PC for PS Elements 9, recording vinyls & playing train sims

[malminstral]

Hi, I have found reading the forums very interesting & that some of you are ready to help others with their PC's, thank you.

I’ve always built my own PC’s in the past, but it’s nearly just as cheap to get others to do it for me. I have an 8 year old PC (AMD 3500+ processor & Asus mobo), it is now playing up, so a time to renew, & so much has changed.

What I need is a PC & monitor that I can edit photos with PS Elements 9, record vinyl’s using Audio Cleaning Lab 2004 & play Trainz Sim 2004 also Microsoft Train Simulator. I like playing my old games as well; I have AOE, Civ 4, Star Wars X-wing Alliance & others.

I’m not sure which OS to go for, I do some of my works IT, a PC with MS Win 7, 64 bit can’t run some of the older 32 bit software, and so which do I go for? I could go for both, install & try each one.

I don’t need another hard disk, but more is always useful, I have nearly 2Tb in SATA drives, some are used for backups. I hope you have not gone to sleep yet!

My budget is about £700, lower would be better, so I don't mind going for a lower spec, as long as it runs what I need. The price will need to include OS & 1 monitor, but the PC will need to connect to 2 monitors. The monitor that’s playing up is the one I use for games.

The spec I’m looking at is:

Case
COOLERMASTER ELITE 310 BLUE CASE
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i3-2120 Dual Core (3.30GHz, 3MB Cache) + HD Graphics
Motherboard
ASUS® P8Z77-V LX: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, ATI®CrossFireX
Memory (RAM)
4GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 2GB)
Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 550 Ti - DVI,HDMI,VGA - 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
750GB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD7502AAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Power Supply
450W Quiet 80 PLUS Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£29)
Processor Cooling
INTEL SOCKET LGA1155 STANDARD CPU COOLER
Sound Card
Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Xtreme Audio (£32)
Network Facilities
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Monitor
19" Widescreen TFT 1366 x 768 2MS, D-Sub, DVI, 18.5" Panel (£69)
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 10 to 12 working days
Quantity
1

Price: £617.00 including VAT and delivery.

Please, your help will be most welcome.

 

[mantadog]

Not a bad setup, but i would ditch the sound card unless you really think you need it. Onboard sound is pretty brilliant these days, most people get by just fine with it. If all your doing is recording sound then i doubt you need it, but feel free to keep it if you know you will need it.

You can get most things to work with windos 7 in compatability mode, you could consider some sort of dual boot setup with windows xp. I'm just thinking do you mean 32 bit windows 7? If so then just get windows 7, the compatability mode will take care of the rest.

The system is basic but is actualy pretty powerful. So long as your not editing monster photos or expecting to play any of the really modern simulator games that love RAM and CPU it will play the older games fine and the basic editing also.

 

[malminstral]

Thank you mantadog, yes I will ditch the sound card.

That's an idea, dual boot, I’ve not done that since Win 95 & 98.

Thank you for your comment on the computer, basic yes, but better then what I’ve got now & I’m not likely going to get any more simulators, the photos take up a bit of time.