new pc build

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well I finally got around to buying everything for my new hardware build... take a look and give me your thoughts, I was doing the build with good quality specs whilst keeping on a budget.

oh and the mrs didn't even give me a telling off so I must have done good on the budget

AMD FX-4 4100 Black Edition 4 Core 3.6Ghz Socket AM3+ 8MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor

Asus M5A97 AMD Socket AM3+ 8 Channel HD Audio ATX Motherboard

Corsair 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1333MHz XMS3 Memory Kit CL9 1.5V unbuffered

Kingston 120GB V+200 SSD - 2.5" SATA-III - Read 535MB/s Write 480MB/s

Kingston 2.5" to 3.5" Hard Drive Bracket and Screws

Powercool 550W 80plus Certified Efficienty PSU - 1x PCI-E 4x SATA

Casecom 6788 All Black Case

Total for all of that was £325

I will use my existing graphics card for the time being as that can be upgraded at a later date as I don't play many games

 

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Thats about the budget I had when I built mine a few months ago, I have that case as well, it seems pretty good to me, no complaints so far.

I bought an amd phenom x6 (or whatever they are called, I gave up keeping up with names when the athlon 1700 was on its way out) and 16 GB of memory. The only thing I needed to do is replace the stock HSF as it made a hell of a racket.

 

I have never had an AMD before, always been an Intel boy but the way the prices on Intel are going I didn't see the point in adding an additional £100 on top just for a different name on the chip.

I am interested to see how AMD compare though when I have built it compared to my current Intel Pentium D single core 2.8ghz with 3gb of DDR RAM against my new system detailed in my earlier post.

The thought of doing 16gb of RAM entered my mind also, but colleagues told me there is no point.

 

No point for what, what are you going to use it for? I've always had AMD processors in my home rigs, ( I tell a lie I first built a pc using a cyrix 300 and then built another one using a celeron 500). I've never really minded about the performance difference as from a real world point of view I've never really seen any difference, I've never overclocked or done anything whizzy with a cpu and especially nowadays what point is there paying an extra 100 notes for maybe a benchmarked 200Mhz difference.

 

I also done this about a month or 2 back and haven't really kept up with the upgrading of PCS and went in looking at £350 and came out more at £450( without graphics card, optical drive, hdd or ssd ), have to say it was pretty good learning about some of the new products and how cheap somethings are now, ram, and how much something's have changed PSU

 

if the pc starts to drag then i will be upgrading the ram to 16gb, as my graphics card is a geforce with 256mb onboard ram, which used to sound like a lot, but these days isnt much, at least with all the system ram i am installing it should run fine again... my current system with Intel Pentium D 2.8ghz with 3gb of ram is starting to drag with Win7 32bit at times and freeze up... I am looking forward to having an SSD also.

Do you have an SSD?

 

Yes I have 2 250GB ones an OCZ and another one (the name escapes me at the moment) . My pc has a 500GB sata drive as the host boot volume and then all of my vm's run from the 2 ssd disks, My theory is I dont mind that the host takes another few seconds but I want the vm's to remain snappy while I'm studying.

 

I got a Kingston 96gb v+100 nearly a year ago and it made a huge difference, now in my new machine i am at the win7 pro(64bit) desktop before it even starts to think about playing the music. I managed to take this, a 2TB hdd, bluray writer and a hd3600 Graphics card from my old machine(this was mainly because I ran out of available funds to buy a new one).

 

Don't know how are the coolers on new AMD CPU's, but I've bought 1090T last year and the stock cooler was almost as loud as my vacuum
I don't thing you'd need more than 8 gigs if you won't be using VM's. I've noticed with my build that it doesn't matter how powerful it is application or hardware issues can grind it to a halt without any problems

 

so i have got the pc built and it's all running very nicely... cpu current temperature around 36c-37c, motherboard generally at 27c.

are these safe levels would everyone think for an AMD fx-4100 3.6ghz, as I am thinking about letting the Asus motherboard utilities run an overclocking, but of course if the system is already too hot at 37c on the cpu then don't want to burn it out.

advice please

 

36-37C is a perfectly reasonable temperature for the CPU to be running at.