Hardware Insights Forum

Here, I will maintain a list of three suggested PC configurations - budget, mid-range, and high performance.

Budget (Office/General use) (Total $564)
CPU: Pentium Dual Core G3240 - $79
Motherboard: MSI H97M-G43 - $109
RAM: Kingston 4GB DDR3 1600 - $49
HDD: Seagate ST500DM002 or WD Caviar Blue 500GB - $65
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB - $19
Case: Fractal Design Core 1100- $59
PSU: Seasonic SSP-350GT - $59
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium or 8.1 64 bit - $125

Mid-Range (General use & light gaming) (Total $955)
CPU: Core i3 4160- $159
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H - $135
Graphics: MSI GT 740 2GB - $115
RAM: Kingston HyperX Blue 8GB - $99
HDD: WD Caviar Blue 1TB - $75
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB - $19
PSU: Antec TruePower Classic 450W - $105
Case: Silverstone TJ08E - $109
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium or 8.1 64 bit - $139

Performance/Gaming (Total $1370)
CPU: Core i5 4690K- $309
Motherboard: MSI Z97 G45 Gaming 3 - $189
Graphics: Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X Overclocked - $245
RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury 1866MHz 8GB - $105
SSD: Intel 530 Series 120GB - $85
HDD: WD Caviar Blue 1TB - $69
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB - $19
PSU: Silverstone Strider Gold 550W or Seasonic G Series 550W- $119
Case: Corsair Carbide 300R - $105
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium or 8.1 64 bit - $125

If you have any suggestions to make, feel free to post them, but do NOT use this thread to discuss your own custom PC build. Create a new thread for that.

ST1000DM003 has a head-park timer (that apparently can't be permanently disabled), which may reduce performance and reliability when used as a system drive. (ST500DM002, on the other hand, can't as it uses contact start/stop.)

If you were to individually rate each series of drive (that you've used) for reliability, what would you give them???

LongRunner wrote:If you were to individually rate each series of drive (that you've used) for reliability, what would you give them???

I haven't had a WD Caviar Black fail yet, but I've only ever sold two, and only seen another two or three in other PCs. They are uncommon as they are more expensive and very noisy

Everything else from the last two years would get a 2 or 3/10, including the WD Scorpio blacks. Those don't seem to be nearly as reliable as their 3.5" counterparts. Unfortunately, budget constraints still rule SSDs out for lower end PCs.

The SSP-350GT, G-360, and G-550 aren't available anymore. It looks like, for the budget and mid-range configurations, we either take a lower-quality product (such as a Corsair VS), or pay extra for a larger unit that those rigs will never take advantage of.

Besides that, some of the other components are also unavailable, but that's to be expected given that this thread, and the Umart version, haven't been updated lately.

Darn! It looks like the cheapest unit available with 100% Jap caps is the Antec Truepower Classic 450W.

I've updated the mid-range one. I haven't got time to think about the others ATM.

Guys you have so much opportunity there in AU. It seems to me you have mostly cheap chinese crap and only a few good units. When I try to search for power supplies you can buy almost anywhere in Europe, I often find nothing. Why is that? AU market is quite big and you are much closer to China where everything is being produced anyway. Get some money and start importing quality stuff

Those Seasonics are available here so this is either your distributor stopped selling them or they run out and he's waiting for new. Who is distributing that in there anyway?

It is indeed PCCG who stopped stocking them. The question is, why? Was there not enough demand for high-quality lower-wattage units? (And yes, that class means a lot to me.)

Now PCCG has also dropped the Truepower Classics. I guess that, at least in the near future, the situation is just going to get worse and worse – as has already happened (and is still happening) with lots of other stuff.

Incidentally, what's at stake now is at Mum's office (she does accounting). The reception PC (about 7–8 years old by now) there seems to be on the blink, although I haven't pinned down the exact fault. The HDDs at least (the original 250GB Samsung Spinpoint, model HD250HJ IIRC, and a WD800JD-00LSA0 I added in order to install Windows 7 alongside XP without having to repartition the Samsung) were fine the last time I checked, so my guess is that the fault is with the PSU (an Antec Basiq), mainboard, or possibly the RAM (or if not those, a GT610 that I added recently to run dual monitors).

Un-sticking this (and the Umart counterpart) as it's going well out of date.