Upgrading my PC - Help please?

[Gerry]

Forgive me if I'm asking the wrong way, but I'm in need of some help here. I'm going to be upgrading my PC soon due to university, so to avoid having the specs being chosen for me by people who don't even know what I'm doing (Games Audio Design) and ending up with an underpowered pile of crap "business PC", I'd like to ask your advice what my PC will need. I need to know what kind of hardware I'll need for it to be as good as it possibly can be. I am as of yet unsure as to what the funds limit is for upgrading this PC, but for the meantime, I'm assuming it's £1k-£1.5k.

There are things that I'd like as requirements for it if it's not too much to ask:

* The PC needs to run programs such as Cubase 4/Reason/MaxMSP/Logic Pro (Music creation software)
* As well as games like FFXIV, Dragon Age Origins etc.
* It needs to be Windows 7 (Upgrade version I believe, I don't want to lose my files)
* It needs to have a fairly large hard drive
* It needs a fair amount of USB ports for stuff like MIDI keyboards

I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions as I'm a complete noob at building PCs.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Bajaratt]

That amount of money can get you a beast of a computer. You shouldn't have much problem getting what you need.

USB ports and hard drive space are barely an issue anymore, there's motherboards with 12 USB slots on them, you can buy USB cards or USB hubs to expand the number of slots you're using. Hard drives are cheap as hell and all of the motherboards are designed to support multiple hard drives.

If you back up your files, then the upgrade version of windows 7 isn't necessary. Actually, since you're going to be building a brand new computer it looks like, then you don't have to even worry about backups, just build the new one, install a fresh OS on it, and copy the files as you want from the old computer.

 

[Gerry]

That amount of money can get you a beast of a computer. You shouldn't have much problem getting what you need.

USB ports and hard drive space are barely an issue anymore, there's motherboards with 12 USB slots on them, you can buy USB cards or USB hubs to expand the number of slots you're using. Hard drives are cheap as hell and all of the motherboards are designed to support multiple hard drives.

If you back up your files, then the upgrade version of windows 7 isn't necessary. Actually, since you're going to be building a brand new computer it looks like, then you don't have to even worry about backups, just build the new one, install a fresh OS on it, and copy the files as you want from the old computer.

Thank goodness. Ok, so... any ideas as to what kind of hardware I should have? As I'm not sure what would be good for this new PC's hardware, I'd probably screw it up. Plus, I don't like the idea of letting the people who built my last PC handle it again, otherwise I'd have the same problem as this rig I have right now, it being an underpowered piece of crap.

The FFXIV recommendations are:

"Intel Core i7-980X 3.33GHz chip, Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 12GB triple channel DDR3-SDRAM memory, Nvidia GeForce GTX480"

Which costs around US$4,075 http://kotaku.com/5625280/which-computer-does-final-fantasy-xiv-recommend, so something similar to this, but less expensive.

 

[Takumifujiwara]

Gerry, I built my computer last week. It is a 2.7 Ghz intel i5 quadcore with 4gigs of dual channel ram, Evga nvidia 465 vid card. My setup even got a 5000 on the benchmark aka it runs the game flawlessly. I was in Beta this morning and had no hardware issues at all and it ran smooth except that the server was packed and it was laggy at times because of that fact. Hardware wise my setup is already running this game at its highest setting including field and texture.

What they recommend is nonsense imo. You dont even get more than a 1% benefit after 4 gigs of ram running this game, tests were done to prove that fact. Any lag you feel is 100% server lag on their side, not ours.

You could easily do what I did and get my setup around 900-1200 US dollars.

 

[Gerry]

Gerry, I built my computer last week. It is a 2.7 Ghz intel i5 quadcore with 4gigs of dual channel ram, Evga nvidia 465 vid card. My setup even got a 5000 on the benchmark aka it runs the game flawlessly. I was in Beta this morning and had no hardware issues at all and it ran smooth except that the server was packed and it was laggy at times because of that fact. Hardware wise my setup is already running this game at its highest setting including field and texture.

What they recommend is nonsense imo. You dont even get more than a 1% benefit after 4 gigs of ram running this game, tests were done to prove that fact. Any lag you feel is 100% server lag on their side, not ours.

You could easily do what I did and get my setup around 900-1200 US dollars.

Awesome, I'll see if I can get this used as well as mention that this'd cost... £600-£800. I guess with that, I'll be able to get the larger hard drives and USB ports as well.

Cheers. =)

 

[Romper]

Gerry, I built my computer last week. It is a 2.7 Ghz intel i5 quadcore with 4gigs of dual channel ram, Evga nvidia 465 vid card. My setup even got a 5000 on the benchmark aka it runs the game flawlessly. I was in Beta this morning and had no hardware issues at all and it ran smooth except that the server was packed and it was laggy at times because of that fact. Hardware wise my setup is already running this game at its highest setting including field and texture.

What they recommend is nonsense imo. You dont even get more than a 1% benefit after 4 gigs of ram running this game, tests were done to prove that fact. Any lag you feel is 100% server lag on their side, not ours.

You could easily do what I did and get my setup around 900-1200 US dollars.

My brother and I are building a bare bones kit for like 500 dollars including 3~5 day shipping. 1.9 ghz tri core, 1TB HD, a 450watt power source, only 1 fan for the processor (open side case for a few months), with a Radeon HD 5770 Video Card bought separate. The video card alone was half the price of the kit. It's stupidly cheap to build a kit that will exceed the minimums. Of course having the OS, monitor, and keyboard already saves money. lol

As I look at the motherboard in the kit it looks like it has 2 slots for video cards too which might come around when the price of the card I got drops.