Building your own PC Questions

[skudmissile]

This is a question for a freind of mine who is thinking of building his own pc. He sent me a screen shot of the items he is wanting to buy. Now my question the experts is, are all the components here compatible? Any help is much apprieciated Thanks John

[Phil-E]

Looks good to me!

It will all fit together although not sure that HDD would be my choice nor would the power supply.

In terms of the HDD I have found samsungs to be very good and the PSU I would personally be going for something with more 12v rails with that CPU and graphics card.

Phil

[Robshaw]

All is fine. That PSU is stupid - I would suggest you change that.

You seem to be missing a case

[billy2981]

PSU is def not good enough, the gfx card will need a bit of juice lol. I have a 500 gb caviar black which is good, 32mb cache

good luck with it mate

[Babs]

Single 12v rail = bad, otherwise not a bad spec... I assume he knows how to put it all together?

[Yeti_Man]

Personally Id suggest changing the Western Digital hard drive to a Seagate Barracuda and I'd say the Corsair PSU is a good choice unlike others on here. Ive never had an issue with the 750TX in systems with 'juicier' components before and in my opinion Corsairs now make some of the best quality PSU's available.

If your friend doesnt have an a problem with overclocking I'd budget £25 for a decent heatsink/fan unit also as that would allow that CPU to run safely nearer the 4GHz mark.

Lee

[cheezemonkhai]

He is half way in between there.

Since he has the i5 he doesn't sound like he is trying toi build a gaming rig. At which point I'd drop the graphics card to a mid range card and be done with it.

The hard disk is fine, but for a quieter version he might want to try the green power version of that drive to save the effort of DIYing it.

PSU will be fine if you don't run a silly graphics card that requires extra power feeds.

[Captain Sisko]

Graphics card prob best off if he can push it go for the Radeon 58x series.

[foo]

You might want a case to put it all in. Oh, and if you change the HDD just avoid Seagate.

[skudmissile]

Big Thanks to all. :thumbsup: In the absense of the thanks button consider yourself thanked. Rather than explain all the good answers, I have sent the link direct to my friend. Really apprieciate this Thanks John

[cheezemonkhai]

You might want a case to put it all in. Oh, and if you change the HDD just avoid Seagate.

Erm obvious question but why?

All hard disks fail (fact) it's just a case of when. All the manufactures have had issues at some point in their past, so a sweeping statement like that is almost as silly as avoid Hitachi drives because of the old deskstar issue.

[foo]

Experience.

I run a datacenter with thousands of disks in it from all the major manufacturers, there are more Seagate failures than any other make, and more bulletins issued against Seagate disks than any other manufacturer.

Unf. we cant control what make disks we get supplied for that, since disks themselves are not the unit we purchase, but since it's all under support and all the data is protected anyway it does not really matter.

But I will not put a Seagate disk in my home PC.

[Yeti_Man]

Experience.

I run a datacenter with thousands of disks in it from all the major manufacturers, there are more Seagate failures than any other make, and more bulletins issued against Seagate disks than any other manufacturer.

Unf. we cant control what make disks we get supplied for that, since disks themselves are not the unit we purchase, but since it's all under support and all the data is protected anyway it does not really matter.

But I will not put a Seagate disk in my home PC.

Thats interesting as Ive found exactly the opposite. Im unsure if a data centre would actually be using the same class of drive as the OP / home user but out of 650+ PC's that I look after - again and again its the Western digital drives that die! Ive probably had to do a warranty replacement on around 12 WD's and no Seagates int he last 12 months. Think we also had a Samsung fail too.

Lee

[Babs]

Don't buy WD Raptor X drives, the window looks nice but it drastically reduces their life! I've just had a RAID array go down.

[foo]

Im unsure if a data centre would actually be using the same class of drive as the OP / home user...

Lee

They are supposed to be 'server grade' whatever that actually means (higher binned?), and their duty cycle and environment is very different from a PC. To be fair they do differ from consumer drives in many respects (speeds, cache, firmware, interface), but the platters and heads would be the same.

[cheezemonkhai]

Experience.

I run a datacenter with thousands of disks in it from all the major manufacturers, there are more Seagate failures than any other make, and more bulletins issued against Seagate disks than any other manufacturer.

Unf. we cant control what make disks we get supplied for that, since disks themselves are not the unit we purchase, but since it's all under support and all the data is protected anyway it does not really matter.

But I will not put a Seagate disk in my home PC.

I work for a company that creates test equipment for the drive manufactures and also builds storage arrays for OEMs. I'm basing my comments on the data I see also.

They are supposed to be 'server grade' whatever that actually means (higher binned?), and their duty cycle and environment is very different from a PC. To be fair they do differ from consumer drives in many respects (speeds, cache, firmware, interface), but the platters and heads would be the same.

It can be many things. Sometime different firmware, sometimes different construction, sometimes extra sensors to allow a drive to regulate and reduce vibration, holding the spindle at both ends rather than one.

Don't count on the platters and heads being the same either as they are not always the same.

Most of the enterprise drives have a very high MTBF too and are designed for 24/7 operation as opposed to stop start operation.

Then you have issues that some chassis are different to others and that means that some chassis will cause drives to fail more frequently than others because the disk carriers in one are less good than another at reducing the effects of inter-drive vibration from the many drives in the chassis seeking, moving heads, spinning up and down at the same time.

As i said your statement is very much a sweeping one. Some drive models might or might not have problems, but you can't write off one manufacturer based on this, because in general it happens to them all at some point.

Edited 2 December, 2009 by cheezemonkhai

[foo]

Seems fair and balanced.

Still won't be buying any for myself any time soon. ;-)