What hardware do you consider most important?

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I am just wondering what piece of hardware do you consider the most important when buying or building a system?

I find that it has to be the power supply and I also find it increasingly difficult to understand how many people under value it's importance. But I would like peoples opinions.

1. Power supply
2. CPU
3. Motherboard
4. Ram
5. hard drive(s)
6. Other (please specify).

 

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Personally, I would say a bit of each as it takes a bit of everything to make a good system

But I like a nice big hardrive for films ect..

 

Yes you could say a bit of each.

Without a good psu how are gonna watch all those films?

 

All of it. If any piece of the hardware is low quality then you may as well have all of the hardware of the same low quality.

 

PSU for sure, without a nice clean supply you are risking everything else.

In order of preference for me.

PSU
Motherboard
Ram
CPU
hard drive(s)

With a decent motherboard and ram you can squeeze out more of an OC with a lower spec cpu.

 

I just don't get why people have good systems but crappy power supplies. Recently I had to argue the case with a customer because he said he would spend more than £30 on a psu but would spend £300 on a graphics card.

THe psu in question was a rosewill 600w which I told hime for the GPU he had which was GTX 295 that he should have atleast a good 650w psu such as the corsair 650TX. I had to show him by using a digital multimeter that the rosewill was 550w at best and could only produce the 600 watts 40% of the time where as the corsair could produce the 650 85% of the time.

He still wouldn't have it and he bought a £30 psu from maplins. I sent him an email saying good luck, you will need it.

 

agreed but even a crappy pc should have a good psu.

 

It depends on what you are putting the system to, if it is for a high end use than a quality PSU is a must, if it is just for web surfing and youtube then the PSU can be "good enough".

However a PSU never ranks at the top of my agenda I pick one that does the job - from a reputable manufacturer but I do that once I have speced the rest of the system.

I tend to consider

Board,CPU and RAM as one section

If its a gaming machine its graphics next, if its a family machine storage comes next, then the case and finally the PSU once I have worked out the other requirements.

 

This is a tough one, personally I would say it is Hard Drives and Power Supplies, but tbh, it's a mixture of everything.

GBL,

What do you think of this PSU quality wise?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1250...-E-6plus2P-16xSATA-6x12V-104A-PeakPower-1500W

 

Not used it myself but I do know that enermax have had reliabilty issues lately due to them pulling the sam trick as Antec by moving to different (cheaper) suppliers a lot which has lead to cheap componets going in their supplies and subsequent failure.

Seasonic and corsair are still the best power supplies with the new corsairs claiming a 95% efficiency rating. These makes are followed by PC power & cooling, Thermaltake (toughpower units only),OCz extreme.

Although Enermax did used to make great PSUs I would only use PSUs from my list above.

 

From experance I would say PSU. I once made the mistake of getting the cheapest one on the shelf (about 10-12 years ago when I was just starting out)...

... I repalced everything trying to work out what the problem was, ended up costing me the price of a whole new system, and damaged my reputation.

Now I aways get the best the budget can afford.

 

All of it. A bottleneck is a bottleneck is a bottleneck.

 

Motherboard for me
its the single base building block for my systems that keeps their longevity high

I can move the system to a new case, with a new PSU, upgrade the graphics, put in more memory
but a generational move requries me to replace my Mobo


Sure picking quality components for the rest is still a given, but thats why PSU doesnt stand out, i pick quality components for all my stuff, so why should i pay special attention to the PSU? I don't overclock, don't run stupidly large graphics cards, so as long as i'm buying quality, with enough power, efficiency and sustained output, why should I worry?

My current mobo is over 3 years old
it started as a Dual Core 1.86, its now a Quad core 2.4 and could easily handle a Quad core 3.0
its gone from 2GB to 4GB to 8GB of memory
I've gone from a 7950 to an 8800 GTS to a Radeon 5770
I had a decent hiper PSU, now an Antec one (I moved around the world, new PSU was required)
I've tapered off Antecs as they started getting a bad rap, but this one is part of the older 'quality' products they used to make, not sure what my new PSU of choice will be...

the second most important requirement for me?
Monitors

each of my 24" monitors are H-IPS panels and cost in the region of 650 each
when you spend as long as I do in front of a screen, TN panels just won't cut it

 

This, I've had to do some serious hardware replacement here in the officec recently. Mobo went, GPU went, HDD went all because the PSU was total ****e (bog standard came witht he case model). This is why I now spec our desktop machines here.

Having said that I'll agree with this statement. All of your hardware has to work together at peak efficiency otherwise the whole machine is effectively crippled by one badly chosen piece of kit.

 

I have to ask, what are you thinking of running with that? I would say it's slight overkill unless you're going for the EVGA Classified and 4xGTX295.

 

I would say all parts are equally important... because like Michael said, bottleneck will cause all kinds of issues... I would also agree with Phoenix... a mother is the piece of hardware that will give you the ability to upgrade components and provide all kinds of support for hardware. Also I would say it depends on what the systems is going to be used for, whether it's a gaming, or a video editing machine, all depends.

 

Agreed with BM, bottlenecks ruin the whole experience... well, to certain degrees.

Whilst it's nice to have state of the art material, sometimes you don't "feel" the difference (at least not immediately) if you go with lower quality materials. For example, I got some pretty sweet ram for my i7 and just popped 'em in, turned the box on and it ran fine. Good numbers on benchmarks etc, but for example W7 was not reporting a full 7.9 on the memory score. It was reporting 7.8 and my ram was meant to be CAS 6-8-6-18 (if I recall correctly).

Took a look at the BIOS and aha, forgot to enable the XMS (I think that's what it's called? ahhh, been a long day... could do with some rest) mode which when activated, got the memory modules running at their true CAS speed vs what I saw in the BIOS and in CPUZ (something like 9-9-9-24). Now I got a full memory score of 7.9 in W7, but the actual user experience for my human brain felt very similar.

So yeah, you could have state of the art motherboard, cpu, psu etc, and maybe save some cash on the RAM side of things, and of course you'd lose a few % speed here and there, but how discernable is it all? If the ram was truly crap, then yeah, you'd probably see funky things such as freezes or just poor performance, but with the slew of material out there these days, making the decision between this ram and that ram is not necessarily all that easy. CPU's IMO seem the easier choice, and not all will afford the 975 vs a 920 if they wanted a slot 1366.

At the very same end of the scale, it might not make much sense to buy a single VERY good component if the rest of the PC was average. The other parts just can't keep up... so bottlenecks are always there. So many reviews will always mention how the CPU can't keep up with GPU on game X or vice versa. At some point in time one company will release bit of hardware A B or C which you then buy, replacing the original component, and bam, now this part in the PC is great and the rest of the stuff are lagging behind. It just becomes one big game of finding the right balance

 

For me, it's as follows:

Motherboard
PSU
Hard Drive(s)
CPU
RAM

First 2 are critical in every system.
Cheaper Hard Drives of lower quality tend to fail or slow down the system.
CPU - Doesn't matter really as both Intel and AMD chips are decent quality in my opinion and anything quad-core is capable of running pretty much everything out there.
RAM - It's always branded "value" product for me (ie Kingston Value, Crucial Value, etc.)

This is for personal use though. In production everything is equally important.

 

For me it has to be the hard drive. Reason being that if any of the other components fails, you have an unusable system. But if the hard drive fails, you lose the most valuable thing in any computer system - the data. The vast majority of businesses and many individual users implement safeguards (i.e. RAID) to lessen the impact of a failed hard drive. Far fewer have this kind of redundancy in place for PSUs or other components.