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The PC Buying Advice Thread mk II
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I want to reply in more detail but heading to work just now. I have my build saved on pc part and I'm just refining it everytime I read some of your guys posts. I will post the final up before I start buying. I'll also have a wee look on your sites for preowned components when I get to that stage. The price os creeping up. Two people have reccomended I get SSD and one hasnt. Also two people have said to get after market cpu cooler but one hasnt. If I go with the majority it will end up being a 900 quid build. =L
My first build was mostly pre-owned. All the screws come with the case, not the parts. You don't need paper manuals for anything in 2015, but even if this was before Google you'd only need it for the motherboard maybe. There isn't usually any mods that are made to parts, certainly none that would make it less suitable.
I'm looking to buy an apple laptop macbook/air but undecided on which one, and whether retina is needed, or if i get the non retina whether i should upgrade parts.
It's just going to be for university (i can get the higher education discount), general work, no gaming and just looking for it to last for a few years.
I'm looking for an apple laptop for reliability and the build quality as I know i can get many cheaper alternatives, but saying that I do just want to pay the necessary amount for the apple laptop and not buy anything overkill.
Any help is welcome!
I'm looking to buy an apple laptop macbook/air but undecided on which one, and whether retina is needed, or if i get the non retina whether i should upgrade parts.
It's just going to be for university (i can get the higher education discount), general work, no gaming and just looking for it to last for a few years.
I'm looking for an apple laptop for reliability and the build quality as I know i can get many cheaper alternatives, but saying that I do just want to pay the necessary amount for the apple laptop and not buy anything overkill.
Any help is welcome!
The non-retina Pro is really out of date now, don't buy it. The 13" Retina Pro is the best all-around laptop Apple sells at the moment, you get the best ratio of specs, performance and portability without any real compromises. If you want to save cash, go for something the Air line with whatever storage size you can fit into your budget. Upgrading to 8GB of RAM is also highly recommended, especially if you plan on having it for a few years as OS X and other programs start making use of more RAM as higher amounts become the standard.
In my opinion, yes. You get a lot more power, longer battery life, more ports, the new ForceTouch trackpad, and a gorgeous screen. The Air is fine but for the sake of future proofing I'd spend the extra £60.
I'm looking to buy an apple laptop macbook/air but undecided on which one, and whether retina is needed, or if i get the non retina whether i should upgrade parts.
It's just going to be for university (i can get the higher education discount), general work, no gaming and just looking for it to last for a few years.
I'm looking for an apple laptop for reliability and the build quality as I know i can get many cheaper alternatives, but saying that I do just want to pay the necessary amount for the apple laptop and not buy anything overkill.
Any help is welcome!
Most people tend to go for the retina, my view is both are fine for your usage except for the 11", screen is far too tiny, other downside of Air is the lack of onboard storage.
Thanks! Hopefully there'll be some upcoming deals for them!
I was looking at getting the 13" with dual core i7, 16GB and 256GB for £1609 before discount but I notice the base 15" model is roughly £10 cheaper with 16GB and 256GB and a quad core i7 (with cores clocked at 2.2GHz instead of 3.1GHz though). Obviously the battery life isn't as good and it isn't so easy to carry around but is there reason to spend more money for a less powerful machine?
I was looking at getting the 13" with dual core i7, 16GB and 256GB for £1609 before discount but I notice the base 15" model is roughly £10 cheaper with 16GB and 256GB and a quad core i7 (with cores clocked at 2.2GHz instead of 3.1GHz though). Obviously the battery life isn't as good and it isn't so easy to carry around but is there reason to spend more money for a less powerful machine?
If you're definitely going down the Mac route and you're decking out a 13" model that matches the price of the equivalent 15" model, getting the 15" is a no-brainer. The improvement from dual core to quad core will be pretty significant, and the extra screen real estate and resolution are obvious benefits for image/video editing. Considering that's all for less money than the 13" I would definitely go for it. If you went for a 13" I'd shave off some of that price by sticking to the stock i5, there's very little difference between the two aside from a bit of extra cache and the higher clock speed
Yeah the three year extended warranty is exclusive to online and telephone sales unfortunately, there's the option of buying three years of AppleCare for about £50 (which offers the same coverage as the warranty plus additional telephone support) if buying online isn't an option though. The Back to School event is expected to start in the next couple of weeks, if it's the same here as it is across the rest of the world (which it will be) this year's free gift is a pair of Beats Solo 2.0 headphones. The Solo 2.0 sound a lot better than the vast majority of other Beats models over the years, which rightfully get tonnes of hate from the audiophile community, so it's not a bad little bonus to get for anyone who doesn't already have a £100+ pair of headphones.
For university level or equivalent, discount on MacBooks is roughly 14% across the board.
Here's a quick list of what I'm looking to be able to use this computer for:
•
Relatively heavy database work. This is the main high-end thing I'll be doing. I'm pretty confident that for this reason, I'll want an SSD to be my primary hard drive. I already have a 256GB one waiting to be installed but the database I'm using is already 120GB and could well exceed that in a couple of years.
