Some General Advice needed

dereko

Ok, Its been a long time since I build my own PC so I'm looking to get back into it again and build a new one.

First off budget is about €800 excluding the monitor and windows 7 licence and mouse. (just bought a new g500)

I plan on using my computer for work, lots of applications open at once but none particularly excessive (photoshop being the most demanding, mostly coding tools)

I also use it for some gaming, e.g. COD, Starcraft etc.

One thing I do want to do eventually is get a really good monitor with hight resolution and maybe 27" so the graphics card needs to be able to make best use of that.

So a few questions

1) Is the bottle neck in performance mostly still the harddrives?

2) Aren't most processors e.g. i5 etc even i3 so far a head of other bottlenecks it makes litte difference the higher you go. Isn't the Graphics card dealing with heavy graphics so what really slows because of a slow CPU?

So from this my thinking is to get a SSD drive as my primary drive for OS etc and have loads of memory e.g. 6-8GB and a decent mid level graphics card?

It doesn't seem at my level worth spending much on CPU and any other parts really.

I basic parts off the top of my head

Case,
Motherboard
CPU
SSD Drive
SATA Drive
Power Supply
Memory
Cooling (fan?)
Graphics Card
Network Card
Keyboard

Mouse
Windows
Monitor

Am I missing anything?

I don't think I've used my CD/DVD drive in over a year. I think them and blueray etc are going to die out. USB flash memory and faster internet speeds make them redundant.

Any helpful tips or general education much appreciated.
Thanks,
Derek

dereko

Just realised DVD drive is like 20-30 quid so may as well throw it in.

seyeM

Here's an attempt at it - had to lose the SSD, use 4 gigs (2x2) of memory and a Phenom 2 x6 1090T to get it near €800. (Still came in at €850 )
You'll also need to chuck in a €15 DVD+RW and a €10 keyboard too if needs be.

deconduo

Should be possible. I think your money would be better off spent on an i5 2500k when they come back rather than on an SSD. However, here's what I made up:
Come to just under €800 when you add on €30 for shipping. You could up the hard drive to a Spinpoint F4 2TB for €20 if you need more space and you could add on a decent cooler of you want to overclock the x6.

Edit: Ninja'd :P but I like my build better.

dereko

Thanks a mil

So you recon an i5 CPU is better than having a SSD primary drive? Can you explain why? My understanding is avoiding and mechanical (platter seeks) IO is the best way to increase over all performance. I thought but i'm only gleaming that having a flash based hd is the most effective way to increase speed especially for reading and writting to hd.

Naturally playing games and some other apps this may not be an issue because the program is loaded into memory but still it seems like with more standard use e.g. opening new programs etc that speeding up IO is hugely benifical?

Also as I eluded to earlier when you speed up the processor what noticable speed increases do you see considering the Graphics card handles most difficult tasks?