Father Xmas's guide to picking computer components

Would also like to give you a big round of applause for your guide. It's given me some insight on what to look for. Right now I'm waiting for the parts to come in, now all I need are some steady hands to put the whole thing together.

Great Guide thanks for all the great info

Wow, I just came across this guide totally by accident. And boy, am I glad I found it. Definitely subscribing to this one.
I, like many others, am waiting for the Ultra Mode specs to be released and hopefully, by the summer, will be able to replace my old comp.

Thanks again for your dedication to keeping this up to date. I'll be checking in to see what you suggest for the $600 Ultra Mode rig...if there is such a thing. :-)

Well it's been a while so time for one of the biggest changes in the low end rig since I first listed it, a price increase.

It's not as big of a price increase as it first seems, I now include a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM with the build and that's around $100 right there. So in reality it's a $50 increase in price, mainly due to the fact I can't get the hardware price comfortably below $600 before discounts anymore.

Also I've decided that Intel Socket 775 is a dead end. Yes they will keep introducing low end CPU's that'll bump the frequency up another 100-200 MHz while dropping the lowest one and shifting the rest down in price but I'm not expecting a new high end part for this socket. So to give people an opportunity to upgrade a year to two from now I've gone to AMD's Socket AM3 series of CPUs. They have various dual, triple, quad and soon hex core CPUs with and without L3 cache at price/performance points that are inline with Intel's Socket 1156 offerings, whose lowest end is still outside of my target price range.

First, let's recap changes I didn't post about in the old $600 build that I'm keeping in the $750 one. The combo case/PSU from Antec I use to have has been discontinued and the new upgraded one hasn't arrived at NewEgg so I had to swap it out with replacements. I ended up choosing the Antec Three Hundred gaming case, NewEgg has a version that comes with additional front fans already installed. For a PSU I went with the 430 watt Seasonic S12II 430 Bronze. Together this was about the same cost as the original Antec combo with the additional fans.

As for parts that hadn't changed, those are the SATA optical and hard drives. As long as the damn SATA DVD burner stays in stock.

Now for the new.

First the motherboard. Went with the MSI 770-C45. It's socket AM3 and it supports 125 watt CPUs which includes all the current AM3 CPUs. I had to include an additional SATA cable since it only comes with one.

For a CPU I went with the 2.9GHz AMD Athlon II X2 245 which is a tad faster in games than the E6300 Pentium Dual Core from my previous build. I coupled it with 4GB of DDR3-1333, Cas 9 memory since it's socket AM3.

Lastly for the graphics, I went all out for Ultra Mode by including a 1GB XFX HD 5770 video card which is considerably faster (around 20%) than the 512MB GTS 250 in the previous build. I give credit to Human_Being, who ideas on an Ultra Mode parts list was uncannily similar to mine, who convinced me that saving $15 by putting in a 1GB HD 5750 was short sighted considering the performance difference (about 15%).

So now the $750 with OS rig is now using modern memory, has a clear upgrade path and decent Ultra Mode graphics. Hopefully this will

Well the high end rig also got a price increase for the same reasons.

Again I now include a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM with the build for $100 and upped the limit by $75 since I'm also now over $1200 on the hardware before discounts.

Thanks for the update Father Xmas. How does your $750 rig compare to the $1149 Best Buy/Dell one you recommended a couple of weeks ago? What am I getting for the additional $400?

Thanks again for all your work on this. :-)

I PMed him Kosmos and yes it was that Dell. I believe he went and ordered it from BestBuy after our chat.

Yeah, been there, "Newcomputer Pneumonia"

"Yeah, I'm... (healz! healz!) sick, and uh.. (AMBUSH!).. can't come to work, right now, (DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! NOOOOOVAAAAAA!), so bye!"

Well it's been awhile since I formally updated the low end rig, even though over the intervening 8 months I have tweaked it a number of times, mostly when a specific part became unavailable.

The CPU is now a 3.2GHz Athlon II X3 450. While the 10% boost in clock speed helps the reason for going from a dual core to triple core has more to do with how other games perform rather than this one. That said having a spare core to handle having the browser up or any of the team voice chat clients while playing this game can't hurt.

I also went from 4GB of Cas 9 to Cas 8 DDR3-1333 memory. It may add a percentage point or two to overall performance and the price increase was trivial.

As for the tweaks that happened over time. I was forced to switch motherboards as the previous MSI motherboard became unavailable. However the Gigabyte one I switched to does have USB 3.0 support and doesn't require me to toss in a SATA cable since it already comes with two. AMD 870 based motherboards are still a bit pricey for low end and only provides SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) in addition, which is great for some solid state drives but since this is a low cost rig, isn't really useful.

I also switched the hard drive to the 500GB Samsung Spinpoint F3 from the 500GB Seagate 7200.12 drive a few months back. When 1/4 of the feedback in the last 6 months at NewEgg rate the Seagate as 1 star, mainly about dieing within months, there may be some fire to that smoke.

