OK guys. I am going to shock and amaze you. Kind of like Pikachu.

My family need a computer. This computer needs to be good enough to last them well in to the future. It also needs to be good enough so that if I move away from home and decide to come back for a weekend, I have a semi-decent computer for running Team Fortress 2 and EverQuest II on. It also needs to have a fair amount of storage space. The computer also needs to be small - Mini ATX is a must, but it needs a fair amount of USB ports for in case they ever want to quickly expand their hard drive space with an external USB jobby.

I have set myself the following constraints:

Needs to cost less than £500
Needs to be multi-core
Needs to have 4 fans maximum, and must be low-RPM
Needs to look good, but not good enough to have to keep on show all the time
Needs to be energy-efficient - no high-end quad-core or multi-GPU setup allowed

I know exactly what I need to get: case, power supply, motherboard, processor, processor cooler, memory, graphics card, hard drive and DVD drive. I also know that I need Vista Home Premium 64-bit, and this pushes the price closer to £600 which I don't really like...

Anyway, this computer will not be completed until at least the end of November.

I'm not telling you any of the specs You'll just find that in a couple of months time there will be lots of nice pictures in this thread.

Ask your questions if you want to

I really recommend the Xilence fans I have, they are very quiet

I can probably image the rough specs, and I'm guessing you will go for the mobo I have, though that is expensive.

gl and hf

I am actually going for a cheaper motherboard Skillers At around half the price of yours.

A GigaByte model?

How did you guess

GigaByte make all the best cheapy motherboards.

I'm intrigued as to what case you will get, though. I wouldn't recommend my case unless heavily modified, which I doubt you will do. The case I would think is that small SilverStone I was looking at, but it's expensive.

I'm still investigating really. I'm a bit worried that the components I am looking at getting just will not fit...

From experience I can say that the CPU cooler is going to be your biggest problem. If you stick with stock, you'll be fine, but tower style coolers will be a big problem. The Zalman flower style should be alright.

Graphics card wise you should be fine with most mATX cases. I could happily fit 2x4870x2s in this case (there's about 7cm off the end of the motherboard for graphics cards).

Hard drives, just make sure you have enough bays for everything you want. Personally I would think a 1TB HDD and a DVDRW will be enough drives (I only have my old HDDs for the sake of recovering data and backup when I have recovered the data, and they would have fit easily if it wasn't for my big CPU cooler.

Most the good cases support full sized (but not oversized) ATX PSUs. Mine does, it's a bit of a squeeze with the cables (noteably the ATX power lead, being a fat braided cable), but it does fit. You MUST get a modular PSU, though, and I can't stress that enough.

Basically, any good mATX case will probably do you fine aslong as you don't have too many drives.

I know Lian-LI do a nice cube style case, and Silverstone do some nice mATX cases (the super mini tower and the "cube style" (more like a cuboid, they're pretty deep). Those are a bit expensive, though, at £70+ each. There is my case, which is only lacking in the cooling department really, but that's pretty expensive now (you can't get the no PSU ones). The tower cases I personally think are pointless, they're just as big as a standard case(not like your case, but one you'd expect to get from Dell or somewhere), just with the height of 3/4PCI slots removed.

I would recommend the SG-03 mini tower case from Silverstone. The only reason I didn't get it was because it only has 78mm clearance over the CPU and I wanted a big cooler. If you use a diffecent cooler, it will do you perfectly, I think.

I've decided that to save myself £50, I am staying with the stock cooler. This has instantly made me feel more relaxed about the whole thing, and I am now able to get a better spec for less money... which is good because I will need to use it from time to time! It also comes under budget which is even better.

This won't be purchased until November 26th, and the spec could change before then, as I am expecting new processors and motherboards to be released.

Stock coolers are never that loud, unless you're a P4 Prescott owner.

The stock cooler will do you fine, but it's not really a £50 saving unless you were planning on an insane cooler (I'm guessing your love for Zalman coolers meant a 9700).

