Budget of £1000, non gamer, smallish space for the case to go into!

So the main use for my PC is streaming and watching HD, Web browsing and the usual office work, email, word, spreadsheets etc. I don't really play games but I'm not averse to the odd shoot em up so perhaps not rely on the integrated graphics card.
I hate that the older my PC gets the slower it is to start up.
I think my case fan and PC fan are noisy.
I use two monitors.
To clarify, the smallish space is the bottom (i.e coolest part) of a custom switching cabinet. It has vent extraction so stays very warm but not hot.
Following advice from The big 'O' and others we had the spec nailed 6 months ago and then life got in the way.

So now I'm back and HERE GOES!
I had to tweak the last quote due to market forces!!! (I.E I can't find them on the website)
Case
CORSAIR CARBIDE SERIES™ AIR 540 GAMING CASE Can't find the 250D previously recommended.
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-8400 (2.8GHz) 9MB Cache
Motherboard
Gigabyte Z370P D3: ATX, LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready Can't find the Strix Z370-I
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1050 - DVI, HDMI, DP As I said I play the odd keyboard or joystick game I don't have a controller so Fortnight is em...interesting!
1st Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
1st M.2 SSD Drive
500GB SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3400MB/R, 2300MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 650W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Noctua NH-U14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
Windows 10 Multi-Language Recovery Image - Unlimited Downloads from Online Account
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365 (Operating System Required)
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Google Chrome™
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 12 to 14 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,209.00 including VAT and delivery

So, this is built on a different configurator to the one previously used - which was a mini ITX configurator, as opposed to the above which is regular ATX.

The 540 is not a small case, though it is an excellent one.

I generally recommend that where possible, an ATX is preferable to mini ITX system, as they offer more upgrade options, sometimes more features, and can be cheaper in the Z370 end of things.

How much space do you have, could you remind me? what's the max dimensions for a case?

Hi Oussebon,
Basically I couldn't find the case you previously recomended and this one, in reality, won't fit very well without a rejig of the switch cupboard. I have, however, created a better space and could fit a case of about 400H x 350W x 400D.
As for upgrades I tend to hang on and thrash a PC to death for 6 or so years and then splurge on a new one.
Hope this helps!
Jim

By upgrades I mean things like storage and PCIe cards, never mind CPUs and GPUs

The Air 540 is: 458mm x 415mm x 332mm (Approx H x W x D).

The Mini ITX configurator is here: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/intel-sff-gaming/

Consider the
Fractal Nano S: 330mm x 203mm x 400mm (Approx H x W x D)

You should consider getting an ATX system so you don't compromise your options, but send in your own case. If you can find one, a Cooltek Jonsbo W2 might do it:
http://www.cooltek.de/en/discontinued-products/cases/131/w2-black Height x Width x Depth 385 x 278 x 395mm It's an old model but you might find some knocking around.
Corsair Carbide Air 240: 260mm x 320mm x 397mm (Approx H x W x D)
Fractal Node 304: 210 x 250 x 374 (Approx H x W x D)

The fractal Nano looks good. Lets populate that!
How about the new spec?
Case
FRACTAL DEFINE S NANO GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-8400 (2.8GHz) 9MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® ROG STRIX Z370-I GAMING: Mini-ITX, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1050 Ti - DVI, HDMI, DP
1st Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
1st M.2 SSD Drive
500GB SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3400MB/R, 2300MB/W)
The Crew 2 FREE with select SAMSUNG NVMe SSDs!
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Noctua NH-C14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
GIGABIT LAN PORT + Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi excluded on H310I-PLUS)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
Windows 10 Multi-Language Recovery Image - Supplied on DVD
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365 (Operating System Required)
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Google Chrome™
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 12 to 14 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,289.00 including VAT and delivery

£1300 for a PC with an i5 and a GTX 1050 ti :/ jeez..

The spec is basically appropriate for your needs, but my goodness that's expensive. You could get a half decent 4k gaming rig for less.

You could shave a lot off the price tag.
Cheaper mobo ~£150
Cheaper SSD ~£70
Cheaper cooler ~£30 (it's only a stock i5 CPU)
Cheaper mobo only takes upto 2666MHz RAM, but for your uses, that doesn't really matter. Also lacks wifi but you can get a USB adapter for £10 on Amazon.
The Z370E is really not worth £150 more imo.


Case
FRACTAL DEFINE S NANO GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-8400 (2.8GHz) 9MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® PRIME H310i PLUS: Mini-ITX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1050 Ti - DVI, HDMI, DP
1[SUP]st[/SUP] Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
1[SUP]st[/SUP] M.2 SSD Drive
512GB ADATA SX6000 PCIe M.2 2280 (1000 MB/R, 800 MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Noctua NH-L9i Low Profile, Super Quiet CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
GIGABIT LAN PORT + Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi excluded on H310I-PLUS)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
Windows 10 Multi-Language Recovery Image - Unlimited Downloads from Online Account
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365 (Operating System Required)
Anti-Virus
BullGuard™ Internet Security - Free 90 Day License inc. Gamer Mode
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Warranty
3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 12 to 14 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,019.00 including VAT and delivery

Unique URL to re-configure : https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-sff-gaming/VnMQ8KxsB3/

Progress

Hi O,
Thanks, as always, for the help.
Savings:
Motherboard: Understood. Absolutely!

