OT: New PC build from scan.co.uk

iPete

I'm in the market for a new pc, current one has been going for over 5 years now and I can't view HD video or HQ youtube video without it stuttering. Don't dare run any games on it beyond minesweeper! Plus I want to buy a GoPro HD soon!

Scan.co.uk has my attention with its buy now pay in 9 months with no interest offer but how reputable are they?

The new machine needs to be able to cope with HD video editing, photo editing and some occasional gaming, probably nothing more than Counter Strike Source which this machine could handle OK until recently.

Budget up to 800 without monitor, mouse or keyboard.

2 Systems from the Gaming section:
http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ShowSystem.asp?SystemID=1166 (£813.17)

Not only is the GTX460 a potent card for the price, the 3XS System Engineers have overclocked it too!! The system also features a 32nm Intel Core i3 530 dual-core processor overclocked to 4Ghz with 4GB of DDR3

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ShowSystem.asp?SystemID=1122 + some upgrades, 1GB XFX HD 5770 + 500 GB storage drive. (£654.70)

The 3XS AMD VISION Premium system is aimed at users wanting more power than a basic PC, utilising an AMD Athlon Quad-Core processor combined with an ATI HD5670 graphics card, a 500GB hard drive and 4Gb of DDR3 memory.

Does the quad core trump duel core or does the other system offer superior graphics, I'm so out of the loop. :oops:

None of the above?
Really appreciate any help!

p.s. man up and splash out? :S
http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ShowSystem.asp?SystemID=1015

dhope

They also do a Core i5 OC'd to 4GHz which should fairly fly.

Could look at benchmarks
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/de ... s,112.html

Would be tempted to get a SSD for your boot disk, the OCZ Vertex 2E that's listed is excellent and does make a difference (bought one a month ago). Not sure offhand if the graphics card would make any difference to video editing, I always thought that was pretty CPU dependent.

So man up and splash out, then add a Corsair Vertex 2E on top of that spec

dhope

Oh, and Scan are fine, bought plenty of bits from them over the years - not bought a whole system though, bought from bigger people for work (Dell, HP) and built my own for home.

jengy

i think scan have a good reputation the pcs look good, they're not the cheapest as they say

make sure you pay before the 9 months are up though or that £800 pc will incur credit costs of about £500 !!

thelawnet

Have a look at this Dell:
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstor ... 736b4dc71d
Six cores Phenom (+ level 3 cache), 5870 graphics card, 2*1TB raid array. Unfortunately the 10% off on these xps systems expired at midnight, but there'll probably be another code soon....

thelawnet

iPete wrote:

I'm in the market for a new pc, current one has been going for over 5 years now and I can't view HD video or HQ youtube video without it stuttering. Don't dare run any games on it beyond minesweeper! Plus I want to buy a GoPro HD soon!

Scan.co.uk has my attention with its buy now pay in 9 months with no interest offer but how reputable are they?

£40 'arrangement fee', even if you pay back within 9 months

MeddlE

Check this for more info on current hardware.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers ... ber-2010/1

Not used Scan personally, have used ebuyer, Aria and OverclockersUK without problems though.

iPete

thelawnet wrote:

Have a look at this Dell:
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstor ... 736b4dc71d
Six cores Phenom (+ level 3 cache), 5870 graphics card, 2*1TB raid array. Unfortunately the 10% off on these xps systems expired at midnight, but there'll probably be another code soon....

ooooo, didn't think an XPS would be affordable for me! I might wait another month and get this outright! Looks to be much better than the other two at a glance for £829.00!

& thanks for the links and help everyone else!

jengy I've been weighing up the £40 arrangement fee with scan vs my overdraft interest & welcome to the forums

mkirby

Just a warning i have nothing good to say about scan. There customer service is beyond a joke if something goes wrong. They also double charged me and had a fight to correct it. They are also expensive.

I use ebuyer.co.uk or mini-itx.com for all my computing needs.

MonkeyMonster

I wouldn't go with Dell tbh. The kit just never lasts brilliant after their warrany period. If you can put it together yourself I'd do that otherwise use overclockers.co.uk.
I've had rumbles in the past with scan, overclockers, dell, ebuyer, dabs etc.
The worse service overall was with ebuyer with regards to cs and returns. dell makes good monitors and okay business systems but not gaming rigs unless you go quite far into the xps range but even then they can be flakey and need replaced (under warranty) within 2 years. Overclockers do somethings very cheaply and have a good rep for cs. Dabs and scan can be good sometimes, awful the next.

£800 quid could get you a very good gaming rig which by proxy will do all your video editing easily. I'd suggest building it yourself though. Intel chipsets (the i series) will be mroe powerful but for more money. I'd suggest getting an AMD phenom quad core, 4 gb memory, AMD 5 series HD card, couple of big disks, 600W psu and a dvd drive. The motherboard you get to go with that make sure its got a 16x pci-e slot and on board sound.

