PC shopping in New Zealand

[Lupus]

Hi there

More of the same I'm afraid but hopefully there is some academic value in this exercise.

Anyway, I will not be ordering any parts from the northern hemisphere, so if you chose to help me it will
have to be from here. Then you can see what prices and choices we have. May be good for a laugh, at worst.

I put the following together after going through previous posts, looking at my budget and trolling some sites.Could you please check for compatibility and overall performance? And of course the old dollar/value ratio. Any questions, fire away, I'll answer.

NZ Dollar exchange rate: 1 USD = 1.45 NZD
1 GBP = 2.19 NZD
1 EUR = 1.98 NZD (if you wanted to convert)

Budget: +/- NZ$ 2000
Windows 7 64 bit

CPU Intel i5 750 $ 349
http://www.pcforce.co.nz/index.php?m...roducts_id=580

Mobo GIGABYTE P55A-UD4 $ 289
http://www.pcforce.co.nz/index.php?m...roducts_id=596

GPU XFX ATI RAdeon 5770 1Gb $ 289
http://www.playtech.co.nz/afawcs0139...ctdetails.html

Ram DDR3 1600 MHz 4gb $ 200 (+-) Corsair or Supertalent
http://www.pcforce.co.nz/index.php?m...page=1&sort=4a

HDD WD Caviar Black 1 TB $ 175
http://www.playtech.co.nz/afawcs0139...ctdetails.html

DVD LG 22x $ 59
PSU Corsair 750W $ 215
http://www.pcforce.co.nz/index.php?m...roducts_id=512

LCD LG W2253 23" $ 329
http://www.pcforce.co.nz/index.php?m...roducts_id=630

Case Coolermaster CM 690 $ 130
Mouse Logitech LS1 $ 28
Keyboard Logitech Wave $ 55

All this parts is from PCForce. They are cheaper than the rest and down the road from me.
http://www.pcforce.co.nz/index.php?main_page=index

Others are: ZCom Computers
http://www.zcom.co.nz/index.php

iFocus
http://www.ifocus.co.nz/

Question - Why would one need the virtual XP on W7 Pro?

Thanks a lot!

Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.
Like always, for all your help and time sacrificed, we can not thank you enough.
You are ...........

Regards

[Freddie]

All looks to be in order, the only thing two things I would say is get the GIGABYTE P55-UD3 Intel P55 , it's $5 above your budget for a motherboard but don't worry about that, I was going to recommend the newer GIGABYTE H55-UD3H but I noticed from the pictures the VRAMS on the H55-UD3H doesn't have any heatsinks which may limit it's overclocking performance if that's something you want to consider in the future. Both of those board (UD3 & UD3H) are unsuitable for crossfire as despite both boards having 2 PCI-E 16x sockets the 2nd slot only runs at 4x which will cause a bottleneck so bear this in mind but given the monitor you have you won't need to worry about Crossfire.

You can save a bit of cash by getting a lower power PSU, by all means stay with Corsair but 750 watts for that setup is overkill, a 600 watt unit such as this Corsair TX-650W, it's $30 cheaper which you can either keep for yourself or spend it on a 3rd party HSF for your CPU if you plan to overclock.

[Lupus]

Thanks a lot, Freddie!
I have added the new info.

[Lupus]

Bump

Anybody home?

[Freddie]

Yes, have you ordered it yet?

[Lupus]

No, not yet. I am going on Monday. Still wondering if I should try and put it together or ask the shop:
"You want dollars, you build".....

Honestly, I thought I would get more opinions or maybe ChaobSiroc would start another war. Anything but this silence.

I read your comment on the reliability of the external drives and I was wondering if that would be a better backup or maybe two drives of 500gb. How reliable is this big drives?

With the monitor, do you mean the card is powerful enough or that the resolution is too low?

Lastly, if this setup is run as is, would I need extra fans?

My needs are more in line of a smaller system, E7500 or so, but for a little extra it appears that you get so much more. I think that money is better spend with 1156 than 775.

Thanks again, Freddie.

[Freddie]

No, not yet. I am going on Monday. Still wondering if I should try and put it together or ask the shop:
"You want dollars, you build".....

Given the amount your spending your better off building it yourself, the more expensive a PC is the more money you save by doing it yourself (D.I.Y), if your only spending $600ish on some low machine for web browsing and office work you might as well get a low end Dell as their impossible to beat on price even if you D.I.Y it but you case stick to D.I.Y.

Honestly, I thought I would get more opinions or maybe ChaobSiroc would start another war. Anything but this silence.

I read your comment on the reliability of the external drives and I was wondering if that would be a better backup or maybe two drives of 500gb. How reliable is this big drives?

This thread has been a bit baron for feedback for some reason, perhaps people are shying away because your a Kiwi and their a bit unsure. As for external drives, there very convenient for quick, easy and portable backup/archiving, however the ultimate in data security would be two matching drives in a raid 1 configuration, that way if one drive dies you still have all your data stored on the other one. If you want to go down this route I would suggest you get two matching 500Gb/750Gb/1Tb (remember RAID 1 will only give you storage for the capacity for one drive so 500gb+500Gb=500gb of storage) depending on what you think you will need and 1x 1Tb Samsung Spinpoint F3 drive for you OS and games.

With the monitor, do you mean the card is powerful enough or that the resolution is too low?

1920x1080 is a fairly high resolution (according to the steam hardware survey the most popular resolution is still 1280x1024) and that card will be just fine for that monitor.

Lastly, if this setup is run as is, would I need extra fans?

My needs are more in line of a smaller system, E7500 or so, but for a little extra it appears that you get so much more. I think that money is better spend with 1156 than 775.

