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Best desktop for £300?

Gonna get this:

Coolermaster IGreen 500W PSU - 85% Efficiency ATX12V v2.2 120mm Fan

£50, but if it's quiet and 85% efficient than that's good.
 
I bought an OCZ 600w SLI ready from overclockers.

bout £50.

Happy so far, braided leads and nice build quality plus 3 year next day swap out warranty.
 
Drain Bamage said:
I bought an OCZ 600w SLI ready from overclockers.

bout £50.

Happy so far, braided leads and nice build quality plus 3 year next day swap out warranty.
Click to expand...

Is that including the 5+ days it takes to get through to their customer service. Is a few years ago to be fair, but swore I would never use them again.
 
The size of this graphics card is fucking ridiculous. Also, impressed with the case for a tenner... why pay more? It's tucked away in a cupboard anyway.
 
ChrisFilter said:
The size of this graphics card is fucking ridiculous. Also, impressed with the case for a tenner... why pay more? It's tucked away in a cupboard anyway.
Click to expand...

Yeah, they aren't small. Mine overhange the back of the socket so much that if blocks the esata ports and it would be a squeeze to get a hdd in the bay in front.

Take it you got all the bits? Ebuyer deliver well fast, dead impressed, orded my stuff at 19.00 and had it by 8.20 the next day.
 
Yep, got all bits.

Put it all together, all good, but I noticed CPU was getting stupidly hot (75c and counting)... so I've checked the seating of the fan and it's driving me mad. How the fuck do you seat a retail c2d heatsink and fan!? It's got 4 twisty bits, but fuck knows if I can get them to work. I'm going to snap the mobo at this rate. I'm just it's completely simple, but right now it's driving me apeshit :mad:
 
Right, got it seated again, cpu still running stupidly hot (unless 80c is normal under no load?!)... what could the problem be? I accidentally smeared a tiny bit of thermal grease off the fan when installing it, but there's still loads left. Could that be it?!
 
70c-80c is NOT normal, I don't feel comfortable with anything that has a temp over 50c at full steam. The thermal compound can make a BIG difference, but not that much! In fact I would buy some Arctic sliver compound as soon as you can.

As for your heatsink issues, before I can give you any real help I need to know what your using? are you using the stock Intel cooler?
 
I don't think it would be fucked as it sounds like you sorted it before any real shit it the fan. You might have reduced the working life of it by a tiny amount but you should be ok.

Still when you got some money, get a new heatsink and some Arctic silver. If the temperatures is very low (like 30c-40c under load) you might even want to think about over clocking it a tad.

I've got my dualcore AMD 4800 X2 overclocked to 2.8ghz from 2.5ghz, and it never goes over 50c with a decent heatsink and compound.........
 
and as for heatsinks your not the only one who had problems! When socket A processors where being used I must have cut myself on the heatsinks countless times! and still to this day I count myself lucky if I fit one with out cutting myself! it has however got better with sockets like amd's AM2, which I have yet to cut myself on!
 
It's still in 70s/80s now with the heatsink and fan properly fitted. Could it have been a dodgy cpu on purchase? The fan was seated properly the first time it was turned on, only double checked it cos of the high temp. Maybe the thermometer is fucked?
 
could well be a dodgy heatsink/fan or even a dodgy cpu/motherboard sensor.

You should always take the BIOS temps with a pinch of salt as they are never spot on, so try with another thermometer before doing anything rash. BIOS temps can fuck with your sanity as they are notoriously inaccurate. They might be inaccurate but they can tell you when the cpu is overheating (like now)

To check if it is really that hot, stick your hand on the heatsink when the BIOS is reporting 70s/80s if its very fucking hot then you have a problem and I suggest keeping your pc off until you find out what's causing it. If its only slightly warm then its probably not 70s/80s

AMD state the max operating temp for their XP CPUs is 85C, so I don't think you will cause too much damage if you don't use it for long periods of time.......
 
Another question... got a 250GB ide drive from another PC... if I lob this in the box, will it slow down the system in any way?
 
Umm, I didn't need to use thermal grease when I got mine, you get a little pad on the bottom of heatsink that heats up and melts onto the chip first time you run it.

Agree its an absolutly bastard to get the retail heatsink onto the board.

The 250 ide will give you no slowdown if your using it as secondary drive.
 
I think, and I realise this sound a little stupid, that the bios temp is each core's temp added together which is stupid. Got it on ultrasilent mode now, fan running at 1000rpm, and it's 40c. No worries.

HDD is a little noiser than my old IDE drive, but not enough to be too annoying.
 
You could check for updated BIOS on the Asus website, that might get you more reasonable temperature monitoring if there's a bios update around.
 
Rarely is that a good sign. Could be you're using the wrong flashing method, there's about five last time i looked.

I hate flashing BIOSes, i spent an hour cursing my AM2 board when i was trying to flash it so it would accept a 5200...
 
Kanda said:
Drop the lot and get a Mac Mini :D
Click to expand...

Possibly that even the chepaest mac mini would cost more than he spent, have half the RAM, a slower processor, half the HDD and 100x slower GPU :D

Put it all together, all good, but I noticed CPU was getting stupidly hot (75c and counting)... so I've checked the seating of the fan and it's driving me mad. How the fuck do you seat a retail c2d heatsink and fan!? It's got 4 twisty bits, but fuck knows if I can get them to work. I'm going to snap the mobo at this rate. I'm just it's completely simple, but right now it's driving me apeshit
Click to expand...

LGA775 stock heatsinks are a total PITA to mount. I've seen a hardware tech break one refitting it, and had a kid bring in a celery 420 which he'd managed to cook by mounting the HSF wrong.
 
Maybe I should have got an 8800GT... the 3870 handles Crysis, but won't do 1280 x 800 at High Detail settings. Well, it will, but the slowdown is too much. Medium detail is such a step down n' all.
 
Not often the game outstrips the hardware..!

This was whilst downloading stuff through Steam and about 5 torrents... maybe it'll be ok just running by itself. Any handing performance boosting hints?
 
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