Father Xmas's guide to picking computer components

I been told that alot major sellers like Frys and NewEgg are now limiting amount of HDs you can buy and their supply is about 45 days. :-() 45 days and they are dry on most of their hard drives. And the back up plants in China and Taiwan are at 100% and they are trying to open plants in other SE Asia nations but even then, it will be over six months till the market will see it.

On the flip side of this, due to price adjustments of mechanical drives, SSDs are now a more attractive proposition on the price/performance scale than they were previously.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Even at $220 (but now out of stock), the 1TB, 6Gb/s WD Caviar Black still has 8x the storage capacity of a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD (also meaning it's 8x cheaper per GB).

Hi all. I'm looking at putting a SSD in my netbook and I'm looking at 100-120 or so gigs for one. What's the cheapest SSD you'd recommend? If it matters, my netbook is an Acer AOD255E (the N450 processor variety).

Looks like it uses a 2.5" drive with a SATA interface. Probably only a SATA I 1.5Mb/s interface (SATA II should work fine, don't bother with SATA III drives I doubt a netbook will have a SATA III interface).

I think this drive from Corsair should work fine. Fairly inexpensive too.

Thank you Father Xmas for your wisdom and knowledge!
After 7 years my computer was getting long in the tooth, it ran CoH fine all these years but the 2 gigs of ram and nvidia 7600 card struggled with all the newish 'ultra mode' stuff and would lag badly on full teams with all the auras+power effects.
It took me months of savings but I was able to upgrade to your $750 system, I kept my Tower and harddrive but got all the other parts including upping the ram to 8gigs (and a tube of thermal paste! not in the build)
my only disappointment was the DVD drive didn't come with a sata cable..had to wait a few more days for that to come!
HOWEVER, I got to say it looks and runs awesome now!!!
::: as an example, before the upgrade when i would run a BAF by the time I would load in, the cut scene would be half or more over. Last night when I ran one i was one of the first thru the door!
Thank you Father Xmas!!! Yule came early this year for this humble Monk.

Hey, Father Xmas, any updates to your parts lists? Also, if you didn't use NewEgg, what would be your preferred second choice to buy parts from?

I've only tweaked a few things due to the hard drive shortage and particular models of GTX 460s being discontinued. Edit: Now they are pretty much gone. Sadly there isn't an nVidia card with similar performance at the old GTX 460 price point.

I did notice at NewEgg that the 1.5GB Caviar Black WD is actually cheaper than the 1GB due to the supply/demand situation. Prices are starting to come back down in general for hard drives but it'll still be a while until it's back to where it was in September.

For any big changes I'm waiting for Ivy Bridge CPUs from Intel. There will also be an updated motherboard chipset to go with them that'll have native USB 3.0 and PCIe 3.0. So a few months.

Hopefully the mods won't consider this update thread necromancy.

It's been a while, August of 2011, since I last seriously tweaked the high end rig. That's because simply nothing all that excited has happen that warranted it. Note this system is designed to handle a 2nd video card as well as overclocking the CPU. Even though I call it the $1375 rig, my price target is around $1288 excluding NewEgg "savings" and rebates.

Well the big change is going to a Ivy Bridge/Z77 motherboard configuration.

For the CPU I went with i5-3570K. It's the logical upgrade from the i5-2500K of the Sandy Bridge build. Minor performance improvements as well as an extra 100MHz base clock speed. Nothing to really write home about.

A while back I switched over to the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO from the Xigamatek Gaia due to slightly better overclock cooling performance. Still using Arctic Silver 5 to mediate between the CPU and the heatsink.

For the motherboard, I'm using the ASRock Z77 Extreme6.

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

The Optical drive is a fairly generic ASUS DVD burner at $18.

Due to the price shock in October last year that still hasn't completely subsided, the "cheapest" 1GB SATA 3 hard drive I would recommend is Seagate's ST31000524AS at $110 list. In retrospect it use to be the WB Caviar Black for $90, which now runs for $150 (it was $250 at peak). Subjective difference is minor between those two.

Due to the ever present video driver saga from AMD, I swapped over to the GTX 560Ti last August and that recommendation still stands. AMD announced that they are stopping the monthly driver release schedule so hopefully once they get it to work with CoH, that whatever fixes they did won't be "forgotten" in the next.

