TechSpot PC Buying Guide: 2011 Kick Off

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Would be nice to hear from you guys on CPU coolers.

In my opinion, stock cooling is sufficient these days unless you're doing heavy overclocking or have other needs (passive cooling for noise reduction, for instance) but those subjects are beyond the scope of this guide.

The GTX 680 is $50 more expensive than the HD 7970, not the other way around , and the performance is almost the same without overclocking since the latest driver update.

Not when that was written. Go read launch reviews. I'll change the text to reflect the current state of things, thanks.

SSD+HDD in one system means SSD is for OS, apps, games, exe files etc., and the HDD is for storage. and that renders the speed of the HDD as irrelevant (minus file transfers which don't happen often), so why recommend a power hungry, loud and performance oriented HDD when the focus should be the opposite?

Because even with a 256GB SSD, many people would still be forced to have things like games on a secondary drive. I don't even have half of my games installed and they occupy about 500GB. The power and noise differences between WD Green and Black drives are beyond negligible in this type of system.

I barely use my disc drive (once or twice last year) and you install two?

Yep, for $17 it seems worthwhile to list a secondary optical drive for the slight bit of added functionality. The whole point of our guide is to offer a complete blueprint for each budget that works fine as is, but can be easily tweaked to your needs. If you barely use optical drives, obviously you'd leave one or both of them out and that's totally fine.

Finally, just imo, Gigabyte motherboards for their futures and Silverstone USB3.0 cases such as FT03 and RV02E for their superior air-cooling deserve a nod.

Thanks for the recommendations.

 

[LinkedKube]

Where is the grunt pc? you know the Grandparent, HTPC, NAS, WHS, student, office build or rebuild upgrade for around $150

Go to tomshardware,

This article isn't about upgrading your current crappy hardware. Its about buying newer crappy hardware.

 

[LukeDJ]

Matthew, I understand if you think stock cooling is sufficient, however I think that you should at least make some mention of aftermarket coolers. I personally wouldn't recommend an overlockable CPU and an overclock ready motherboard without an aftermarket cooler (especially with Ivy Bridge). When you compare stock and aftermarket temperatures at higher clock speeds, it really isn't hard to justify purchasing $35 CM Hyper 212 Evo. If you don't feel comfortable recommending a specific cooler (I realize there is a HUGE variety of coolers out there), then maybe just mention the option in the description, and leave it to the reader to figure out which one to get.

Anyway, this is still the best guide out there, so I understand if you don't find this edition necessary. Keep up the good work

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

I can agree with that much: broadly mentioning aftermarket coolers if someone plans to overclock is probably worthwhile. Noted for the next update and thanks again for the feedback .

 

[HiDDeNMisT]

I wonder when this list is going to be updated.

 

[Peter Satera]

What rubbish, " Ivy Bridge ranked high in our graphs, taking second only to the $1,040 Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E"

Hello? 3930K?

This Luxury build is an enthusiast build, and their enthusiast build is an i5! For the price of Ivy that's easily an enthusiast part. With a luxury you should have went at least 6 core. When kicked in multicore, it'll score above Ivy - which is why that system will be made. For the multicore part. And even at that...it's still an enthusiast build imo.

If it was all about luxury, Dual Xeons.

 

[Jad Chaar]

I think 2x8 GB RAM is a better choice since it is cheaper than 4x4 nowadays. Also, why pay 1400 for a monitor? I would rather put that money int he GPU. At 2560x1440, a 680 wont be sufficient enough for games like Crysis 3 @ max settings. I would make that monitor a $500 27"-30" one with a Titan as the GPU.

 

[fdart17]

I think this needs a few updates. One of which is to use the Vertex 450 128GB instead of the Vector