Building a PC for my girl for XMAS

[Sneaky]

She needs a computer, her laptop crapped out and she has no computing devices other than phone and tablet. Since she's not in school anymore I don't see the need for a laptop so I'm going with a desktop.


Budget intel build with room for expansion if need be:


Intel Core i3-4330 Haswell Dual-Core 3.5GHz
Team Elite Plus 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
Antec Three Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
ASRock Z97 Pro3 LGA 1150 Intel Z97
CORSAIR CX series CX430 430W
Kingston SSDNow V300 Series SV300S37A/120G 2.5" 120GB

Total $441.. Did some shuffling around after the black friday/cyber monday deals dropped off, but this build looks pretty solid for a general browsing/netflix machine and should last her quite a while. No CD drive because she doesn't really need one, and I also have a Wifi card I already have I'll be throwing in there. No video card because no gaming and the integrated intel HD should be fine for Netflix/streaming.

I am slightly jealous because I've never had a custom Intel build, but am still on my AMD from last year. I can run Far Cry on high so not that jealous but I would eventually like an Intel build for myself.

SSD because she won't be downloading a whole bunch of crap and I want it to be fast to load/boot etc. Can stick a storage drive on there later if need be.

Thoughts, comments, concerns?

Happy holidays to all

[Spectere]

Lookin' good! That thing should fit those specifications perfectly. If there is even the slightest concern that she might use it to do much more than that (i.e. multithreaded applications like photo/video editing, gaming, etc) I'd probably bump it up to an i5, but that's about it.

Were you just going to try to use the OS license from the laptop?

[Sneaky]

I was looking to perfectly legitimately install Windows 7 on there......................


Any recommendations on a similarly priced i5? I would just be concerned with the drop of overall processing speed of the individual cores.

I don't have much experience with Intel at all so any insight is appreciated.

Thanks for taking a look spex

[Spectere]

The i5-4440 is a 3.1GHz (3.3GHz turbo) part for around $184, so it's going to be a fair amount more expensive. As far as processing power goes, pretty much anything is going to deliver more than enough single core performance. Most applications in my experience that use that much CPU power are going to be multithreaded anyway so having a true quad-core is going to be a better bet than a dual-core with Hyper-Threading in that case.

That being said, I didn't realize it would be a $50 difference between the two parts. If you're pretty positive she's not going to do anything that's going to saturate multiple cores I'd just go with the i3.

Edit: Also, the GPU clock speed on the i3-4330 and i5-4440 are identical, so if she decided to do some light gaming she wouldn't see much of a difference there.

Another thing: you might want to consider trying to grab Windows 8.1 (with a copy of Start8, naturally). It has a much smaller disk footprint than Windows 7 and generally works better with SSDs.

[Sneaky]

I actually ordered the stuff 12/8, it ended up getting here 12/9 all together! I love newegg. I didn't make any changes to the original order and got it all installed last night. Installed W7 ultimate on it in just a couple minutes (!!!) and it has a consistent cold boot time to desktop of 6 seconds. I can't even believe that. I've never had the pleasure of an SSD or an Intel cpu on any of my machines so I am slightly jealous but happy for her.

She doesn't do any gaming and the most she would get into is possibly using photoshop or some derivative to design her own pixel-sized (like 10x10, 15x15) patterns for a custom LED hula hoop. That's not even on the radar until some time next year so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it; but i think it will be fine either way.

I am wary of new OSs like 8.1 but maybe I will give it a go. It's still fresh and it takes no time at all to get stuff installed due to the SSD so we'll see!

[Spectere]

Windows 8 just has such a teeny-tiny footprint that it's kind of crazy. I ended up getting a $100 Windows 8 tablet not too long ago (which is running a quad-core Atom, crazily enough) and despite only having a 32GB SSD it manages to give me 16GB free! Considering it's running a full build of Windows and can actually run Windows 3.1 apps, that's not too shabby. The main reason that I suggested that is because I noticed that Windows 7 installs have a larger footprint from the beginning and the amount of space that they take up always seems to slowly creep up over time. I had the same sized SSD installed in my old laptop (and that size hard drive in my old old laptop) and I was consistently amazed by how much space I had left on the OS drive with Windows 8.