I downsized the power supply to a 750 watt, 80plus Silver, Corsair HX750 from the HX850. I looked at the power requirements again and decided that even with moderate OCing of Ivy Bridge and a 2nd GTX 560Ti that 850 watts was overkill.

I'm still using the Cooler Master CM 690 II Advance as the case. I may tweak this as I find out more about the USB 3.0 version of the case in a couple of weeks.

Of course Win 7 Home Premium SP1 OEM is included in the list. Get it now before Win 8 is forced upon.

Hey Father Xmas.

I have got a simple question. I am currently using the following

Inter(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz
4.00 GB DDR3 RAM (I think)
32 bits - Windows 7

I recently had an issue with a graphics card, which spec I can't remember since someone else does the repairs and maintenance for me when something comes up with my PC, although I remember it was an Nvidia. They provided me with a RADEON HD 5450 video card, which I am using right now.

My question is WILL THIS VIDEO CARD ALLOW ME TO PLAY NORMALLY? I'm asking because I have pretty limited access to hardware in my country (currency control and what not). If not, what would you recommend I should get?

Thanks.

Since I don't know what you had I can't compare it so I'll talk in generalities.

It will allow you to play. Don't expect normally unless you aim really low or don't set the bar too high. It's better than the old ATI integrated HD 4200 that my folks have in their Athlon II quad desktop but it's around the same performance as the integrated graphics in Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs (HD Graphics 3000). The ATI HD 5450 is more targeted for people building home theater PCs which are quiet but have hardware assisted video playback for Blu-ray rather than gaming. Compared to older cards we are looking at the 6600GT, 8500GT, 9400GT or HD 4550.

Forget AA, forget native resolution of your LCD monitor. Start at 1280x720 or 1280x800 (16:9 or 16:10 are the two "standard" aspect rations for widescreen monitors) and the graphics slider (lets start with advance graphics off) set to high/no ultra mode (middle setting) and work from there. You may have to go down to 1024x768 in a window to get OK frame rates. You will probably need to disable effects like DoF, Bloom and even basic shadows (now we are talking about options in the advance graphics options) and you may get around 30fps (with VSync off), less red side, Praetoria or revamp Atlas but I'm SWAGing here (Scientific Wild *** Guess).

/showfps 1 will display your frame rate so you can use that to gauge your fine tuning of the settings.

Just been told that my links to the parts lists aren't working. It appears that NewEgg doesn't like tinyURL redirecting so here are the two actual links until I figure out a way to include them again in my sig.

$725 Rig - http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...Number=3829929

$1350 Rig - http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...Number=5117031

I've been thinking about picking up a second system for multi-account running. (yeah yeah, no life) Something that can handle several accounts going at once, say 3, on minimal graphics settings.

This is all i would use the thing for, but I don't know squat about computer specs and parts and magic and all that match witchcraft.

Any suggestions?

Exactly how "multi" are you talking?

If just two accounts, pretty much any i5 or i7 will do just fine.
Memory will be a bigger concern (the more the better, but figure between 1 and 2GB per instance just to be safe).
If you're simply flipping between instances, graphics card isn't as important.
If you're running in windowed mode with multiple instances displaying simultaneously, you'll want to go beefier with your graphics card choice.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Three accounts, four max. I would just be flipping between screens, primarily staying on the main toon's screen while the others were just set at follow or staying put, while using the /maxinactivefps command

In that case, I'd probably go i7 for the greater multithreading, and get whatever you'd like (and can afford) as a graphics card.

Start up a thread of your own for to ask for advice on the system to build.
This way we don't poison Father's guide thread any further.

Use this as your guide for specifics.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

The GTX 680 is swatting mosquitoes with tactical nukes when it comes to this game. Personally I like the GTX 670 which is, online, $100 less but only 10% slower. The GTX 680 is also power hungry like all high end cards, but better than the previous high end 5xx series. We are talking 195 watts max. Compared to 20 watts for the HD 5450 or 50 watts for the 9500GT so making sure your power supply can properly feed it is now the question.

Off hand I say we are talking a modern 600 watt power supply with 40+ amps of 12 volt power and two 6+2 PCIe power connectors.