New PC advice please

Bielie said:
Yes PP, I fully agree with you. In fact I don't think I disagree with anything you've said in this whole thread except maybe the daily running cost (electricity bill) BUT...

I am looking at the whole thing from an upgradeability (spelling??) / future-proofing point of view and the reason for that is from what was said by levovo. It's that WHAT IF factor. He is obviously more and more seriously considering the SLI setup, so it makes sense to cater for it now - just incase - versus having to worry about it again at a later stage.

Undeniably, if he never gets to doing the SLI thingy, he's wasted a few bucks on that PSU because your statement about that is correct. But what if he does finally decide to go that route? And judging from his posts that seems to be a very big possibility... So therefore I'm supporting him in that idea. See where I'm coming from?

He's not simply upgrading.. a new mobo, CPU, RAM... man, he is building a brand new system. Thus I believe he is doing all the right things - building a rig that would serve him a long time to come (by going a bit bigger on certain things now).

I'm sure he will go for SLI in the end hehehe :D Keep us updated on that levovo!
Click to expand...

I am with you and understand 100% where you're coming from. And we seem to agree with each other mainly.

Point most pertinent is that a ±500watt PSU will be perfect for the future and any future-proofing, provided it is a single card setup.

The difference lies in how the buyer perceives the value of SLI/Xfire. From my point of view, it is overrated, doesn't do anything a single card can't, and from my example above the saving of R40 will be forgotten after 2 months of dual graphics card PC use... With all that extra noise and heat.

It really is mainly about bragging rights, I guarantee you this.
 
Bielie said:
Agreed! Can you recommend a good one there PP?
Click to expand...

Anything from Corsair. :) For me, personally.

But the truth is, any PSU from any brand that has a decent warranty, is 80% efficiency certified, and has 4 x PCI-E connectors. Any PSU like that, no matter the brand, by default will be excellent.

Cheapest from Corsair looks like the TX750, followed closely by the GS800.

±R1215 Corsair TX750 , Eps12V , ATX 12V V2.2 - 750w ( 12v : 720w ) , nvidia SLi ready , 80PLUS certified for energy saving , 24pin ( 4pin detachable ) , with active-PFC , 4 x 8pin (2+6) PCI-E power connectors , 8x SATA , 1x 140mm thermal controled fan ; with OCP, OVP, OPP, SCP, UVP - 5 years warranty - no power cord

±R1240 Corsair GS800 , Eps12V , with 140mm Tri color ( Red or bLue or White led fan ) - with selection + on/off switch , ATX 12V V2.3 - 800w ( 12v : 780w ) , 80PLUS white certified for energy saving , 24pin ( 4pin detachable ) , with active-PFC , 4x8pin (6+2) PCI-E power connectors , 8x SATA ; with OCP, OVP, OPP, SCP, UVP - 3 years warranty - no power cord
Click to expand...

Just look at the price though. Insane to pay that much when you are only "considering" SLI/Xfire in the future, when a single card setup for twice the price of the 2 to-be SLI'd/Xfire'd cards will be as good, create less heat and noise, and consume less power.

...But the bragging rights... ;)
 
PostmanPot said:
Here we go.

Well you could get this single PCI-E 16x mobo with 4 X RAM slots for R650:



Okay so that's a R300 saving.

Then, you could get this PSU for R575 for single card setups:



Or this PSU, enough for SLI/Xfire for R1215:



Okay so that's R640 saving.

R940 in total.

So you will save ±R1,000 by getting 2 x GTX460s for similar performance to a GTX480, but it would cost you R940 extra to support the 2 cards.

So not really as cost effective as you perhaps thought. And more noise, more heat.

But the bragging rights...! :D
Click to expand...

Regretfully I did not see that mobo (I have no idea why!!??).

Even if I never use sli - which was always intended as an option only and not something that I was definitely going to do - I will feel more comfortable knowing that I won't ever have to worry about the psu (at least until it croaks one day).

Perhaps you have a point with the savings. I think what I'll do is just get the gs700 since I anyway have the spare cash and not have to worry about power again, then save some money for later and get a single power house graphics card.

I guess when I saw that the mobo I was getting came with sli, I got all hopped up and just saw gpus in my eyes :D
 
stevovo said:
Perhaps you have a point with the savings. I think what I'll do is just get the gs700 since I anyway have the spare cash and not have to worry about power again, then save some money for later and get a single power house graphics card.
Click to expand...

But that would be complete overkill.

Look. It's your money, and you can do what you want with it. All I'm trying to do is be sensible and try and help you save money.

I see absolutely no point in going for the GS700 when it doesn't have 4 x PCI-E connectors, when the CX500 will work just as well at about half the price.