AyrshireBacon

mkirby wrote:

Just a warning i have nothing good to say about scan. There customer service is beyond a joke if something goes wrong. They also double charged me and had a fight to correct it. They are also expensive.

I use ebuyer.co.uk or mini-itx.com for all my computing needs.

Although I have always got on well with Scan (including some part swaps under warranty) I have a friend who agrees with this quote and would not use them again.

He ordered a box of parts to build his own PC and when he opened the package the memory was missing. No amount of persuading would convince them that this was never included. Even his plea that if he was going to lie then he would lie about the most expensive item and not the cheapest, and that he ordered enough memory to put the motherboard to max capacity so why would he lie to get more, fell on deaf ears.

Always had good experience with eBuyer as well.

mkirby

me and my parents have had to return 2 tv's back to ebuyer. Mine had one faulty pixel right in the centre the parents didnt work. ebuyer accepted both and arranged a courier to come and pick it up on a day we specified. Top marks from me but i guess everyones experience is different.

As for what pc you want, have you considered building your own? You might save a few quid that way. `If your wanting to do HD/audio editing these are processor hungry jobs. If that is your main focus you want the best cpu and the most memory you can afford. You will need a big hard drive too 1TB are cheep these days. Graphics wise if you only want to play counter strike i dont think you will need anything too beefy for that.

redvee

I've rebuilt my PC over the last few months, so far it has cost me around £200.

Elite Coolermaster case £35 from Ebuyer
700w PSU £35 from Maplin
Gigabyte mobo £43 from local PC shop but ended up with the £50 mobo, the shop ordered the wrong one.
Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 £35 Ebay
AMD Athlon II CPU £55.
160gb HDD FOC

Not installed the cpu yet as the problems I was getting from the new build was down to the Nvidia 8800GS which I've removed and have had a stable system since doing so

nich

overclockers.co.uk 8)

Kieran_Burns

I'm driving distance from Overclockers so always recommend them - plus their kit is well priced and you can get LOADS of advice from the forums. I'd go for one of their pre-built bundles personally

dhope

I've had Overclockers sell me duff kit and refuse to refund or replace it (CPU that would start failing Prime95 at default clock after 10mins). I found the customer service felt they knew enough and it entitled them to arrogance dealing with customers but not enough to actually be useful troubleshooting.
That said, plenty have had good experiences. I'd suggest Scan, eBuyer, Overclockers, Aria, Novatech are all pretty much identical and just pick the cheapest.

redvee

Aria might be cheap but the postage costs put me off using them more often, Novatech are usually on a par with Aria but have the bonus of having a shop locally for me so I can order online and collect with no commitment to purchase when I get to the shop.

iPete

Thanks guys, I'm going to exercise some patience and possibly buy out right at the end of this month, so that opens the options. As for Dell, I'm inclined to agree, they don't live for long looking at all my mates who have them.

redvee my current rig is going on 6 years old, has an old style GPU slot, no spare RAM slots and I'm not sure its worth spending any more on. Its also sounds like a light aircraft!

MonkeyMonster, I'm considering building myself now as the scan models in my budget are all missing the spot on 1 or 2 components. I like the sound of your suggestion.

I've just had to Wiki what an SSD is, is it beneficial to run the OS from one of these drives and have a couple of large drives for storage?

Anonymous

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DonDaddyD

I buy from Novatech - www.novatech.co.uk

At Uni I bought from Novatech a Sempron 3000 1.8ghz with Maxtor 80gig hard drive 1gig ram and 256mb geforce graphics card. Lasted 5yrs with absolutely no problems.

Recently I bought, again from Novatech the following:

Barebones bundle: Phenom X4 965 (3.4ghz quad core and 4gig ram) and Foxconn motherboard

ATI 5670 1gb DDR5 graphics card

Western Digital 1terabyte 64mb cache hard drive

Sony 24x DVD writer with lightscribe

£339 for the barebones bundle
(comes with only came with one fan so I’ll buy 3 more for about £5 each not a problem also comes with the cables needed to connect the hard drive and DVD).

£148 for the other components.

£5 for next day delivery.

£492 for the whole system.

(I have a monitor, keyboard mouse, 5.1 creative speakers and simply bought a USB wireless network adaptor for £30.00 it’s a good one though. I also already have XP, MS Office, photoshop so no problem there).

MonkeyMonster

iPete wrote:

I've just had to Wiki what an SSD is, is it beneficial to run the OS from one of these drives and have a couple of large drives for storage?