The DVD burner and HD 5770 video card simply changed models but stayed with their manufacturers as my original choices became unavailable.

And with all these changes, I was still able to reduce the target price for this rig by $25.

Edit: I overwrote this post with my May 2011 update. Thank you Google cache!

It's also about time the formally update the high end rig, which also got changed a bit from the last time which other than adding the OS, was 11 months ago.

Over that time the price of memory and the video card plummeted, knocking well over $125 off the price. Well, I can't let that stand.

The biggest change was going to 8GB of system memory from 4GB. That pretty much soaked up a lot of the price drop. I was forced to drop from the over aggressive Cas 7 to a more reasonable Cas 8. Plus the Cas 7s seem to be out of stock for the foreseeable future.

I also upgraded the CPU, even though I did this awhile ago, to the 2.8GHz i5-760 from the 2.66GHz i5-750. No real price change as the 760 came in at the 750's price at the time.

I changed the video card from the HD 5850 to the HD 6870 which is slightly faster and before the current HD 5850 fire sale, actually cheaper.

Lastly due to reports from some of you that the Corsair TX750 power supply was acting funky, I replaced it with the slightly more expensive Antec New TP-750 which also has modular cabling for clutter reduction and an additional 24 watts of power (2 amps) at 12 volts.

Thank you for the update. The better rig round Black Friday was actually less than $1,000 after including all the rebates and discounts.

Yes but I don't count NewEgg's "sales" and rebates when I'm pricing because they change so often. And yes I did look during the Black Friday weekend and boy did they have a heck of a sale, including Windows which you almost never see.

Right now the $725 rig is only $644 after discounts and rebates and the $1375 rig is $1232 due to nearly $90 of discounts. I always leave a bit extra for price fluctuations.

I notice you have an aftermarket CPU cooler as part of your $1375 system. Do you recommend that even if the CPU isn't going to be overclocked? If so, why?

Well I had an aftermarket cooler as part of the high price rig since the very beginning, back when it was a Core 2 E8400 dual core processor. Heat is always the enemy of silicon so it seemed logical to spend some small amount on a better cooler, since the stock Intel one was rather poor and loud. However now with the Core i5/i7 series of processors, there may be a concrete reason to use one regardless.

This series has a feature called Turbo Boost, essentially self overclocking based on a number of conditions. Now according to Intel, one of the factors looked at to determine if it's okay to overclock and by how much is processor temperature. In the case of the 2.8GHz Core i5-760, it can self overclock to 2.93GHz with 3 or 4 cores active, to 3.33GHz with 2 cores active or to 3.46GHz with a single core active.

Now while the tiny stock cooler from Intel may be sufficient for an office based PC, a gaming system with a discrete graphics card dumping a hundred or more watts of heat into the case, just below the CPU, may just end up hindering the effectiveness of this feature with a stock cooler. So it seems to me that using an aftermarket cooler that can lower the processor temperature by 20-30 degrees Celsius over the stock cooler can only improve the odds that Turbo Boost will reach it's maximum.

Seems like a good use of $40 for decent aftermarket CPU cooler and a tube of Arctic Silver 5.

Well one difference with Sandy Bridge is every Socket 1155 processor, including the quad cores, will have integrated graphics and Turbo Boost can affect both of the processor and the graphics core, independently of course.

Don't know how much of that will be "putting lipstick on a pig" but the new graphics core is actually suppose to approach performance levels of what integrated AMD and nVidia graphics are currently at (very low but not dismal), along with Dx11 and OpenCL support.

I'll give it three to six months, before I'm going to look at Sandy Bridge, unless the Socket 1156 platform and the i5-7xx processor simply vanish from the market.

The after Christmas sale at Staples had a 3 month old HP with an i7 processor and a 5770 video card. I thought I could crank everything to "11" but my experience with the video card is very disappointing. I'm finding my son's 2 year old computer with a 9800 has better details and faster processing at the same UltraMode settings. Should I have expected this or is there a problem with the card that I should ask about? I've had the machine less than 2 weeks and wanted to put it through a Hami before I made a final determination.

Well this really belongs in it's own thread over at the tech board but nobody in the old "Ultra Mode graphics" thread ever said that the HD 5770 would allow you to crank it to 11. It's a mid range video card, good for 1600x900 or so gaming.

The general scuttlebutt is the 10.9 driver is currently best driver for this game. Has the fewest quirks.

And if we are talking laptops here and not desktops, the mobile HD 5770 is only as powerful as a desktop HD 5570.

Start a thread on the Tech board with a CoHHelper and HiJackThis report and we can see if there's any suggestions to improve your performance.

Well it's time to do a major overhaul on the low end rig, due to discontinued or always out of stock parts and falling prices.

