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aremjay
At the ripe young age of 51 I’ve finally decided to build my own system. My priorities are:
1) Low noise
2) Games performance
I’ve made the ‘giant’ step of buying the case, a Jeantec Phong II, due to the reasonable write ups as a top hardware choice in the mid-tower class.
From now on it gets technical. As this will be an “as cash is available” project, I’ll be buying the least time sensitive parts first, so my next move wil be the PSU. I’ve been looking at the Enermax Galaxy range, but I hav not made up my mind yet (see my forum begging for advice). I’m looking at including Quad core Intel CPU, SLI mobo, and the best mid-range graphics available at the time of purchase (but these are going to be the last bits bought). For storage I’m considering some solid state drives for normal use and a large SATA II drive (or two in mirrored RAID) as main data storage. As far as RAM goes, the choice between DDR2 & DDR3 will be made as I buy the mobo depending on the price at the time.
All for now, back to thinking and (hopefully) considering advice from the experienced ones out there.
Ok so a bit of advice.
Dont buy a PC piecemeal! By the time you’ve got all the bits the first items will be out of date.
Either:
Save up until you can afford the entire performance PC
or
Build a cheaper PC and upgrade regularly.
You may find the second option to be the best one as value for money doesent have to mean slow as long as you are prepared to do a little tweaking…. After all whats the point of building your own system if not to tweak it. Go buy a dell / alienware pc otherwise.
Personally (and bearing in mind what you’ve got currently) I’d go for the following as a starter
1) Pentium 2140 dual core @ 1.6 / 1.8 Ghz (yes its on a slow 800 Mhz bus but thats the gem when your overclocking) should be about £45
You should easily get 2.8Ghz out of these with simple bus speed overclocking.
2) 2GB of decent DDR 2 - corsair, ocz, geil, g-skill are all good. should be about £35 Forget DDR 3. Its time has not yet come and its a waste of money versus money spent elsewhere. e.g a system with DDR3 and a mid range graphics card will get spanked by a DDR2 system with a top end Graphics Card and they’ll cost around the same.
3) A decent motherboard (this is the key for a nice easy upgradable life) - forget SLI or crossfire its a waste of money, your better off getting a new graphics card every year instead.
I’d reccomend any motherboard containing the intel P35 chipset. Gigabyte, asus and msi are pretty good and should provide a decent ammount of overclocking. Expect to pay £60
4) cooling - arctic freezer 7 pro. Its dirt cheap, quiet and is a fantastic cooler. Custom PC were right on the money awarding it. Should be about £13
5) storage - forget solid state at present. Not worth the dosh. If your after a speedy boot get a 74GB raptor and a seperate 500GB+ drive for your data. Samsung / western digital are quiet and fast. This combo makes a good start.
£140 for both.
6) Graphics card… dont scrimp here.. Its all that matters with games (or at least your far more likely to run into a bottleneck here than anywhere else) Get either a 3870 or a 8800GT. Their the top of their class at the mo (price vs performance and general greatness 
) £150
If you go for something like above not only should you be able to overclock and have a really speedy system that runs everything out at the moment (so you can start enjoying your pc sooner!) - Additionally you can slap in a quad processor and not feel like you’ve wasted loads of dosh sometime late this year / next year. With the new penryn cores coming out its not a good time to be buying a quad anyways.
Anyway just my two sense as a system builder. Enjoy your trip down custom PC lane!
Oh and as an addition, I’d reccomend getting something like this
http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/acousticmaterials
It’ll make your pc whisper quiet along with a pair of 120mm fans one blowing in and out.
Hope the advice helps.
wouldn’t you get more performace for your pennies if you bought something like 2 x Spinpoints in RAID and put the spare cash into either more RAM, MHz, better CPU, etc? Surely 4GB RAM is better than knocking off 8 seconds loading time on a Crysis level?
If money’s going to be tight (by which I mean, if you don’t need and can’t afford to buy and regularly replace two top-end cards) you don’t need SLI - you’ll gain far more benefit from a single more powerful card. If you don’t need SLI, then you don’t need an SLI motherboard, as SLI is the only point in buying them - Intel chips perform better at stock and overclock further with an Intel chipset. I recommend the P35, and (depending on your budget again) the best motherboard for you can be found somewhere in the Asus P5K variants. If you’re planning to overclock, you should ideally look for the P5K-E as a minimum.
I don’t mean to sound harsh to the commenter above, but you should also avoid the advice about getting a Raptor - they used to be great, but these days the price/performance ratio is terrible. In CPC’s last HDD Labs, they were outperformed by the Samsung 500Gb in the game loading test, so get one of those instead.