•
The other main thing which I suspect is rather high-end is that I'd really like to be able to get quick results using this piece of software:
http://piosolver.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/piosolver-pro
•
Storage of a lot of media. My music library is currently a little under 1TB and I have roughly the same in video.
•
Uploading media (a decent portion of my income comes from video production). I'm not sure if hardware can affect wireless upload speeds (it's not feasible to run an ethernet connection and it's impossible to increase internet speed - fibre isn't available where I live).
•
Not really that interested in gaming tbh but being able to play Football Manager on low settings would be nice.
•
Would I still see performance increases if I ran a database across two separate SSDs in a couple of years (this would work as querying two separate databases at once)? And what sort of prices would we expect to see on SSDs in a couple of years?
•
I'd like to be able to have at least 4 internal hard drives with the possibility to expand to 6 or more. What's the best way to plan for this, both in terms of cost and performance?
•
Given my requirements, what would be good processor(s) to look at? I've spent a couple of hours reading about them and I still have no idea how to compare them.
•
Is there any hardware-related method of upgrading wireless upload speed? At the moment I'm getting about 100 kbps, ideally I'd like this to be around 1mbps but past that I'm not really bothered.
•
I was planning on just using integrated graphics because I can't see that I'll need dedicated graphics for anything I've set out - this is correct?
•
What sort of RAM ought I be looking at? Pretty confident I need at least 8GB and that I don't need as much as 32GB; what's going to be best if I want this to last a number of years? And what are the other elements of RAM I need to be looking at apart from raw capacity?
•
What should I be looking at in terms of power supply/fans?
•
I'm currently on Windows 8.1 and haven't taken the W10 upgrade yet. Could I simply use that upgrade on the new PC and thus avoid paying for an OS? (I'm not interested in pirating an OS).
•
Anything I've missed?
Thanks.
Here's a quick list of what I'm looking to be able to use this computer for:
•
Relatively heavy database work. This is the main high-end thing I'll be doing. I'm pretty confident that for this reason, I'll want an SSD to be my primary hard drive. I already have a 256GB one waiting to be installed but the database I'm using is already 120GB and could well exceed that in a couple of years.
•
The other main thing which I suspect is rather high-end is that I'd really like to be able to get quick results using this piece of software:
http://piosolver.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/piosolver-pro
•
Storage of a lot of media. My music library is currently a little under 1TB and I have roughly the same in video.
•
Uploading media (a decent portion of my income comes from video production). I'm not sure if hardware can affect wireless upload speeds (it's not feasible to run an ethernet connection and it's impossible to increase internet speed - fibre isn't available where I live).
•
Not really that interested in gaming tbh but being able to play Football Manager on low settings would be nice.
•
Would I still see performance increases if I ran a database across two separate SSDs in a couple of years (this would work as querying two separate databases at once)? And what sort of prices would we expect to see on SSDs in a couple of years?
•
I'd like to be able to have at least 4 internal hard drives with the possibility to expand to 6 or more. What's the best way to plan for this, both in terms of cost and performance?
•
Given my requirements, what would be good processor(s) to look at? I've spent a couple of hours reading about them and I still have no idea how to compare them.
•
Is there any hardware-related method of upgrading wireless upload speed? At the moment I'm getting about 100 kbps, ideally I'd like this to be around 1mbps but past that I'm not really bothered.
•
I was planning on just using integrated graphics because I can't see that I'll need dedicated graphics for anything I've set out - this is correct?
•
What sort of RAM ought I be looking at? Pretty confident I need at least 8GB and that I don't need as much as 32GB; what's going to be best if I want this to last a number of years? And what are the other elements of RAM I need to be looking at apart from raw capacity?
•
What should I be looking at in terms of power supply/fans?
•
I'm currently on Windows 8.1 and haven't taken the W10 upgrade yet. Could I simply use that upgrade on the new PC and thus avoid paying for an OS? (I'm not interested in pirating an OS).
•
Anything I've missed?
I expect for the software you're likely to be fine with most half decent mainstream CPUs
For Football Manager, looking at the system requirements, you should be fine with integrated, the minimum is a nearly 13 year old card from pre PCIe days, with compute performance that can be exceeded by some very high end CPUs alone today.
For RAM, may as well go 16, it should be more than enough and you can always get more later. With DDR3 you can get some decent RAM for £50 new, £70 with DDR4, depending on which you need
On the SSD front, I would be lazy and not bother messing around with RAID and just get a 500GB or even 1TB one when you need the extra capacity, currently 500GB is around about £100, and 1Tb around about £200 and going down. It also has to be considered is that there is new tech with SSDs that is only really now hitting the marker, and whilst it is fairly expensive now, it is much, much faster, for instance, the SATA one, which doesn't really have many benefits given the interface is still the bottleneck, is about £400 for 400GB, and the 1.2TB PCIe one will set you back way over 1k, but prices should be down in a few years, either way, I would just get a new SSD and move the database.
