Advice needed please :)

[LostDose]

Good evening,

I was hoping someone might be able to offer me some advice, I am relatively computer literate and have a rough grasp of what most things mean and do. But when you start combining parts, their dependencies, the extra potential capabilities then I just get a little lost, confused and overwhelmed I am afraid.

Budget: Initially I had hoped to spend about £600, but quickly realized that just wasn't going to cut it for my needs. I have upped my current budget (which wont be available until at least January) to about £1000. But even there I am so overwhelmed in figuring out what I need, that if needs be I might save for another 4 to 6 months to up the budget to about £1,500.

Needs: I can list a few things that I will definitely want my P.C. to perform very well with;

- Playing Minecraft (runs through Java) on Far render distance, Fancy Graphics, 512x texture packs and lots of mods. With the game itself maxed out in performance, I still want to pull i 60 FPS without any lag at all.

- Playing Sims 3 on top specs.

- Video capture of gaming sessions whilst maintaining high performance.

- General web browsing/ streaming of video.

- Solid sound for music and gaming.

Confused: Below are a list of things that confuse me, I don't understand them so am not sure if I need them, will miss out without them and/or need something else for them to work;

- 2nd and 3rd graphics cards, I don't understand why you need more than one?
- RAID
- SSD Cache drive
- Eyefinity/GEforce 3D vision

Things I don't need (I think):

- Monitor, keyboard, mouse etc (I already have these with current P.C. and can upgrade them separately and easily
- Modem, Floppy disk drive and basically anything in the peripheral category besides the Eyefinity/GEforce 3D thing which I don't understand.
- Home installation, data recovery

Things I will take:

- 3 year silver warranty
- The £9 diamond delivery
- Standard build time

Other notes:

- Ideally I don't want a P.C. that will be useless for tomorrows gaming, for example if Sims 4 came out I wouldn't want to have to buy a new P.C. to play it. I understand that max performance on games not yet released can't be given, but at least to be able to play them.
- My problem seems to be that I am always open to the though of improvement for a few more £'s and just don't know where to stop to meet my needs.

Any help or advice anyone can give will be greatly appreciated!

Many Thanks,
Jonny.

 

[LostDose]

Nobody can help me at all with some advice?

 

[Corfate]

By January, what people spec for you will be relatively outdated, so you could get a better spec if you wait till January, rather than get somebody to draw one up or you now

 

[mantadog]

i think you are over complicating a little, i will try to help.

Starting off with what you want to use your pc for. Games like Minecraft and the sims are not the most demanding games out their, a mid range GPU will play them no problems at all, even when using screen recording software. a £1000 budget should be ample.

You can sometimes need more then 1 GPU to help speed up gaming performance. The typical scenario is you buy a solid mid or high range GPU and in a couple of years when newer better games come out you add in a 2nd identical card in crossfire or SLI to boos gaming performance for a fraction of the cost of buying a whole new pc. It's best to buy the best single card you can afford, and if you want to add a 2nd later make sure the motherboard supports it and you have a big enough PSU.

RAID can be used as a performace tool or a backup tool, needs 2 of the same HDD - most people have no need for it.

SSD Cache drive gives you some of the benefits of a SSD for a lower cost, a small SSD is combined with a mechanical drive to boost performance. A fast HDD like the Caviar black is more than enough for most people.

eyefinity etc is a system for playing games in 3D - up to you if you want that but you would have to buy 3d ready monitor.

You say you are looking at Next year before you can afford the pc, by that time the next generation of GPU's should be released or soon to be released so any spec you put together now might need toying with. I wouldn't be too worried about a £1000 pc not being able to play the latest games on some level as modern cards and CPU's are very very powerful indeed.

If you want a quick spec then i will make you one, any other questions just ask.

 

[LostDose]

Thank-you for the replies, it's been helpful and I'll pop back when my budget is ready and put something together then

P.s. I think it is suprising how powerful a P.C. is needed to run Minecraft well, there is a lot of data being constantly refreshed and the code still hasn't been optimized .