The only parts I'm keeping are the 3.2GHz Athlon II X3 450, the 4GB of CAS 8 DDR3-1333 memory. Over the last month or so I slipped in the parts list Win 7 Home SP1 and the Asus 24x SATA DVD Burner instead of the Sony one, due to some very favorable reviews and that nearly all SATA DVD burners are around $20 now.

For the motherboard, prices have come down a bit on the AMD 870 based motherboards so I swapped out the Gigabyte one based on the AMD 770 with the MSI 870A-G54. This replaces the old SATA II ports with six SATA III (6.0Gb/s) drive ports when someday SSD's are affordable.

The 500GB Samsung SATA II hard drive was discontinued or never restocked at NewEgg so I switched in the 500GB Seagate SATA III hard drive which is surprisingly cheap at $40.

The Antec Three Hundred Illusion case variant has been out of stock too long for my taste so time to replace it with the Cooler Master HAF 912. What we lose, an installed top fan as well has the case fans having two or three user settable speeds is partially made up by a very good cable routing system that helps clean up the air flow and dust filters nearly everywhere. You can still install either a 200mm or up to a pair of 120mm fans for the top fan(s) if you want. I just couldn't find the money in the budget for it because...

I've upped the video from the HD 5770/6770 to the HD 6850 which is generally 35% faster in games.

Now to support the added power draw I swapped out the 430 watt Seasonic SII Bronze PSU for the Seasonic made Antec NEO ECO 520 watt PSU. Not only it lists for $10 less than the old PSU, it also has ten more amps of 12 volt power, now 40 amps or 480 watts. Considering the CPU and video card power draw maxes out at 222 watts worst case, you have plenty of overhead for future expansion or even overclocking the CPU. (You should get a better CPU heatsink if you plan on overclocking.)

All of these changes bring the price back up to within a dollar of my price target with is $625 for hardware minus a 5% buffer for price changes (total hardware budget target: $593.75), and $100 for an OEM copy of the Win 7 SP1 DVD also know as the Microsoft Tax.

Now I would like to remind people that I use the unit price of an item when I calculate the cost, no "Savings" or rebates. This means that there are some "deals" I would love to take advantage of but don't because I don't want to update the build every week. Also some of these picks suit my "taste" like a windowless case, an unpainted PSU or a motherboard with a COM port (I have an external dial-up modem). There are always good alternatives at around the same price for just about every part and some of those may be on sale the day or week you are pulling the buy trigger.

Now lets see if I can get around to do the $1350 rig sometime this week.

So finally I got around to modify the high end rig to a Sandy Core (Socket 1155) based system. This system is designed to handle a 2nd video card as well as overclocking the CPU.

For the CPU I went with i5-2500K. It's the logical upgrade from the i5-760 of the previous build. Even when not overclocked, it gives a substantial boost to CPU performance going from 2.8 to 3.3GHz, not counting in the internal gains due to the improved design. The unlocked overclock K version is only $15 more and is needed due to Intel finally coming up with a way to lock down base clock overclocking.

I swapped out the Hyper 212 Plus CPU heatsink for the slightly less expensive but slightly better performing (according to FrostyTech) Xigmatech Gaia. Still including a tube of Arctic Silver 5 and damn those commodity prices on silver.

For the motherboard, I'm still kinda up in the air about it. Right now I'm including the ASRock P67 Extreme 4. I'm also considering the MSI P67A-GD65 and the Asus P8P67 Pro and may swap to one of them at a later date. Yes, they all have the B3 rev of the P67 chipset. What I really like about the AsRock is the 3.5" adapter that can bring a pair of USB 3.0 ports to the front of the case.

Memory is kept the same, 8GB of CAS 8, 1.5 volt, DDR3-1600 memory.

The drives are essentially the same as before. The DVD burner is now the same Asus that's in the $725 build, I decided to drop my requirement of it being a drive that can do LightScribe. You need special media and then it takes time for the drive to etch the label on; it seemed like a silly requirement. The hard drive is now the SATA III - 6.0Gb/s version of the 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black drive. It wasn't for the SATA III ability but because they tweaked the head mechanism for a slight improvement in seek times over the older SATA II version.

The video card was upgraded significantly to the 1GB HD 6950. It is around 15% faster in games, not sure about this one, over the previous 1GB HD 6870. The down side is it draws a bit more power so ...

I upgraded the power supply to a 850 watt, 80plus Silver, Corsair HX850. Now this PSU is sized assuming two HD 6950s and an OC HD 2500K. You can easily get away with a 650 watt PSU, with room to spare, if you only plan on using a single video card. The HX850 has modular cabling, 70 amps available at 12 volts but it's only drawback is it's a tad long. Not really a problem with the Cooler Master CM690 II Advanced which I'm also keeping from the previous build.

All together, the unit price of this is as of this post, $1278.88 which is under my target price, with 5% hardware buffer, of $1287.50.