Thanks again, Freddie.

No need for extra fans unless you live in a particularly hot area, just make sure every 6 months of so do a bit of maintenance and get some compressed air spray and give your video card, case and CPU fans a blast to clear any dust that has built up.

Don't bother with the Socket 775 its a dead platform, stick with 1156 your getting about 25% extra performance clock for clock buy using the newer platform and it uses less power to boot (thus less heat), it's also worth getting it for the awesome turbo mode as well.

[Roman_Man#3]

That drive will be reliable, just make sure to get the Black version, not the Green. You only need external drives if you need lots of storage, IIRC Freddie uses his for tv shows, movies, etc. And 1 drive will be more reliable than 2 drives in RAID, if you are talking about Raid0 which is most common in custom builds.

The card is powerful enough, you don't really need 2 for it, thats all he means.

No extra fans needed either, unless you notice it starts getting hot. When you get it, download and install SpeedFan to keep an eye on temperatues.

1156 is definitely a better choice than 775. Looks like a solid build.

[Lupus]

Just a double check: Is the i5 compatible with DDR3 1600? Or should it be 1333?

[Roman_Man#3]

Doesn't matter.

[wozzar]

Hi there



Question - Why would one need the virtual XP on W7 Pro?


Regards

You will need Virtual XP for old apps and games from XP which may not run in WIN7

[Lupus]

You will need Virtual XP for old apps and games from XP which may not run in WIN7

Do you have any examples? Are there that many that it would be a good investment to spend the few extra bucks?

[Freddie]

Do you have any examples? Are there that many that it would be a good investment to spend the few extra bucks?

To be honest I doubt you will need it unless you have some really obscure application that you can't live without and only runs on XP. As for games let just say I'm a member at Wing Commander CIC and it's been reported that games as old as Wing Commander 3 & 4 work just fine on Windows 7 (so long as you use the normal XP fixes), if you do find a game that doesn't run on W7 just google the game and windows 7 and nine times out ten there will be a work around.

[Lupus]

Yeah, that makes sense.
The other thing is the retail version. I just found out they are double the price. Seeing that I will not need W7 pro, the home will be 189 oem vs 359 retail (pro is 249 vs 519).
Can it really be worth it?

[Freddie]

Yeah, that makes sense.
The other thing is the retail version. I just found out they are double the price. Seeing that I will not need W7 pro, the home will be 189 oem vs 359 retail (pro is 249 vs 519).
Can it really be worth it?

It's really up to you. If you buy an OEM copy you can only use that licence once and the licenece key will forever be tied to that PC, you can upgrade things like the Ram, video card, hard drive and CPU but if one day you want a whole new system including the motherboard Microsoft count changing the motherboard as a new PC so you will have to buy a new licence again. This doesn't effect things like formatting the hard drive, so long as you still have the same hardware you can still successfully reactivate it.

With retail you can use as many times as you like and change as much hardware as you want, I bought the retail copy back in October since Microsoft were offering Windows 7 on discount (which is unheard off - a big company being generous for UK buyers!) which was retail and was the same price as OEM so it was a no brainer.

Another thing to consider is Windows 8 - it's due for release in 2012 and you might want to upgrade to it so buying a OEM Windows 7 now might make better financial sense. On the flip side Microsoft seems to follow a smiler engineering policy to Intel who have Tick-Tock process - Tick = new architecture Tock = Same architecture smaller process, Microsoft's is a bit different in as much as it's called the Great-Crap method, Windows ME= Crap, Windows XP= Great, Windows Vista= Crap, Windows 7= Great so that means Windows 8 = Crap. Of course that's speculation but for some reason every other OS seems to be a bit of a stinker.

[Top-Tier-Tech]

Another thing to consider is Windows 8 - it's due for release in 2012 and you might want to upgrade to it so buying a OEM Windows 7 now might make better financial sense. On the flip side Microsoft seems to follow a smiler engineering policy to Intel who have Tick-Tock process - Tick = new architecture Tock = Same architecture smaller process, Microsoft's is a bit different in as much as it's called the Great-Crap method, Windows ME= Crap, Windows XP= Great, Windows Vista= Crap, Windows 7= Great so that means Windows 8 = Crap. Of course that's speculation but for some reason every other OS seems to be a bit of a stinker.

Windows 8 will be a completely new OS unlike Win7 so I suspect it will have extra bugs needing to be worked out of it, yet I must say, I got an HP Vista PC 1 month after Vista's release and I didn't have internet to get updates till' a year later, yet I never had any trouble with the OS.

[Freddie]

We could go on a tangent about Vista but people don't like for different reasons some don't like the boot times, some don't like it's sluggishness, eats up battery power on laptops etc but Vista does follow the line of Microsoft products that go good/bad. Technically speaking XP should have more bad rep then Vista as IMO it was a bigger step forward then Vista as it combined the consumer kernel with the Windows 2000/NT kernel and whist it did have more then it's share of compatibility issues when it came out they got fixed within in a year but people tend to forget this when they talk about XP simply because 90% of time it's been reliable Vista will never enjoy that privilege.

[Roman_Man#3]

Never had any trouble with Vista. Most people who harp on it have never used it and just follow the reviews from the first day it came out.

[Lupus]

Would software written for 32 bit work on 64 bit?

All my searches on the internet confirms that they will, but what has been your experience?

My printer is going to work on 64 bit, says Windows...

[mrcrusty]

Would software written for 32 bit work on 64 bit?
For example, Microsoft Office 2007. It says Win32 on the box.
I got it from the university, but forgot about the details.

Of course, it would just run as a 32 bit program.