external drive in the event that something goes wrong. "Mission critical" data (that is the work I do on a consultancy basis) goes off-site once a week on a CD or DVD.

If my netbook ever needs replacing, there's nothing critical actually on it so it could be swapped out with very little downtime.

[Justin]

CPU
Am I right in thinking to most users there is little benefit to quad core overduel core and that not many applications take advantage of the extra 2 cores?

MEMORY
If the mobo will take DDR3 1800Mhz, am I better to put in 4Gb of same memory or 8Gb of slower memory?

OS
No point in putting 4Gb+ in if I'm running WinXP Home, so do I upgrade to Win7 or stay with XP?

[GoldRapt]

quad core is limited as it makes a bottle neck .
BAsically it is wo dual cores using the same pathways.
I have a quad core and my mate who owns a com[puter shop told me i had wasted my money.
XP wont use anything over 3gb allegedly !

ALso, I have twin geforece video cards using sli mode and 12 months on they are a waste of money as nvidia have superceeded two cards with a new single card.
Its all a mine field really,.

[Justin]

Yeah, just reading up on the net. The slower quad core could probably be overclocked to match the slower duel core but the duel core has 6Gb L3 cache which I think is a benefit. Most software won't exploit the duel core but video and photo editing should, swings and roundabouts really. The duel core would probably run cooler.

Tis true, XP won't see over 3Gb so I think it's time to go to Win7.

I don't think a huge graphics card is needed, seems more of a benefit to get everything else right, more RAM, quicker processor etc. Not playing games which is where you seem to need massive graphics cards.

Something else I'd not really thought about until now is moving uo to 64bit OS over current 32 bit.

[GoldRapt]

I play call of duty... or try too