Sounds like this will be a pretty nice machine.

I was looking at a Scythe Ninja 2 or a Thermalright Ultra 120. The Ninja obstructs the DIMM slots and the Ultra 120 does not work so well fanless.

I think they would both be a bit overkill for a budget mATX system.

It depends how hot your processor gets!

you already basically told me the spec xD

He's told me the spec too, lol. Well I mostly had to guess.

OK Well I will reveal the spec anyway, because I am useless at keeping secrets, but it appears not so bad after all at keeping to a budget.

So anyway, the hardware comes to less than £500, but Windows puts it over £500 by a smidge.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-S2H Mixro-ATX Socket AM2+
Processor: AMD Phenom X4 9550 at 2.2GHz or AMD Phenom X4 9350e at 2.0GHz
Memory: 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS2 800MHz at 5-5-5-18
Hard Drive: Samsung HD502IJ 500GB
Graphics: HIS ATI Radeon HD 4670 IceQ
DVD Drive: Samsung 22x DVD+/-RW with Nero
Case: Silverstone Temjin TJ08 Micro-ATX
Power Supply: Enermax Liberty 500W
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit with Service Pack 1

Multiple processing cores are the most important thing. It does not matter if it is a slow quad-core, as long as there are many cores. Phenom's aren't as good as the Core 2 Quad's, but they are certainly cheaper... In the future, let's say in a few years time, a lot more applications will be multi-threaded and this is what will bring the performance difference closer together.

Update.

I would like to add that I am really pleased with the huge selection of motherboards and processors that are available on this platform. The 780G chipset provides a high level of performance, and the Phenom processors are for sure not as powerful as the Intel chips but what more can I say other than that you can get a quad-core processor for under £100?

Processors for under £100 is usually some sort of tease for OEM's like Crapard Bell or Hell to put them in their machines, then at least they can say that they are quad-core... but whatever.

I'm trying to up-spec the components list, but always reverting back to these components. The reason being that my family really do not need a powerful machine to get by, but they could seriously do with a 'media' type of PC to store all of their photos and music. They have a lot of photos because pretty much every person in the house has their own ultra high resolution digital camera now. This really just means they need a lot of disk space. They also do a lot of Internet browsing and they use OpenOffice a lot. I just want something that will be 100% reliable for them to be honest...

A low-power Phenom will be nice and easy on the electricity bill but will also scale well in the years to come due to its native four cores.

If this system goes to plan - I am going to find a low-power alternative to the setup I have available to me today, and purchase that as a replacement for my machine perhaps some time at the end of 2009 or start of 2010. I really feel like I have done pretty much everything in this high-performance end and just want to try at something a bit more 'normal' for once. Kind of like my first system I built actually!

It's picture time.



and



and



slotting in to



powered by



running



on



installed from



all neatly packed away in

Nice spec, will be interesting to see it's performance.



It's easy to build a super high end money-no-objet performance PC. I find it much more interesting to work to a budjet and even other considerations (in your case power consumption and heat, while still being good for media and moderate gaming, mine being size and lots of high end gaming). It's quite fun, actually.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to building this thing more than I was looking forward to building mine... for sheer building pleasure.

Yeah I wish it could be avoided, but...

There's DirectX 10 in Vista, and good 64-bit driver support.

And that's about all that's good.

I don't think Vista is too bad. In my short experience with Vista 64 I've only really had one problem with drivers (well 2, but the second had a simple workaround), and that's not really Vista's fault. The constant nagging is a bit annoying, though.

It might be worth putting Windows XP on there until Windows 7 comes out. What do you think?

Because the system will not have a high-end graphics chip, DirectX 10 is pretty much a no go for this machine. But I will lose a bit of RAM to the 32-bit OS.

Update: Could just go for 2GB of RAM? I also have spare XP license swinging around at home and this could push me closer to £400 than the £500 mark.

For a budget machine, dropping the RAM and going to XP may be alright. More than 2GB only really helps in Vista or with some of the more insane games (Crysis et al).