Nothing good left in stock !

I was all set to order my gaming pc, came back the next day and noticed you have only 2 motherboards left, neither are good enough. Also you have no i7 left, only i5. What is going on ? You must know the popular items that will sell out and keep your stock up. At the moment there are no options that are anywhere near appealing to me and i'm sure many others who want to buy a high end gaming pc. Are you going to restock any time soon ? You are losing business everyday this continues.

Best to phone PCS direct. The forums aren't official support channels so we can't answer but chances are they're running down to bring in newer, better, hardware.

You're lucky you posted, because I have some good news.

The i7s being out of stock and the lack of mobo choice you refer to is because you're looking at this configurator: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-z270-pc/

These are the 7th Gen processors on the Z270 chipset, which are obsolete and terrible value for money versus the 8th Gen alternatives. The reason they're out of stock is that they're out of date / end of life and PCS are (presumably) selling off the last of their stock.

You want to be looking at 8th Gen Intel options instead.

In terms of high-end gaming, an 8th Gen i5 8400 (the lowest clocked of the i5s, though not by much) actually outperforms a 7th Gen i7 7700k. It also costs ~£100-150 less than a 7700k.


For high end gaming, or any other uses, you should not buy a 7th Gen Intel CPU but (depending on your uses and budget)...

8th Gen Z370: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-z370-pc/
8th Gen Z370 pre-overclocked: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-z370-overclocked/
8th Gen on cheaper motherboards, slower RAM: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-home-office-pc-II/
AMD Ryzen: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/amd-am4-pc/ (with 2000 series CPUs)

If you post your
full budget
intended uses (just gaming? gaming and streaming? video editing? what software?
exact requirements (e.g. if you need Windows, a monitor, etc.. if you have a monitor already, what model..)

people can suggest an appropriate spec

The 7th Gen CPUs have been a terrible buy since 8th Gen came out in October tbh.

The configurators do seem a bit screwy atm. On ghe overclocked z370, there are no more super fast NVMe drives (the 3500Mb options, at 512Gb and 2T) and the 750 txm now costs less than the 650!

polycrac said:

The configurators do seem a bit screwy atm. On ghe overclocked z370, there are no more super fast NVMe drives (the 3500Mb options, at 512Gb and 2T) and the 750 txm now costs less than the 650!

Click to expand...

I suspect that, as Ouseebon says, when they are looking to upgrade components or laptop chassis, PCS quite sensibly run down stocks of the 'older' components or chassis and that may well make the configurator options appear a bit strange or limited for a while. We should remember though, that is is just another way the PCS keep the prices down for us, good stock management is key.

ubuysa said:

I suspect that, as Ouseebon says, when they are looking to upgrade components or laptop chassis, PCS quite sensibly run down stocks of the 'older' components or chassis and that may well make the configurator options appear a bit strange or limited for a while. We should remember though, that is is just another way the PCS keep the prices down for us, good stock management is key.

Click to expand...

<cough> Who said they run down stock?

Thanks very much Oussebon You saved me from wasting a lot of money. Obviously I need to educate myself more on pc builds, been so long since I bought one. This 10 year old pc needs to go in the bin ASAP.

No worries, glad it helped. If you want to post a budget and intended use / what you require from the system, people can draw up specs or make suggestions for you to think about.

I'm thinking of this setup, for music production and gaming. I can afford the i7 ( £1000 is my budget ) so thinking why not go for it just in case it has more use in future audio and gaming advancements. I already have an MSi GTX 970 gaming 4G card so am not upgrading that for now, the 1080ti prices are ridiculous.

Case
CORSAIR CARBIDE SERIES™ 200R COMPACT GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor i7-8700k (3.7GHz) 12MB Cache
FREE Warhammer: Vermintide 2 & XMorph Defense w/ select Intel CPUs!
Motherboard
Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming: ATX, LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
INTEGRATED GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR (GPU)
1st Hard Disk
250GB WD Blue™ 3D NAND 2.5" SSD, (upto 550MB/sR | 525MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk
2TB SEAGATE FIRECUDA 3.5" SSHD
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Super Quiet Titan DragonFly Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
Extra Case Fans
2x 120mm Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof)
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS

Any thoughts on that setup ?

the 1080ti prices are ridiculous.

Click to expand...

Yeah, plus if you are gaming at 1080p the 1080 ti would be a ridiculous waste of money even if it was £200 cheaper anyway

You could go with the Frostflow 100 CPU cooler as it's larger and should be more effective, though the Titan ought to be okay too.

I'd probably take the 970 Evo SSD from the M.2 SSD menu all else being equal, over the WD Blue.

The spec seems very sound for your uses.

Thanks for the tip about the 970 Evo, didn't notice the speed difference before, cheers