SSD How important are read write speeds? Clearly the Samsung would appear on the page to be 3x faster but what applications, games, functions benefit from this?
Also I get putting the OS onto the SSD. Turning the PC on will now cut 2 cups of coffee out of my day! How do other applications use this? My naive belief is that SSD will always be quicker than an HDD but what applications use/load to the SSD automatically or is it simply my choice to load/store things on there?

Only reason for the choice of cooler is noise reduction. Given the number of fans already in the casing will this be quiet anyway?
Being Greedy, should I bump up the CPU to 8600 for the extra £50? or the Graphics card to the 1060?
Kind regards,
Jim

P.S A day without chocolate IS a day wasted.

Only reason for the choice of cooler is noise reduction. Given the number of fans already in the casing will this be quiet anyway?

Click to expand...

The other cooler I suggested is a Noctua and very quiet, it's just a cheaper Noctua. You could stick to the C14S if you really like it though.

Being Greedy, should I bump up the CPU to 8600 for the extra £50?

Click to expand...

It's about £50 for 200Mhz of boost clocks, which sounds like very poor value to me.

or the Graphics card to the 1060?

Click to expand...

The 1030 3gb might be worth it. The 6gb one is way more expensive and doesn't at all seem like good value. A 1050 ti is more than fine for quite casual gaming needs.

The Samsung SSD is faster. But you're possibly not likely to perceive the difference, other than if you copy GBs and GBs of data on the SSD very regularly. Also the motherboard would bottleneck the Samsung, probably limiting speeds somewhere around 1500MBps. Though IOPS would be unaffected.

You could stick to the Samsung 970 Evo, but you won't get its full performance on the cheaper mobo. And the Z370 mobo ends up making your SSD effectively £220 more expensive if you're buying it just for the SSD. And you may not perceive the performance difference .e.g how fast Word opens up anyway...

You want the OS on the SSD, and in general an SSD will always be faster than an HDD. OS + all programs + any games you can fit / are currently playing on the SSD. Mass storage like movies, music collections, and games you're not playing right now on the HDD. Game framerate will be unaffected by SSD or HDD, but they will load faster on an SSD. The loading times between different SSD models are usually pretty similar I think.

Given that the space for more HDDs is very limited, consider getting a larger HDD. Maybe 3TB as this seems to be decent value in terms of TB vs £.

Forgot the blu ray player!

Brilliant thank you.
Just to clarify. Unless I load it onto the SSD no program will actively seek out the SSD to use for storage, ?file swapping? temp files etc. They will simply use the drive they are installed on or I have to direct them to use a folder on the SSD?

I have just looked back at my posts and 'research' (AKA advice from you) from January. The hangover then was that without a 5.25bay for the blu-ray I have no way of getting info from DVD's CD's etc into file storage on the PC. I am a sad case of old and bought my first PC in the late 80's (a 386) when doing my Degree. In those days I was just moving up to CD's from Vinyl so I have a great stack of them to transfer using an inboard blu-ray I have ATM. I guess the answer is to do that before I get the new PC!!! or buy an external drive.
So unless you know of a similar sized case with a 5.25 here is the latest (last?) attempt!

Case
FRACTAL DEFINE S NANO GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-8400 (2.8GHz) 9MB Cache
Motherboard
ASUS® PRIME H310i PLUS: Mini-ITX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
3GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060 - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP
1st Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 32MB CACHE
1st M.2 SSD Drive
512GB ADATA SX6000 PCIe M.2 2280 (1000 MB/R, 800 MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W TXm SERIES SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Noctua NH-C14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
GIGABIT LAN PORT + Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi excluded on H310I-PLUS)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
Windows 10 Multi-Language Recovery Image - Supplied on USB Drive
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365 (Operating System Required)
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Google Chrome
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 12 to 14 working days
Quantity
1

Price £1,105.00 including VAT and delivery

Jimfire said:

Brilliant thank you.
Just to clarify. Unless I load it onto the SSD no program will actively seek out the SSD to use for storage, ?file swapping? temp files etc. They will simply use the drive they are installed on or I have to direct them to use a folder on the SSD?

Click to expand...

If you designate the SSD as the C drive, pretty much anything you let auto-install itself on your PC will go there by default, but I can't think of anything that doesn't give you the option to browse and install wherever you like.

If you order the system with Windows, PCS will install this and have the SSD as the C drive. Most programs will have someone on the C Drive as the default installation path. However almost all modern programs will give you a choice where to install them. For Steam games you can set up libraries on different drives if you don't want to install a given game on the SSD for some reason and you pick which to install to

The Cooltek Jonsbo W2 case I suggested has an optical drive bay (in a weird place, so you'd need to use it before stuffing the system in the cupboard).

For the mini ITX builds, you're out of luck. The Cooler Master 130 Elite has space for a blu ray drive, but it is not a quiet case.

You can rip the stuff on your old PC. Or buy and external drive connected by USB and do it on your new PC. But since they're ~£60, using your old PC for ripping seems like a plan.