PC for less than £900
A few months ago my PC was fried.
I was sat at it, heard a storm happening outside so went to take a look. It was an amazing sight; I wish I’d had taken some photos of the folk lightening and dramatic sky!
I came back in as the storm was dying down and my computer was off. I hit the power button expecting everything to be fine; maybe just a short power cut? Alas, just a brief spin of the fans and then nothing. I tried again but this time nothing at all.
I had a spare motherboard and power supply so thought, although they’re not as good as the ones I as using, at least I’ll be able to get my PC back up and running.
I spent all afternoon rebuilding my PC but still was getting nowhere. I could have cried!
In the end I called my insurance company. They arranged for a company to pick up my PC to take a look at it to see if it was repairable. After a couple of days they were in touch to tell me that I’d be needing a complete new PC. It was happy days when I was told that they would send me the cash value, as new minus my excess.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that most readers aren’t interested in anything I’ve written up to this point so here’s what I bought (from Scan.co.uk)and built.
What I bought
Corsair H50-1 Hydro High-performance 1 £41.50
Intel Core i5 2500K Unlocked, 1155, 1 £129.15
500GB Seagate ST3500413AS Barracuda 1 £23.59
Asus P8P67 Pro Rev3, Intel P67, S11 1 £115.67
LiteOn IHAS122-18 22x DVD±R, 8x DVD 1 £11.59
2TB Hitachi Deskstar, 0F12117, Cool 1 £46.09
8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance Blue 1 £59.12
2GB XFX HD 6950, PCI-E 2.1 (x16), 5 1 £161.99
750W Coolermaster RS750-ACAAE3-UK G 1 £49.99
Coolermaster CM 690 II Advanced Dom 1 £54.99
Net Total £693.68
Carriage £15.98
VAT @20% £141.93
Scansure (Accidental damage insurance) £25.38
Total £876.97
Issues after build
After thinking I had completed the build and feeling happy with my cable management I put the sides on the case, plugged everything in and tried booting. Nothing, zip, nada, zilch.
After a small amount of investigation it turned out that the RAM modules weren’t installed properly. There had been no error beeps however – the only indication was a single LED on the motherboard.
Once the RAM was installed properly (human error on my part) I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with no issues.
I do occasionally experience very long boot times or complete system hangs when booting into Windows (it’s fine with any other OS). After several BIOS updates (none of which have helped) and much research it seems like a fairly common issue with the P67 chipset that I’m stuck with for now. The system is 100% stable once booted into Windows and I’m a little perplexed as to what’s going on as there are no errors. If anyone reads this and has had similar issues or has any suggestions please let me know and I’ll report back.
Overclocking
The Core i5 2500k is a monster CPU. Overclocking was easy right up to 4.7GHz on my particular chip using this guide: http://is.gd/myBdUq
My core voltage was a tiny bit high at 4.7GHz so I’ve settled at a very cool and stable 4.5GHz.
At the time of writing, I’ve not overclocked the Corsair Vengeance RAM. The only memory tweaking I’ve performed was to change the Command Rate to 1T from 2T and to manually add the correct timings. Voltage is still stock and the RAM is completely stable.
Graphics card unlocking / overclocking
The 2BG XFX HD 6950 I purchased was a reference card so using this guide I flashed a 6970 bios. This worked great but after reading a little more I started to get concerned that it may cause issues with the card in the medium to long term.
I settled on using a modded BIOS that unlocked the shaders to 1536 (as are available on the 6970) and then overclocking using Catalyst Control Center after using a simple registry “hack” to increase the overclocking limits of the card.
*If you do use the registry hack please be very careful and don’t overclock too much. The hack allows you to overclock way too far which could result in a dead graphics card. I take no responsibility for any damage you may cause.
Conclusion
Generally I’m very happy with this system. It performs extremely well in day to day tasks (which for me are Photoshop CS5.5 and some video encoding) with only the occasional game not running well at maximum setting (Crysis 2 with DX11 pack and textures etc. comes to mind).
Dell Inspiron 530 – How Upgradable is it?
I’ve had a Dell Inspiron 530 for just over a year now. It was pretty good in the processor department when I purchased it but memory and graphics performance was mediocre. Over the past year the system has seen a few upgrades.
The system started out having an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, 2GB DDR-2 PC2-5300 RAM, a 250W PSU (YES! Just 250 watts!), 2x 320GB HDD, NVidia 8600GT 256MB GPU on a Foxconn G33-S motherboard all packed into a smallish case.
I’ve kept the case, motherboard, CPU and hard drives but the rest of the system has changed.
First thing to change was the PSU to a more substantial 650W one. The next thing was the memory – I took out the 2 GB of slowish memory and changed it for 8GB of GeIL Black Dragon DDR2 running at 800Mhz with tight timings. I then installed a 9800GT which I overclocked quite nicely to 9800GTX speeds. The system was running well and I was happy with it for a month or so…. I then noticed a rather nice pre-overclocked Palit 4870 Sonic graphics card and I had to have it!
One thing to note about upgrading the graphics card on the Inspiron 530 is that the case is small and high end graphics cards tend to be big so it is a squeeze to say the least! The Palit Sonic 4870 only just fits in the machine. To get it into the case I had to remove one of the hard drives. Saying this though, it is worth it! The machine can now play all of the latest games at high settings at 1920×1200.
Another thing to note is for the Inspiron 530 to support 8GB of RAM (or in fact anything more than 4GB) you must have a recent version of the bios. This can be downloaded from Dell and installed through Windows with ease. Of course for your system to support more than around 3.5GB – 4GB of RAM you must also be running a 64bit operating system or be using a hack that allows 32 bit Windows to see more RAM.
If you have any questions about the system feel free to comment or contact me and I’ll be happy to help.
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