What hardware should I get?

[bigsharn]

The amount of times I've heard this being asked is amazing, so here I've put together a guide on what hardware you should buy on what kind of budget. We've set ourselves a budget to cover everything, which is reflected in the sub-headings below, I hope this helps.

NOTE: EVERYTHING can be bought from scan.co.uk, I checked it myself though by the time you've read this some of the stock will have gone, so don't hang me if what I've mentioned isn't in stock

The office worker (£500)
It's very rare would you be building your own computer if all you did was browse the web and maybe type up a couple of word documents, but there are the rare few so here we go:

CPU: Intel Core i3 530
Why: Being only £100 and a new innovation (or at least newer than Core2Duo) the dual-core i3 530 is cheap, hardly power-consuming and can be upgraded in the future if you need it.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H
Why: At £70 it's pretty cheap for a new, low power motherboard. Gigabyte in our experience tends to be reliable and if they do fail, the RMA service is brilliant. With 2 PCI-E x16 slots there's space for a graphics card should you choose to upgrade later, and with 6 SATA 3 ports you could add all the hard drives you'd ever need.

Memory: Corsair Value Select 2GB DDR3 PC3-10666
Why: Cheap, fast, all the RAM you'll ever need, and it's Corsair which are known for their reliability - just £50 to you

Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB
Why: Fast, reliable, and high capacity. Unless you start ripping movies it's highly unlikely you'll fill it in a hurry, and for just under £40

Keyboard, Mouse, Case and Power supply:Bundle deal from Scan Computers
Why: Why not? It's everything else you need to build the computer for a mere £35

Graphics card: None
Why: Do you want to save money or not? Exactly, keep this cheap (or non-existant) and you've got extra to upgrade something else... Trust us, you just don't need one

Monitor: LG E2250V
Why: 22" for £155 is a good deal as it is. Though it's made better by the fact that it's LED backlit. Yep, nice and crisp and clear image, on a screen capable of Full HD. Also, it's HDMI, so it'll work with your games console as well.


Final total:<£450

The casual gamer (£1000)
If you're in the same sort of league as me and you consider yourself a gamer, but in reality you've never touched anything newer than Grand Theft Auto 4, this is your sort of rig... Enjoy!

CPU: Core i7 920 D0
Why: Intel's best performance per £ processor out there, and at £175 it's not exactly breaking the bank

Motherboard: Asus P6T
Why: Cheap and cheerful and does the job, at <£170 you can't really argue with the board most people chose as the i7 chip was just coming out.

Memory: 6Gb (3x2Gb) Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600MHz
Why: Fast, reliable, and pretty cheap at only £145. Sorry, but there's not a lot more to say

Hard drive: 1Tb Samsung F3
Why: £55 for 1Tb of storage... What's not to like? I personally have an F1 in my rig and I've never had a problem with it slowing down, even 3 years later.

Graphics card: 1Gb ATi Radeon 5770
Why: Under £125 for a DirectX 11 card isn't something to be sniffed at. Cheap, cheerful and does the job of playing the older games perfectly.

Case: NZXT M59
Why: Cheap, cheerful, and looks beautiful in my opinion. It comes with 5 fans (FIVE!!!), which is all you'd ever need. If you don't like the styling the Antec 300 can also be had for around the £45 mark

Power Supply: Corsair 550VX
Why: 5 year warranty makes sure that the £900 you've spent on the rest of your components doesn't go to waste. £70 for an excellent PSU like this is a complete steal in my opinion.

Keyboard: Keysonic Blu LED Back Lit Keyboard
Why: Anti-ghosting is everything you need from a keyboard when you're gaming, why should you splash out? They're pretty good when you get used to the smaller than normal layout, and at £25 for a keyboard with built in anti-ghosting you can't really complain

Mouse: Microsoft Explorer 4 Optical Mouse
Why: As weird as it sounds, these are pretty comfortable to use and very accurate. They're not for everyone, but these are my favourite of the budget mice you can get hold of

Monitor: LG E2250V
Why: It's LED 22" for £155. You can't really argue that it's brilliant value for what you get.

Extras: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2.
Why: As you can imagine, a 130 Watt processor gives out a fair amount of heat. The better cooling you have for it, the longer it will last (or the further you can overclock it)

Grand Total: <£995

The "hardcore" gamer (£2000)

Ok, you're a gamer, that means you have a bit more to splash out on equipment than the rest of us. For that I hate you, but I suppose I'd better give you a hand building this 1337 rig, so here we go...

CPU: Core i7 920 D0
Why: Excellent overclocker, this little gem can get up to 4GHz on air cooling alone, so why not go for it? (or at least try). Just shy of £175 to you.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7
Why: SATA III and USB 3.0 onboard, support for up to 3-way SLi or Crossfire, a decent little overclocker for just over £275

Memory: 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator
Why: Who said you need to overclock your RAM? 1800MHz is enough for anyone, you included. This might struggle a bit with Crysis, but for £200 you're not going to get much better performance for the price.

