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Author: Subject: Advice on building a PC?
james h

posted on 1/9/14 at 07:12 PM Reply With Quote
Advice on building a PC?

After my 7 year old laptop gave up the ghost last month, I've decided to build my own PC.

I'm returning to uni for the last two years of my engineering degree so I'll need to be able to do some CAD and CFD work.

I'd like to be able to use it for at least four years when (hopefully) I'll have a job that will enable me to upgrade again.

I'm looking for some general advice on what processor (i5, i7, other?)/graphics/motherboard to go for and where to buy the components from. I don't have a huge budget but I'd like to get a medium to high performing PC that can manipulate and render 3D items without too much hassle. I know that some of our future projects will be quite processor intensive.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

James

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drt

posted on 1/9/14 at 07:20 PM Reply With Quote
http://www.ankermann.com/?language=en

If you like to FEM a lot, you need a lot of processing power.
I7 it would be,
And specially for cfd a whopper of a graphics card.

Ankermann does very good deals and you don't need to worry
if everything works good together.

If you want to build it yourself... it will cost more
And it is a hassle of finding the right combo's.

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stevebubs

posted on 1/9/14 at 07:24 PM Reply With Quote
The days of buying PC components individually to get a cheaper PC are pretty much long gone, I'm afraid...

Check out the costs of what you want in component form, then compare with something that's ready-built...

Don't forget to add the cost of O/S....not necessarily an insignificant amount...

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Irony

posted on 1/9/14 at 07:25 PM Reply With Quote
I would just buy one from the likes of dell outlet. Dell spend millions on perfecting there systems so all the components work together in harmony. You just won't get that sort of reliability with a home built system. You'll spend more in the long run.
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stevebubs

posted on 1/9/14 at 07:25 PM Reply With Quote
PS I would say the forward is an i7 with as much memory and as good a graphics card as you can afford....
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HowardB

posted on 1/9/14 at 07:54 PM Reply With Quote
I have an i7 and 32gb of ram, it crunches through FEA slowly,.. we have a few tower system things that are recommended by the software manufacturer and they fly,....

however at least one has an unsupported video card now,...

look at the software and get a machine as good as or as near to the spec as the software company recommends.

hth





Howard

Fisher Fury was 2000 Zetec - now a 1600 (it Lives again and goes zoom)

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drt

posted on 1/9/14 at 07:56 PM Reply With Quote
second that....

check out
http://www.ankermann.com/?language=en

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james h

posted on 1/9/14 at 08:03 PM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by HowardB
I have an i7 and 32gb of ram, it crunches through FEA slowly,.. we have a few tower system things that are recommended by the software manufacturer and they fly,....

however at least one has an unsupported video card now,...

look at the software and get a machine as good as or as near to the spec as the software company recommends.

hth


I hadn't thought of looking at it that way, it will definitely help narrow down the options for sure

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whitestu

posted on 1/9/14 at 08:43 PM Reply With Quote
We've just put together a gaming PC for my son and it does work out a bit cheaper to buy the bits, but not by much. I had an OS licence which saved a few quid.

We used an AMD FX 8350 8 core processor, Nvidia R7 260x graphics card, 16gb RAM, 128 gb SSD and 1tb sata.

It flies along with all the Minecraft stuff he does - I've not seen anything that hammers a PC like Minecraft with all the mods, texture packs etc.

Unless you are keen to build for the sake of it [we were] it is probably best to buy ready built.

Stu

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inkafone

posted on 1/9/14 at 08:52 PM Reply With Quote
There's still a few computer fairs around. The vendors are knowledgeable and you will save quite a few quid compared to a Dell plus there's the satisfaction of self-build. Buying secondhand (try HERE is good - change the hard drive for an SSD and use the original for backups. Building a PC is pretty straightforward plus there's plenty of advice on the net.
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bigfoot4616

posted on 1/9/14 at 09:01 PM Reply With Quote
its no cheaper to build your own, but it needn't cost any more.
its also more enjoyable to build it up from scratch rather than just unpacking and turning on.

bit of research to make sure you get stuff that will work together and it will be as reliable as any prebuilt one.
i've built my last 2 and done quite a few cpu/mobo upgrades over the years and have never had any problems.


i usually have a look here http://www.overclockers.co.uk/index.php find what i want, then see if i can get it cheaper elsewhere as they aren't usually the cheapest. having said that the service is very good so unless its a decent saving i go with them.

