building a new pc

[Gary406]

i did have them both in yellow so A1 & B1, but it kept blue screening,. so now in A1 & A2 its running fine....

i reinstalled windows 7 64bit only yesterday. installed all 64 bit drivers and it seems to be super quick now, fingers crossed it stays that way


what sort of screen should i be buying ?

[OdinEidolon]

i did have them both in yellow so A1 & B1, but it kept blue screening,. so now in A1 & A2 its running fine....

i reinstalled windows 7 64bit only yesterday. installed all 64 bit drivers and it seems to be super quick now, fingers crossed it stays that way


what sort of screen should i be buying ?

Dual channel or not, it shouldn't blue screen. You mean it blue-screened after boot orbefore starting the OS?
You should run a memory test such as memtest86 to see if a memory module is corrupted. (It won't harm anything)

About the screen I do not know as I have a laptop and my desktop still has a cathode huge 17" monitor (it's so old that only really lightweight Linux distro can run on it), but you can check excellent screen reviews on bit-tech.net or other tech sites. I really trust BT staff.

People say W7 is a good OS, hope so for you. On my father's new (and powerful) laptop it gave a big bunch of problems and wasn't really what I would describe as a huge step forward from Vista. By the way it has the usual Windows problem that performance decreases with time, but I've heard it's not as bad as Vista and XP under this point of view.
My father decided to try a few Linux distros since he was pissed at W7 on his Dell, in the end he decided on Ubuntu (which I honestly do not like) since he really liked the Unity interface.

Good luck, have that memoty test it's only like 5 minutes.

[Gary406]

also is it best to buy a good sound card ? i use onboard sound ATM with a cheap 2.1 speakers.

i want to buy a good loud 2.1 speaker setup, but need to know if a sound card will make a difference or not ?

[OdinEidolon]

also is it best to buy a good sound card ? i use onboard sound ATM with a cheap 2.1 speakers.

i want to buy a good loud 2.1 speaker setup, but need to know if a sound card will make a difference or not ?

It depends on your motherboard (on the audio chipset it uses), but usually no, it won't make any difference as the bottleneck will still be the speakers, 2.1 good or not.

If you get a decent set of headphones (>80£) then it may be worth it, but for common speakers just don't bother.
This applies to 95% of decent modern motherboards.

[lozz]

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/24-acer- ... 0cd-m2-2ms

think i will be getting this monitor...

ihad one of them mate,
idont rate them,
go for a sony Monitor you carnt go wrong with them,
im not impressed with Acer stuff its gone abit cheap and Nasty since the logo change from Benq to acer,
asdas have been throwing Acer stuff out cheap for the past 2 years or so,

[gumby6371]

When it comes to sound cards I personally wouldn't bother unless you're really into your music and listen to everything at full cd bitrate, if you listen to MP3 you've already drastically reduced the quality so a top notch sound system will only highlight the lower sound quality.
That sounds like I have a downer on MP3 but i don't, my entire music collection is encoded to 128 bit MP3, I just think that 99% of people will be happy with 128 bit encoding, onboard sound and a £30-40 set of 2.1 speakers.
If you do decide you 'NEED' a soundcard, which ever model you choose make sure the motherboard you're fitting it to has a nice big gap between the PCI slot and the CPU.

I really upset someone recently who parted with £250 for a soundcard and speakers only for me to tell them the clicking and popping noises were due to the soundcard being too close to the CPU and they hadn't got enough PCI slots to move it any further away

[OdinEidolon]

When it comes to sound cards I personally wouldn't bother unless you're really into your music and listen to everything at full cd bitrate, if you listen to MP3 you've already drastically reduced the quality so a top notch sound system will only highlight the lower sound quality.
That sounds like I have a downer on MP3 but i don't, my entire music collection is encoded to 128 bit MP3, I just think that 99% of people will be happy with 128 bit encoding, onboard sound and a £30-40 set of 2.1 speakers.

I do not consider myself an audiophile, but I just can't stand 128bit MP3s with some music. Pinkfloyd or De André for example, I listen them only in FLAC lossless, I just think they lose half their magic with 128bit MP3s. 256bits are better but with a decent pair of headphones and a good music player (certainly not something with an apple on it ) you can definitely feel the difference.
That said, Gary, most 2.1 audio systems will perform as a bottleneck even with 128bit MP3s, so the sound card shouldn't be on your list.

[lozz]

Inever bother with soundcards.
ithink Most M/Boards onboard are pretty good,
The AsRock does me fine, ijust make up my own Audio leads and Run the Pc through a Kardon Amp , iHate pc Speakers Nasty Tinny things,

[Gary406]

old post but ive now sold my old amd machine and im gonna build a new machine.

my new machine ---
based on a gigabyte motherboard
intel i3 3.1ghz cpu
8gb ddr3 (1600) ram
750gb sata 2 hdd
dvd recorder

built this in a nice black micro atx tower for £256.41

[highlander]

Nice job!

Where'd you get that? I'm thinking of building myself a new rig.

[Gary406]

from scan mate http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware

i live about 5 miles from this shop . its the only 1 in uk....

[Gary406]

i wanted a laptop (thats the reason i sold my pc)

but price of laptops = £350+ for intel i3 with 4 gig ram

it would be silly not to make a new pc at this spec ..

[teamster1975]

See if you can stretch to an i5 cpu Gary!

[Gary406]

u got me thinking now teamy.... if i cut back the ram to 4gb which is still more then enough i save £20.

the i5 is only £50 more so in theory i will only be adding £30 to upgrade to i5 .

and loosing 4 gb or ram wont make any difference cos 4gb will be same as 8gb for what i use it for...

[highlander]

Easier to upgrade RAM later on than it is to upgrade the processor, so go for the best processor you can manage.