That being said, at this point (especially since you already have Windows 7 loaded on the new rig) I'd just wait for Windows 10 before you upgrade anything. Really, it's what Windows 8 should have been in the first place. It goes back to more of a desktop-first paradigm rather than forcing a bunch of tablet-centric nonsense in your face. It actually gives you the best of both worlds: Metro fans can still use their full-screen start screen while the rest of us can use a modernized Start menu. What it does is condense most of the Start menu functionality into the left side (it's slightly configurable as well) and lets you optionally stuff Live Tiles onto the right side so that you can get useful info like Weather, news feeds, etc, at a glance. Additionally, Modern UI applications can be run in a window without having to use something like ModernMix. Additionally, it reintroduces window shadows so that you can actually tell at a glance what's in the foreground again without having to install ShadowFX.

So yeah, like I said, it's how Windows 8 should have been. If I remember, I'll grab some screenshots from the Windows 10 Technology Preview VM I have at work tomorrow.

[Sneaky]

Installing the OS was such a quick process I ended up obtaining 8.1 pro and throwing it on there instead as well as Start8. Working great! I set the background to something Merry Christmassy and is now awaiting wrapping/boxing.

Just like 7 was what Vista should have been..why can't they just wait and release the good one without going through all this consumer confusing bullshit?  Seem like this has been the operating environment for their release schedule for the past few versions of Windows..

[Spectere]

Yeah, 8.1 really isn't awful as long as you bypass the start screen bullshit. The start times are stupidly fast, too. With UEFI boot and a Corsair MX100 256GB SSD, my laptop boots up in a matter of seconds. It's just nuts. Even my pussy little HP Stream 7 tablet boots up quick and you can't get much lower-spec than that.

I think I sort of get what happened with Vista and 8. In Vista's case, the OS had a rocky development cycle. It was in development for a couple of years, got bloated beyond belief, and then they basically restarted the entire project and cranked out a workable product in a fairly short amount of time. The core of it was decent, the security was drastically upped from the disaster known as XP, but the optimization just wasn't there. On a decent machine you couldn't even really tell much of a difference between that and XP, especially with SP1 and SP2.

With 8, I think Microsoft was suffering from arrogant management and a serious case of Apple envy. They wanted to take the tablet market and strengthen their desktop hold and they figured that convergence would be the way to go. I think the biggest proof of that is when they tried to put the Surface against the iPad. That marketing campaign failed miserably. Their recent effort to bash the MacBook Air seems to be going just as well (hey Microsoft, you know what I can do with my MacBook Air that I can't do with a Surface? Use it on my fucking lap!). Let's not even get into their strange belief that your average keyboard and mouse user (or trackpad...ugh, trying to use Metro with a trackpad on a high resolution display is not an experience that I want to relive any time soon) would jump at the idea of using a pointing device to control a tablet interface.

I think the failed Windows releases are more Microsoft's recent attempts to stay relevant than anything else. We're not living in the same world that we were when 98 and XP were released. Apple's market share has been continuing to grow, more people are embracing the penguin, and a whole crap ton of people are using their iOS or Android devices more and more in their daily lives. Vista was largely an attempt to modernize NT's security from something that worked in a controlled enterprise environment to the chaotic home environment. 8 was largely an attempt to improve the tablet support from XP, Vista, and 7 into something more modern. Both of them largely succeeded in their base goals (let's face it, Vista was a hell of a lot more secure than XP and 8 is actually a really nice pure tablet OS), but they both fail pretty dramatically in other ways.

Also, I just remembered that I was supposed to get you some Windows 10 screenies today. Whoopsie.