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james h

posted on 1/9/14 at 10:01 PM Reply With Quote
Lots of good advice here, thanks! Looking at computers is like going to an Indian or Chinese, there are so many options and combinations it gets quite frustrating to find what I actually want!
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craig1410

posted on 1/9/14 at 10:34 PM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Irony
I would just buy one from the likes of dell outlet. Dell spend millions on perfecting there systems so all the components work together in harmony. You just won't get that sort of reliability with a home built system. You'll spend more in the long run.


Sorry mate but that made me laugh...

Here's a recent review on laptop and desktop reliability which might be of interest. Assuming you don't want an Apple machine, your next best bet is probably an Asus machine.

I do agree that the days of building your own machine are long gone and I say this as someone who built his own high-end PC's from the mid 1980's through the 8086, 80286, 386, 486, Pentium/Cyrix/AMD K6 & Athlon/Athlon XP generations. My journey came to an end on Aug 11th 2007 when I bought an iMac. That machine is still going strong today and is used daily along with a few other Apple machine in the household.

If you do buy a PC then seriously give a recent Linux operating system a try rather than defaulting to windows. You might need to use Windows for some software you want to run but give Linux some thought.

Here is a good resource for hardware reviews: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk

and another:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/alist

Asus here: http://www.asus.com/uk/Desktops/

Good luck,
Craig.


[Edited on 1/9/2014 by craig1410]

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Irony

posted on 2/9/14 at 07:28 AM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by craig1410
quote:
Originally posted by Irony
I would just buy one from the likes of dell outlet. Dell spend millions on perfecting there systems so all the components work together in harmony. You just won't get that sort of reliability with a home built system. You'll spend more in the long run.


Sorry mate but that made me laugh...

Here's a recent review on laptop and desktop reliability which might be of interest. Assuming you don't want an Apple machine, your next best bet is probably an Asus machine.

I do agree that the days of building your own machine are long gone and I say this as someone who built his own high-end PC's from the mid 1980's through the 8086, 80286, 386, 486, Pentium/Cyrix/AMD K6 & Athlon/Athlon XP generations. My journey came to an end on Aug 11th 2007 when I bought an iMac. That machine is still going strong today and is used daily along with a few other Apple machine in the household.

If you do buy a PC then seriously give a recent Linux operating system a try rather than defaulting to windows. You might need to use Windows for some software you want to run but give Linux some thought.

Here is a good resource for hardware reviews: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk

and another:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/alist

Asus here: http://www.asus.com/uk/Desktops/

Good luck,
Craig.


[Edited on 1/9/2014 by craig1410]



Funny you should say that as I am currently typing this on a Mac. Everyone in my office uses macs and we have never had a single machine go down in the entire 12 years of the office operating. I wouldn't touch a windows machine with a 10ft pole, if one of my machines goes down I am losing business. However I wouldn't touch a home built machine with a 20ft pole. Assuming I could get a pole of such a length.

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David Jenkins

posted on 2/9/14 at 07:31 AM Reply With Quote
I'm just in the process of building a PC - just waiting for Amazon to ship the last few parts.

I wanted a medium power box that was small enough to sit on the corner of my desk, just to run the Windows apps that simply can't be replaced by anything on Linux. I had a big powerful but older PC but that won't run Win8, and I have a 4-year-old laptop on my desk for which Intel won't write Win8 video drivers (thanks Intel). I have been running Win8.1 in a virtual machine under Linux, but that hasn't been a rewarding experience.

The Mini-ITX case will take less space on my desk than the laptop, barely 5" high, and will have just the CPU fan (low-power CPU, no graphics card). 8GB memory, 1TB HDD, DVD R/W drive, and I already have the Win8 Pro 64-bit installation disk, a keyboard and a mouse. I'll be sharing the monitor with my Linux box. The total cost is going to be around £240. It could have been cheaper, but I picked a fancy case...

I've not seen a bare-bones PC with that spec for anything like that sort of money.

