Hi Paul,
I take it you're not looking for a system you can overclock the nuts off, just one that runs TS2013 happily?
If so, 800 quid will get you a pretty good system; I've just run through the options at PC Specialist and brought the figure down to £720 inc. VAT and delivery but not including a monitor, mouse, keyboard or speakers as I assume you'll be able to use your existing ones.
STYLISH PIANO BLACK ENIGMA MICRO-ATX CASE + 2 FRONT USB
Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-3570 (3.4GHz) 6MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® P8H61-MX USB3/SI: uATX, USB 3.0, SATA 3.0Gb/s
8GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (2 X 4GB)
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 650 - DVI, mHDMI, VGA - 3D Vision Ready
FREE £50 IN-GAME VOUCHER with GTX 650 & GTX 650Ti GPUs!
500GB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 16MB CACHE
1TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 32MB CACHE
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
CORSAIR 750W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX750 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE (£89)
INTEL SOCKET LGA1155 STANDARD CPU COOLER
ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence (£109)
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Standard Build - Approximately 9 to 11 working days
As for alternatives, look at CCL and Aria, both of which I can vouch for in terms of quality and honesty and they do allow you to tweak a system to suit your needs. (
http://www.cclonline.com/category/202/D ... t/1175003/ and
http://www.aria.co.uk/Systems/Gaming+Range/ )
PWHolmes wrote:Can someone guide me here and suggest either a good mix, or the sort of rules I should be following. For example, are the ultra top end video and sound cards really necessary? What size of SSD do I need? How much RAM? etc etc. I am sure that once one gets up to the top end of these specs, some sort of law of diminishing returns must apply.
Bewildering isn't it?...particularly if you don't know what those impressive numbers quoted actually mean.
SSD or HDD has been debated/argued quite a few times, and in the last not-very-scientific tests we did in here we found that an SSD powered system booted up to the desktop in about half the time my conventinal spinning HDD did.
Impressive eh?....
Not really when you learn we're talking about 20 seconds as opposed to 40 which only meant that the faster system was waiting for the user to get themselves sorted for 20 seconds longer than the slower one. When loading scenarios the SSD system was even faster, loading a scenario uo in about 20% of the time the HDD system took--in real money, about half a minute as opposed to just over two.
Whether an SSD helps reduce or even eliminate any tile loading stutter when actually playing is a subject still open for debate, some see an improvement but other don't. As the primary function of a hard drive is to provide storage space, the £100 you'd spend on a 120GB SSD would get 2TB of HDD so in my view the time saving offered by an SSD doesn't justify the cost. So far nobody has provided any results using an SSD as they were designed to be used--a fast cache drive for frequently accessed files--but I suspect that that would be the most cost effective way to go, using a small SSD to speed up reads.
You can achieve a decent performance boost by having your OS and data/programs on completely separate drives, as you'll have noted in the above spec it has a 500GB drive for Windows, and Windows alone, with a 1TB drive for 'all yer goodies'
500GB is the smallest they offer on the web page, in truth 100GB would be more than ample so I'd consider the 'spare' space on that drive as a nice place for archived copies of stuff you need to save.
The most obvious benefit of a 64bit OS is the ability to use more than 4GB of RAM, 8 is a sensible amount to use even though TS2013 won't use it (32bit app, so it only sees 4GB) Windows will have space to breathe in. In the dim and distant past (though many would say I'm still a bit dim and distant in the present) managing your mrmory was quite a 'black art'; now all you need to do is let Windows deal with it and your only worry is how much of it you can afford.
Unless you're really in to messing about with or creating sounds the on board sound on modern motherboards is more than adequate; remember that a 300 quid sound card is a waste of money if it's pushing the noises to a £10 2:1 speaker set from Tesco so unles you're a real audiophile just stick with what's provided as standard. Most graphics cards now offer an HDMI port, so if you can utilise that they also do a pretty good job of handling sound too.
The general consensus in here is that nVidia GPUs perform better than AMD for TS2013, and would be my choice but as much from habit as from an having authorative knowledge about which manufacturer is best. With nVidia, the important thing is to pick a card of at least *50 in the name/number---in nVidia speak the last 2 digits indicate how well the card will run games; 10 means it's a general purpose card, great for watching you tube videos or DVDs but not up to gaming, 90 means it's the dogs back wheels for gaming with 40 being the more or less accepted point at which nVidia cards become capable of playing games *properly*.
If it helps the budget at all, you could use the integrated GPU on the CPU until you could afford/sneak past the gaffer a discrete card, but you'd be unlikely to be able to run with details on high or with much in the way of shadows.
2GB of RAM on a graphics card comes into play really only if you're running at a huge (above 1920 x 1080) resolution, over multiple monitors or using very high definition textures. Whilst 'more is good' in this respect, a 1GB card will suffice if needed.
Hope that helps a bit, any more questions please don't hesitate to ask etc...
Gary
An efficient PSU can also be claimed to be nice and 'green', saving the planet and all that!