Building a new rig

[ipop@you]

Right my fellow Escapees I am (as I figure you guessed) intending to build a new rig early next year, what I want from you is advice on what parts to use as well as a few basic building tips.

I want to be able to play Skyrim, WoW and Fallout (3+NV) at fairly high settings. From some limited past experience I've had better luck and use from Nvidia for a GPU and intel for the processor but if you really think I'd do better with something else then feel free to suggest it.

My budget is about £700 ($1200) but I think I'll be able to go somewhat higher if necessary, oh and I don't have a screen that's any good.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

For a CPU the go to CPU is Intel's i5-2500K

If you're not going to OC, the K isn't worth the extra cost, which is something worth keeping in mind.

For budget performance, there's also the Phenom II X4 series... Sod the X6 CPUs... cost as much as an i5 and very few progs make full use of all the cores.

For GPU I would wait less than 1 month to see what AMD's 7000 series is like.

Doesn't really matter what it's like as the release of 7000 series should see the cost of 6000 series cards drop, so a bit of a win-win there.

For the HDD I have a samsung F3 1TB which is great though you may want to recycle your old HDD due to the increase in price.

Baaaad time to buy HDDs at the moment, though. I'd advise anyone who can recycle to make do until March-April when they estimate production will be back to normal and prices drop back down.

 

[Rodrigo Girao]

The Falcon Guide [http://tinyurl.com/falconguide] could be useful.