Once the new box is up and running my laptop will be converted to a Linux box - it's just a case of swapping out the HDD as I've already got one set up and ready. It's amazing how much quicker Linux Mint is than Win Vista on the laptop, considering that the Linux is the very latest 64-bit version with all the usual bells and whistles.






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craig1410

posted on 2/9/14 at 07:50 AM Reply With Quote
@Irony.
Yeah same here. I'm a software consultant/developer and almost everyone in my office uses Macs now. Even the Linux/Android fans use Macs and dual boot to Linux. As you say they are very reliable and if they do fail then Apple support is second to none.

As for home built PCs, it depends who built them and what components they used. I used to read countless reviews before buying my parts and then assembled them with extreme care with top quality thermal compound, copper heatsinks, fans, cables (all neatly secured) etc. It's the detail that matters and being a bit OCD helps!
My machines would typically last reliably for 5/6 years with incremental upgrades along the way. The PSU and case is one of the most important parts and sadly a lot of home builders skimp on that bit and spend maybe £30 and get a free set of speakers thrown in... I used to spend more like £150 on case and PSU alone and that was in early 2000's. That's not so bad as long as you buy shortly after a motherboard format change and not shortly before one!

Anyway, nowadays it's just not worth building PCs but mainly because hardly anyone wants desktop machines now and home built laptops never really caught on. Personally I need a machine which "just works" and for me that's currently a Retina MacBook Pro 15" with 16GB ram, 500 GB SSD and quad core CPU. How times have changed since my Amstrad PC-1512 in 1986... 😄

[Edited on 2/9/2014 by craig1410]

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Chris_Xtreme

posted on 2/9/14 at 08:01 AM Reply With Quote
I'm an IT bod and whilst I used to when I had time (ie before kids!) build my own pcs etc.. 3yrs ago when I decided to get one decent machine in the house I went with these guys:

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/

3yrs ago the service was spot on.

I pretty much picked the combination of components I wanted and they put it together and tested it for me. One time consuming thing in the passed, which has got far better is a situation where for eg the cpu and motherboard don't work together. ship them back and individually they work, I lost about 2months returning parts until the seller eventually gave in and tried my 2 parts together.


whilst I am a linux bod, windows does have it's place and especially as some software just isn't written for linux. See what the package you need says.

Building your own PC for the fun and learning experience is great, but if you just want something to a spec you want I would buy it made and tested these days.

There are many parts of the PC that are going to be the bottleneck depending on how the software works/does. With rendering I would imaging the best graphics card that the app supports is going to be the biggest help as it will probably offload all of the work to it, and you can then save on the cpu. If it is I/O intensive, it wont matter how faster CPU you have as you will always be waiting for data from the HD, so SSD will help.. really depends on what you are going to use if for and how that main application works.

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mcerd1

posted on 2/9/14 at 09:16 AM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by craig1410
Assuming you don't want an Apple machine, your next best bet is probably an Asus machine.

I'm still not much of an apple fan - but Asus stuff is always my first choice

most of there stuff is pretty bombproof and often has some nice extra features too - even my 2002 cheap laptop is still going

I currently have a 4 year old 1st gen i7 (i7 920) at home, a 3 year old 2nd gen i5 quad core (i5 750) at work (built it myself) and my mum's 4th gen i5 - All running on an Asus boards / graphics with corsair memory and none have given me any trouble yet

where as the other 15 folk at my work got given newer HP's in the last year with 4th gen i7's - they aren't actually that much quicker than my old 1st gen one and they have had a couple failures already


quote:
Originally posted by craig1410
I do agree that the days of building your own machine are long gone and I say this as someone who built his own high-end PC's from the mid 1980's through the 8086, 80286, 386, 486, Pentium/Cyrix/AMD K6 & Athlon/Athlon XP generations

I've still got good memories of my old K62-500, it used to punch far above its weight next to old P3's

but I wouldn't say the days of building your own are over - especially if you can save bits /OS's from an old machine

even if you can't save any bits I built my mum's machine inc a new copy of windows for ~£400 which is about the same as a basic dell etc.
but its got an decent i5, a good asus board that I know will last forever and decent quality ram, PSU, HDD etc... and room to expand it if need be.
the 'off the shelf' machines for the same price had an average i3, cheap components and no room for any expansion

when I built my own one I looked at the dell xps / alienware stuff (lots of people were recommending them at the time)
it was £700 - 800 more than mine ended up costing and that was with the exact same MB, CPU, PSU and RAM - the only difference was there HDD was £100 more and it had a fancy case - what a rip off !