Not really for the expense. If you need to, get a raptor (hi-speed) disk to run the os and another biggie for storage. I spent 450 ish a few weeks back for mobo, cpu and memory upgrade and it's very happy indeed.

iPete

Thanks loads guys, some great suggestions on builds!

I should point out that I'm no professional. I simply want to branch out be able to edit HD occasionally and purchase a GoPro HD camera. I also shoot a DSLR, again not professionally but I'm demanding on my gear.

I'll have a word with my house mate who is mid build himself and create myself a shopping list tonight.

suzyb

I'm thinking on getting a new PC now as well. Old one has been going for over 5 years (around 6 I think) and I now realise how slow it is whilst working on a new PC in the office.

dhope

iPete wrote:

I've just had to Wiki what an SSD is, is it beneficial to run the OS from one of these drives and have a couple of large drives for storage?

Yep, SSD is meant for quick access so ideal for apps but useless for storage. It's still hugely expensive per GB when compared to traditional media and you lose the benefits of the near instant seek times.

A few years ago they had problems where they would only be able to write data a certain number of times before performance degrades - the problem is essentially fixed with current models.

My desktop has a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2E as the boot drive, then two 640GB and two 320GB disks for storage

Following review pretty much convinced me
http://www.elitebastards.com/index.php? ... le&id=1626

And I've not been disappointed - it's probably made more difference than it would have done to upgrade the CPU (currently a Intel Quad Q6600 @ 3.2GHz), RAM (already 8GB) or GPU (only 8800GT). Apps do load near instantly and Windows is very snappy. Assuming you'll have Windows 7 which has a few features that SSD drives benefit from (TRIM support, all wikipedia-able)

dhope

MonkeyMonster wrote:

iPete wrote:

I've just had to Wiki what an SSD is, is it beneficial to run the OS from one of these drives and have a couple of large drives for storage?

Not really for the expense. If you need to, get a raptor (hi-speed) disk to run the os and another biggie for storage. I spent 450 ish a few weeks back for mobo, cpu and memory upgrade and it's very happy indeed.

I'd go so far as to say SSD has rendered Raptors obsolete. If you want cheap get traditional 7200RPM, if you want fast get SSD. Raptors aren't cheap and they're not the fastest anymore either.

Kieran_Burns

There are SOME advantages to having multiple SSDs...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

:shock:

pangolin

Have a look at http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk I got mine there 4 years ago and its still going strong. Beat most of the others I looked at for price and their customer service seems good.

My friend had a laptop from them and the RAM seemed broken, then sent him 2 new sticks for free the next day and talked him through installing it over the phone (they also would have let him post it back so they fit them).

MonkeyMonster

@ dhope - yeah you might be right. I've been out of bothering with the HD game for long enough to have missed this SSD push. That 24 disc raid array is silly. Most amusing though. About as expensive as a raptor too now for same size.

aldric

Kieran_Burns wrote:

There are SOME advantages to having multiple SSDs...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

:shock:

WOW!!! lol thats insane!

iPete

pangolin wrote:

Have a look at http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk I got mine there 4 years ago and its still going strong. Beat most of the others I looked at for price and their customer service seems good.

My friend had a laptop from them and the RAM seemed broken, then sent him 2 new sticks for free the next day and talked him through installing it over the phone (they also would have let him post it back so they fit them).

Nifty website, in a matter of a minute I've put together this build for a few pounds over 800...


Case: COOLERMASTER ELITE 310 BLUE CASE
Processor (CPU): AMD PHENOM II X6 1055T (2.80GHz/9MB CACHE/AM3/)
Motherboard: ASUS® M4A87TD/USB3: DUAL DDR3,SATA 6.0GB/s, USB 3.0
Memory (RAM): 8GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 4GB)
Graphics Card: 1GB ATI RADEON™ HD 5750 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk: 500GB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (7,200rpm)
2nd Hard Disk: 1TB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 16MB CACHE (7,200rpm)


DVD/BLU-RAY Drive: 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Memory Card Reader: INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (READS XD, MS, CF, SD, etc)
Power Supply & Case Cooling: 450W Quiet 80 PLUS Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£29)
Processor Cooling: STANDARD AMD CPU COOLER
Sound Card: ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Facilities: ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT
USB Options: 6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD

I'd guess its worth a few quid more to get some USB 3.0 ports as the Mobo is 3.0?

biondino

Last time I bought a desktop system (2003) I had it made on spec by a company in the Midlands - good customer service, fast delivery, competitive price and it worked perfectly. So when I decided I wanted a laptop, I went back to the same company only to find they'd seemed to have ceased trading.

I did a quick search to see what else I could discover and it turns out the owners had taken a huge number of orders on some suspiciously cheap gear and then fled the country with over a quarter of a million quid