Hard drive: 1Tb Samsung F3 x2
Why: You shouldn't need more than 2Tb of data, even with all the fragging you do and music you listen to. And as I said before, the F3s are reliable and damn fast.

Case (Air cooling): Lian Li PC-P80 or Coolermaster ATCS 840
Why: Both are very good cases for air cooling, it's just what kind of style you like better.

Power Supply: Corsair HX 750
Why: It's modular to save on cluttering the computer up with unnecessary wires, it's 750W so enough if you ever want to Crossfire or SLi and it's Corsair so it'll last forever. (ok, not quite, but a decent warranty on PSUs is hard to come by unless you go with them)

Keyboard: Razer Arctosa Black Edition
Why: You know as well as I do that £40 on a name like Razer is a good deal, especially as it's totally programmable.

Mouse: Razer Deathadder
Why: £42 on a gaming mouse? Bargain! Well not really but this one seems to be the choice among gamers that are buying their mice new right now

Graphics card: ATi Radeon 5870
Why: Only second best to the rather more power hungry GTX480 as far as single chip cards go at the moment. £325 gets you one of these beasts in your rig.

Monitor: Dell U2410
Why: Let me get this right... You're a gamer and you're questioning spending £500 on a Dell Ultrasharp?

Extras: Cooling solutions...
Why: You've got £200 to spend on making your computer cooler, so why not? Fan controllers will be a must with the amount of 120mm Scythe Gentle Typhoon 1150 RPM fans you'll be putting in there, and a new CPU heatsink like the Prolimatech Megahalems with more of the aforementioned fans on is a must.

Grand Total: roughly £1,950

The workhorse
Now I should define, this rig really doesn't have a budget because those in the professional industry would normally have a fair amount put away for their computer, people who do a lot of 3D modelling, photoshop artistry, video editing and similar should definitely follow these guidelines:

(I should also warn in advance, these will be VERY heavily biased to graphics people, as that's all I know)

CPU: Intel Xeon X5650 x2
Why: 12 cores is all you'll ever need for rendering if you're working on something yourself. At £750 each they're not cheap, but you've got to spend money to make money

Motherboard: EVGA Classified SR-2
Why: It's stable, it's got two processor slots and SEVEN PCI-E slots, so it's more than capable of stupid rendering jobs and it's a board you can overclock easily (Unlike other Xeon boards), meaning those £750 X5650s can easily get up to the same speed as the £500 more X5680

Memory: Corsair CM72DD2G1066 (2Gb stick) x6
Why: Should be all you need, at £300 it's not that expensive and has low-latency timings so should help your jobs along that little bit smoother

Hard drive: 1Tb Samsung F3 x6 and Intel X25
Why: £55 a drive for fast, high level storage is all you'd need in a normal environment, but we recommend getting double the amount you need and backing up onto a second hard disk every time you save, in the case of system failure (you can't afford to lose your work).
The Intel X25 should act as a swift boot drive and by keeping all work off the boot drive, you should be able to save the data by plugging it in on a seperate machine.

Case : Coolermaster Cosmos Pure Black V2
Why: It fits the motherboard and it looks good. There's not much more to it than that, the cooling's not bad but a few more fans might be needed to help keep it cool under heavy load (we'd try a few render jobs before considering more fans though). £175

Power Supply: 1250W Enermax Revolution85+
Why: Should be enough to power the entire system, and Enermax are known for reliability and efficiency, so £225 is a small price to pay for keeping your business safe from power surges and high electricity bills

Keyboard: Logitech Illuminated Multimedia Keyboard
Why: It looks good, it works, and it's surprisingly comfortable to use for long periods.

Mouse: Razer Imperator
Why: Comfortable, accurate and aesthetically pleasing, so why not? £60 for a brilliant, comfortable mouse.

Graphics card: NVidia GTX480 x4 (£425 ea)
Why: In honesty, I'm not entirely educated in workstation graphics cards, so I picked the best of what I know... The GTX480 is power hungry, but has CUDA support and GPU acceleration in Photoshop CS4 and onwards. As I say I'm not good with workstations but whatever Quadro you're looking at, this can't be that far wrong (and it's probably cheaper)

Monitor: Dell 3008WFP
Why: Dell panels are brilliant for colour reproduction. IPS panels usually are, and they're the same panel as Apple's more expensive Cinema LED screens, just ~£300 cheaper

Extras: Cooling
Why: Again, I'd get some aftermarket CPU coolers and maybe two GPU coolers if you think they're going to be under heavy load a lot. At £50 for each processor and £50 for each graphics card it's not that much extra spent for prolonging the life of your components.

Extras: Wacom Intuos4 Large
Why: Wacom are known for their brilliant, responsive graphics tablets. Granted £400 isn't cheap, but for a near-A4 graphics tablet, what else do you expect?

Grand Total:£5950