[Edited on 2/9/2014 by mcerd1]





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dhutch

posted on 2/9/14 at 12:11 PM Reply With Quote
Build about 2-3 machines between 2000 and about 2005 when I went to Uni and found better things to spend time on, includes those with engines and wheels...

Main reason for that was wanting a quiet desktop, so it was about large heatsink and fans, running them on 7v, and banging a decent amount of ram in.

Now I have a fanless shuttle barebones and a HP elitebook bought 18months old on eBay.



Work hast replaced all its Lenovo S20's with S30's, dont know what the options for cheap used cad boxes are.



Where are you at Uni? Did 5 years of MechEng (inc placement year) at Loughborough.


Daniel

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james h

posted on 2/9/14 at 10:10 PM Reply With Quote
All good stuff as usual! Interesting to hear about the price difference (or lack of) between speccing a PC from a vendor vs buying components individually.

I will veer away from linux at the moment - the industry I am going into after uni doesn't use linux and I know uni doesn't for engineering applications.

Interestingly, my Belgian friend absolutely loved linux to death, couldn't get enough of it. He's now pretty much an Apple fanboy now, despite doing a computing PHd at Cambridge. He's a sucker for shiny stuff though.


quote:
Originally posted by dhutch
Build about 2-3 machines between 2000 and about 2005 when I went to Uni and found better things to spend time on, includes those with engines and wheels...

Main reason for that was wanting a quiet desktop, so it was about large heatsink and fans, running them on 7v, and banging a decent amount of ram in.

Now I have a fanless shuttle barebones and a HP elitebook bought 18months old on eBay.



Work hast replaced all its Lenovo S20's with S30's, dont know what the options for cheap used cad boxes are.



Where are you at Uni? Did 5 years of MechEng (inc placement year) at Loughborough.


Daniel


I'm at Brunel doing Motorsport engineering, MEng, 5 years too - just getting back from my placement year and I will be designing parts of next year's Formula Student car. Can't wait! Another BEC project

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phelpsa

posted on 3/9/14 at 09:12 AM Reply With Quote
My Dell XPS14 was more than sufficient for formula student use (with NX7.5). Despite having an XPS 8100 with all the bells and whistles I rarely found any difference in performance or any need for better performance!
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mcerd1

posted on 3/9/14 at 11:54 AM Reply With Quote
It would be easier to recommend a spec for your PC if we knew which software you intended use...
specific programs may run fast on one system and slow on another with apparently similar specs - all you can really do is look at benchmark tests for the software you need to run


also bare in mind that laptop cpu's are never as powerful / quick as the equivalent desktop and desktops are cheaper too
even my 5 year old i7 920 (2.66GHz - but I could overclock it to 4.0GHz easily if I felt like it) is only a tiny way behind the power of some of the latest i7's being offered in the likes of dell XPS laptops for more than £1500

you don't need to run out and get the very latest version of everything, I'd go for the stuff that's been out a long enough for the price to have dropped a little

I can recommend these guys if your looking for components: http://stak.com/common/home
I've used them for years and never had any issues with them





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coyoteboy

posted on 3/9/14 at 11:57 AM Reply With Quote
I Agree with one of the early posts. I've built literally dozens of PCs and rebuilt them over the years. Recently found it makes no sense to do so, financially or otherwise. You can use something like scan.co.uk to generate a custom machine and they deliver a bare bones box as per your spec. Used it recently to get a work CAD machine - 8 core, 4.4Ghz, 16gig of ram running on a 250Gb SSD, AMD FirePro V4900. Works fine on assemblies up to (so far) up to 300mb in solidworks and has no issues at all with CFD/FEM.






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Volvorsport

posted on 3/9/14 at 04:11 PM Reply With Quote
interestingly , im in the market for a new computator , im off on a catia v5 course , so any recomendations are welcome





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getting dirty under a bus

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