building a new pc

[406loon]

The quad core Phenoms are better than the 6 cores for gaming. The 6 cores are not worth the extra outlay. Plus they will be obsolete as the so called "Bulldozer" core cpus from AMD will be released soon. If you are building an AMD rig make sure it has a AM3+ mainboard. I prefer and have always trusted gigabyte. Dont buy Asus mainboards. 8/10 systems which come into my repairs department have knackered Asus boards fitted.

[jasper5]

May I hijack this thread for some advice please?

My PC is an HP Pavilion Media Centre PC m7000, it has 4gb of RAM (maximum amount) and runs XP Home.

I want to do photo processing using Lightroom 3 but the Lightroom crashes my PC all the time, same with my laptop which runs Windows 7 with 4 gb RAM, but not quite as bad.

I was wondering whether I could update the PC without it costing me a fortune or could anyone suggest something to build to replace the HP.

Not really bothered about the laptop, unless it might be cost effective to replace it with one that will run Lightroom, I sense not.

Thanks guys

[steve_earwig]

Running XP home there'd be no point in adding more ram as windows won't even see all you have now anyway.

I stuck "lightroom 3 crashes" in Google any got almost a quarter of a million results What are you doing when it crashes?

[lozz]

When iused to mess with pcs,
iused a programe called Si soft sandra,
dont know if this programe is still available, but it used to Bench mark pcs etc, and Give out info on what needs upgrading and what couid be upgraded etc,

ive stopped messin with pcs now as My father builds them iget him to sort mine as he can get all the parts at Trade price,

iused to buy an upgrade kit, before this, for around £175 and just use my old hard drive and dvd roms,
it was the cheapest option ifound, if you just go in and buy the parts sepratly there was a big diffence in price,

[FarmerPug]

can you upgrade the hard drive in a laptop easy and is these solid state ones much better

[steve_earwig]

Yes but I'd think it depends on your laptop how easy it is to get to. I was looking at SSDs and thinking how it would be good to have one as primary - keep it simple and have blisteringly fast start ups. Then I saw the bit about them only having a finite number of read/writes before they start dying.

[jasper5]

Running XP home there'd be no point in adding more ram as windows won't even see all you have now anyway.

I stuck "lightroom 3 crashes" in Google any got almost a quarter of a million results What are you doing when it crashes?

I was trying to edit a photo, trying to scroll through options but it kept crashing/freezing up.

I sometimes get the freezing up just after the PC has started up and I try to start Firefox or Outlook.

BTW, I have Canon Photo Professional on the PC which also crashes when trying to edit a photo, I also have this on my laptop, but it works fine on there.

[Gary406]

The quad core Phenoms are better than the 6 cores for gaming. The 6 cores are not worth the extra outlay. Plus they will be obsolete as the so called "Bulldozer" core cpus from AMD will be released soon. If you are building an AMD rig make sure it has a AM3+ mainboard. I prefer and have always trusted gigabyte. Dont buy Asus mainboards. 8/10 systems which come into my repairs department have knackered Asus boards fitted.

which would be best in amd phenom or athlon quad or intel i3 ?

[OdinEidolon]

Yes but I'd think it depends on your laptop how easy it is to get to. I was looking at SSDs and thinking how it would be good to have one as primary - keep it simple and have blisteringly fast start ups. Then I saw the bit about them only having a finite number of read/writes before they start dying.

Recent ones last much much longer, there has been a huge leap forward. Don't let you be scared by that stuff. I have an old sm800 from samsung, mid-end two years ago. It's still in perfect shape and very fast. My laptop booted in 22 seconds from power button to ready desktop with a standard 5400rpm drive, now with the SSD and some OS tweaking the machine presents me with an awesome ready KDE desktop in 10 to 12 seconds.

This is with a 2 yr old Clevo M735T laptop, Intel P8600, GMA4500, 4GB ddr2 - 800, Samsung SM800 64GB (same as first gen Corsair P64), ArchLinux with KDE 4.7.
I know that heavily tweaked Arch or Gentoo with more recent high end hardware can boot in less than 6 seconds, even 4 secs to command line. But that requires a good mobo and bootloader tweaking too.

[FarmerPug]

im after a hard drive for my macbook, the current one is a 320gb not sure of the speed but there is probably faster. I was thinking an ssd one would be better in a laptop since they are always moving about. But one problem is i went and got the warranty extended a month ago for another 2 years which was a bit of a rip off.

[OdinEidolon]

im after a hard drive for my macbook, the current one is a 320gb not sure of the speed but there is probably faster. I was thinking an ssd one would be better in a laptop since they are always moving about. But one problem is i went and got the warranty extended a month ago for another 2 years which was a bit of a rip off.

check you can upgrade your macbook (if the HD is IDE you'll never find an IDE SSD), old ones had... well, strange hardware choices only Apple could understand. They think their customers will never want to know what's inside the machine thus often fit low-end or old components.
You void your warranty if you change the HD? This is not far from fraud!
I can do anything to my laptop without changing the warranty. I don't count how many times I've opened and modded it and still next week I'll use the warranty for some annoying screen flickering.

[FarmerPug]

£285 it cost for the additional warranty, a bit of a rip off but at least now i can send it back to them to get the rubber feet at the bottom replaced.

[lozz]

ive been looking into having a pc built for the kids,

so far im thinking of this, whats your opinions,



Unassembled

Package Contains :

1 x AM3 Athlon X3 455 Processor

1 x Asus M4N68T-M LE V2 AM3 Motherboard

1 x 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 Memory

1 x AT Standard Case

1 x 450W PSU

price £108

[ally406]

SSD all the way. I would simply not consider a new PC without an SSD. The responsiveness an SSD gives you is in another league compared to a machine equipped with a mechanical hard drive. I recently purchased a plain jane HP Pavilion (£450) for my uncle, and refitted it with a Crucial M4 SSD (£88). The machine is booted an useable in 7 seconds and everything snaps to the screen.

My philosophy on computers these days is buy cheap, overclock the crap out of them. Currently I have a Core2 2.7Ghz that cost £45 overclocked to 3.86Ghz, 6GB RAM and an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, Windows 7 x64. The chip will actually do 4Ghz but I like to keep things conservative and reliable. Windows 7 x64 can often soak up all 6GB, my next machine will have more.

[Gary406]

well teamy made me think and after a few days deciding heres my pc.... going for it later tonight and then the building process starts.

Gigabyte mainboard with onboard graphics £51.13
Intel core i5 sandybridge 3.1ghz quad core socket 1155 cpu £148.98
4gb DDR3 corsair xms3 1600mhz ram in 1 stick £22.99
750gb western digital sata2 3gbs hard drive £33.34
samsung dvd drive £13.86
in a piano gloss black micro atx case with 500w power supply £23.98

total - £294.28 not bad to say its an i5 with 4gb 1600 ram..

future upgrades - graphics card . add another 4gb ram and fill both slots - bigger power supply ....