Fans, just use what comes with the case, CPU cooler, you should be fine with the stock heatsink, but can always get an aftermarket if you want.
PSU, you shouldn't need much, just make sure that it's got an 80plus rating and is from a reputable manufacturer
For windows, just upgrade to 10 and then shift it, you should be able to do what you want to do with it.
For upload, are you sure you mean kbps and mbps, and not mbps and gbps, because 100kbps is REALLY bad, as in even on a crappy rural connection I can still get 1mbps.
For the HDDs, you just need a case that can support them, for performance, it depends what sort of performance you're looking for as to whether you're better off just getting decent ones or faffing around with RAID, and whether you want redundancies
As for CPU, given that the software says it can use up to 12 physical cores, I think that largely comes down to how much you are willing to spend.
For Football Manager, looking at the system requirements, you should be fine with integrated, the minimum is a nearly 13 year old card from pre PCIe days, with compute performance that can be exceeded by some very high end CPUs alone today.
For RAM, may as well go 16, it should be more than enough and you can always get more later. With DDR3 you can get some decent RAM for £50 new, £70 with DDR4, depending on which you need
On the SSD front, I would be lazy and not bother messing around with RAID and just get a 500GB or even 1TB one when you need the extra capacity, currently 500GB is around about £100, and 1Tb around about £200 and going down. It also has to be considered is that there is new tech with SSDs that is only really now hitting the marker, and whilst it is fairly expensive now, it is much, much faster, for instance, the SATA one, which doesn't really have many benefits given the interface is still the bottleneck, is about £400 for 400GB, and the 1.2TB PCIe one will set you back way over 1k, but prices should be down in a few years, either way, I would just get a new SSD and move the database.
Fans, just use what comes with the case, CPU cooler, you should be fine with the stock heatsink, but can always get an aftermarket if you want.
PSU, you shouldn't need much, just make sure that it's got an 80plus rating and is from a reputable manufacturer
For windows, just upgrade to 10 and then shift it, you should be able to do what you want to do with it.
For upload, are you sure you mean kbps and mbps, and not mbps and gbps, because 100kbps is REALLY bad, as in even on a crappy rural connection I can still get 1mbps.
For the HDDs, you just need a case that can support them, for performance, it depends what sort of performance you're looking for as to whether you're better off just getting decent ones or faffing around with RAID, and whether you want redundancies
As for CPU, given that the software says it can use up to 12 physical cores, I think that largely comes down to how much you are willing to spend.
Practically speaking, uploading to file hosts (e.g. Dropbox/Mega) I get 60-70kbps, 100 on a good day.
As for CPU, money is potentially no object (i.e. I have enough savings to buy any non-supercomputer CPU), but I don't really want to spend an infeasible amount. I don't what 12 cores really means. I know that at the moment running this software, some calculations take a couple of days on a verrrrry basic computer (4GB RAM, intel core i3-3110M processor). Cutting that down to 2-3 hours would be enough; based on what I've read I don't think you can get under ~30 mins on the more complex calcs without spending like £10k.
Thanks for the rest.
Thanks for the rest.
Practically speaking, uploading to file hosts (e.g. Dropbox/Mega) I get 60-70kbps, 100 on a good day.
As for CPU, money is potentially no object (i.e. I have enough savings to buy any non-supercomputer CPU), but I don't really want to spend an infeasible amount. I don't what 12 cores really means. I know that at the moment running this software, some calculations take a couple of days on a verrrrry basic computer (4GB RAM, intel core i3-3110M processor). Cutting that down to 2-3 hours would be enough; based on what I've read I don't think you can get under ~30 mins on the more complex calcs without spending like £10k.
Thanks for the rest.
Thanks for the rest.
I've taken a look at i3-3110M and yeah, not the best, 2.4GHz, dual core
What I was thinking, the CPU would set you back about £300, and the mobo will be a bit more expensive too, and you will be doing DDR4 for the RAM would be a 5820k (and I think you NEED an aftermarket cooler with it). Looking at about 50% higher clock, before overclosking, and 3 times the cores and probably an architecture that is a fair bit more efficient. Not sure you will be able to cut days down to a few hours with it, but will shave a bit off
A slightly newer 6700k would be an extra £50-100 (looking on Amazon, so probably not the best price), but that would be recouped from the cheaper mobo. Double the cores and double the clock (after OC) of the 3110M. The question then becomes whether the 6 slightly slower cores is better than the 4 slightly faster with the software.
Given that software has a 12 core limit, I don't see how that couple of days could be brought down to half an hour, assuming that there's a fairly liner correlation to compute performance.
Given that software has a 12 core limit, I don't see how that couple of days could be brought down to half an hour, assuming that there's a fairly liner correlation to compute performance.
Pretty sure literally every part of my computer acts as a bottleneck atm haha
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