The CX500 is an absolutely brilliant PSU, and Corsair are in fact gifting us by providing such good quality PSUs at such an affordable price. You would be silly to not take the opportunity they've presented you with. Again, the quality of the Corsair PSUs is unbelievable. You should feel the weight of the things.
 
I suppose I can go for the cheaper psu, and then with the difference get a new dvd writer to replace my "manual feed"* one. I forgot about that old thing :)

* manual feed dvd writers are those when you push the eject button 3 - 5 times before something comes out, then you have to catch the tray as it only opens half-way and pull it out to be able to change the disc.
 
stevovo said:
I guess when I saw that the mobo I was getting came with sli, I got all hopped up and just saw gpus in my eyes :D
Click to expand...
Aha! NOW the truth comes out!!:D:D

Well if that's the case my friend, PP is right. Anything more really will be overkill (read: waste of money). Really no need for anything bigger then, so pleeeaase use what you'll be saving to get another DVD writer! LOL

(but i'm still worried about those gpu's in your eyes... i'm sure i still see a glimmer there.... :p )
 
Last edited:
I'm so excited I think I might put the specs in my sig before I even get it :D
 
PostmanPot said:
The CX500 is an absolutely brilliant PSU, and Corsair are in fact gifting us by providing such good quality PSUs at such an affordable price. You would be silly to not take the opportunity they've presented you with. Again, the quality of the Corsair PSUs is unbelievable. You should feel the weight of the things.
Click to expand...

I recently bought the Corsair AX750 PSU from PP and the quality of the product is incredible!
 
yeti said:
I recently bought the Corsair AX750 PSU from PP and the quality of the product is incredible!
Click to expand...

Have been debating about the manual and lack of cable labels. Everyone agrees Corsair should have done better there. Otherwise, amazing product. Basically the best PSUs on the market.
 
I got my goods yesterday. Everything went perfectly fine, putting in all the parts, installing windows etc.

But now, at random times in windows I will just start getting messages saying "windows explorer has stopped working" and then I can't do anything else, I have to click on close and then the windows explorer restarts again only to give the same message a few secs later :confused:

It doesn't always do it however, sometimes when I start up the pc, everything is 100%. I even played a few games for an hour or so without any problems.

So this morning I noticed that I could reproduce the error exactly by trying to open any folder on my second hard drive (yet the error sometimes happens when doing nothing as well). So I plugged out the second drive and did a scandisk on the 1st drive and it picked up a bunch of errors. Since then I have not plugged in the second drive and I have successfully switched the pc on a couple of times to check if the problem comes back, but it looks like it's gone now * crosses fingers *

Could there be something wrong with my hard drive? or with the sata controller on the mobo? (that second drive was working fine with my old parts)

I already updated the bios since the old bios it came with didn't support the cpu.

I'm secretly hoping that the problem is with 1 or both of my hard drives since I don't want my shiny new stuff to be faulty :)

Oh and the windows 7 was a fresh install.
 
Hmmm, will do that if I get home and it's still giving problems. It's just strange though, cos it was already a fresh installation, doesn't the setup disc tell you if there were any errors during installation?
 
CriticalConsumer said:
It generally does, however, did you get the latest updates for your OS and drivers for your devices?
Click to expand...

So far I only installed the latest drivers for my display card, but the other drivers (something called a 'coprocessor' and some 'unknown device') I downloaded through windows update. So at the moment there are no "exclamation marks" in device manager.

Today I've downloaded the latest nForce 750a drivers from nvidia as well as the latest via audio drivers from via's website. Will install them when I get home and hopefully that will sort it out (if it is a driver issue, which I doubt a little).

Also downloaded win7 sp1, gonna install that too.

So basically, if after updating every single thing I can think of and it still gives problems, I guess I'll just have to format again :)

EDIT: forgot to mention, I also ran sfc /scannow and it didn't pick up any errors. However... the pc hasn't given any problems since I ran a scandisk this morning on the c drive.

@ postmanpot, stroebs : I also seem to think that reinstalling is the solution.

will keep posting on progress...

BTW is there any way to test the windows 7 setup dvd for integrity?
 
Last edited:
Ok I've changed the hard drive and reinstalled windows 7. All the previous errors are gone but now there are new errors :(

So far it's only happened twice - I get a blue screen about something to do with memory management and then the pc restarts. From what I recall it only happened while I was copying a dvd with lots of files from the disc to the hard drive, though I'm not sure if that's the culprit.

I'll probably have to test the memory this weekend with memtest.

Has anyone experienced blue screens like this with new hardware? Is it possible that the hardware can't handle the ram at 1333mhz when all 4 slots are in use?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X