Hi guys, so i would like to build a desktop and this is the setup I have gone for, any advice given will be appreciated. I want to keep pricing low while still getting a very fast and good performance computer. My budget is £500, and I do not plan on having a GPU, though I might want to play games, even if it is with mediocre graphics.I will be doing rendering, but I want it to be CPU based. I have chosen the Intel Core i5-4570S on purpose, because the computer is going to be running in my bedroom, so I want it to be as quiet as possible in the night. Could I get a less powerful PSU to lower the price, without the 80 PLUS certification? Would this be recommended? Thanks. Any advice on lowering the price would be great too!
Your choice is excellent but if you want to add a dedicated graphics card then you will have to go with a higher wattage PSU so that or go with a lower end PSU, to see how much power your computer will be using then i would recommend this wattage calculator.
you can do better than this for around a extra £30 with a Xeon E3-1230 V2 (£170) 4 cores 8 threads (hyper threading) + a cheap mobo and a £10 pasive cooled video card to power the monitor...you may what to think about a aftermarket heatsink if you are going to be punishing the cpu 24/7 the stock cooler will make niose at full load doing rendering.
The Xeon is cheaper i7 and will do cpu rendering much faster than a lowend i5 and as above dont go for a single stick of ram get a dual kit so you can take advantage of dual channel memmory aposed to single.
Thanks for the tips! So I have updated the list to include the 500W power supply - in case I want to get a GPU in the future, and changed the motherboard, and RAM, to save more money! The price of the build is now down to £470. Thanks for the Xeon idea, but the boards to support the chip-set are very expensive and so changing to Xeon will effectively push my price bracket up at least £100, which I am not willing to do, unfortunately.
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Pete./saved/1Jes
Any other suggestions to either, improve performance for around the same price tag, or lower the cost? Thanks!
Wow, that is actually a very good price! I am seriously considering that now! Thanks! May I ask, what is the need for the dedicated video card? I will change your set up to suit my needs and check back with you!
The Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 dosent have a igpu so you will not get video output for a monitor without one.
The i5-4570S has a igpu (i think its something like a intel HD4000 off the top of my head) the mobo will have onboard video only if the cpu supports it (haveing a igpu)
Realy you can save more by grabing a 2tb hdd video files in there raw format can be huge before rendering.
So there is no GPU built into the CPU? :( i was hoping that there would be so i could play games with medium settings! Is there a more expensive version of the Xeon chip with a iGPU? Got a 2TB USB 3.0 external drive, so I really need the performace of the SSD than the quantity of a HDD, plus HDD draw more power and are more noisy! I suppose I could downgrade to the 120GB EVO drive for about £50 less, which I might consider doing. I think the Xeon option might be better, as the main thing I need is the low power consumption, coupled with the high CPU rendering performance - thanks for mentioning this!
A HD5450 dosent take much power to use idle power consumption (siting around the desktop) wil use 10-15w's (thats about the same power drwa as a mechanical hdd.
Realy a 450w pus for this pc is way overkill but its a cheap psu and a very good one XFX just put a case over a seasonic psu and sold it cheaper.
i7 with 250gb SSD for £520, sounds like a good price, it has very good dedicated graphics and the motherboard will be supported for the next gen of Intel processors. Better benchmarks than the Xeon too! What you think about the i7? http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/1WCrt
Thats not bad but the Kingston SSDNow V300 is not a good drive for some hefty file useage i have a 64gb one and drive degradation is fast on them with that kind of useage there better used just as boot drives the samsung ssd's are a lot better.
The 5450 dosent amount to much its just there for the monitor to work you can get a game of dota 2 out of it asking anything more is a bit of a push tbh @ 1080p
