Assistance with First Build- A Dollar saved is a Dollar earned.

I've attempted to do my own research so far, however I now turn to Neoseeker and your great minds to focus my wants into reality.

Budget: $900-$1000 AUD

My Location: I'm in Australia so hopefuly someone local can assist with prices.

Main Purpose: Web surfing,

Multitasking: Most likely a high level of this.

Games: Revised to none.

Resolution: Not a huge deal for me. Onboard graphics are fine.

Overclocking: No need.

Peripherals I have: Wireless Keyboard and Mouse.

Recycled Parts: None

Case: Just one that fits my parts and doesn't make them overheat.

RAM: preferably 8GB however would like to have the option of upgrading in future.

HDD: 500GB will be plenty.

Other Requests: I'd like to have as much future proofing as possible, eg USB 3 and Firewire ports if possible. As far as I can tell, this means I have to be careful about the motherboard I purchase, I believe. (first build )

I've pulled a rough plan from mwave, here's the specs from the attempt I made:




Any pointers of where I can go cheaper would be appreciated. I'm willing to stick to the upper end of the bracket ($1000) if it means longer time without needing to upgrade.

My main sticking point is my lack of knowledge in the CPU/Motherboard area.

Thanks in Advance

slaythebad

Is the i5 3550 3rd Gen an Ivy Bridge? I would prefer Sandy Bridge as I know Ivy just came out. I'd rather give it time to sort any problems.

Thanks

ivy bridge all the way, man. lower power consumption, and ~15% faster speeds clock for clock. youre not overclocking, so thats no issue either.

the absolute lowest prices you can find will mostly come from www.msy.com.au

i dont really feel like making a build right now, but you should be able to stick at least a GTX 570 in there. of course, if youre not much of a gamer, you shouldnt have to end up spending a grand on parts, either, and for merely web surfing and starcraft, 4 gigs would be more than enough.

the battery likely just has a memory problem. if you run it down until the computer shuts off, then leave it for 3 hours, recharge it again fully, turn it on, and repeat the process a few times, you should get back some of your capacity.

also, if that laptop is still fine for you, then you can definitely get away with much cheaper parts. hell, you might want to consider just going for AMD and its APU processors instead.

its basically a video card and a CPU combined. its nothing overly powerful, but should still be enough for your usage.

you have to look at the specs of each PSU youre interested in. not all of them will have less power than advertised. a good PSU will supply the advertised power on the 12 volt rail (there are multiple rails, one or more for 12 volts, and one each for other voltages). youre looking to spend about 100 bucks on a good 500 watt unit. dont go any higher. youre not going to use more than 300 watts, anyway.

For your stated purposes (mostly websurfing, no gaming) you are grossly overestimating your hardware requirements--you can easily build a SOLID machine for maybe a third of your total budget.

Try this: http://amzn.com/w/12FY5QGA3J6LS

AMD Dual-Core APU

AMD is much better bang for the buck than Intel. Intel's CPUs outperform on benchmarks, but that's on benchmarks, not real-world usage. AMD is the hands down choice if you're on a budget.

Dual-core: for some reason, the market has gone crazy over 4/6/12/9001 core processors when the reality is that dual-core is still REALLY powerful. At this point it's really only huge multimedia applications like Photoshop, intensive games like Skyrim, and some other file encoding operations can even make legitimate use of 4+ cores; for you, there's no need for that many.

An APU is essentially a CPU and a GPU on the same chip. This simplifies two data streams down to one, which reduces your machine's power consumption for performing the same tasks.

2GB Kingston ValueRAM

Kingston ValueRAM is a legendary product line.

For your stated needs, 2GB should be more than enough. It is not unless you play recent games that you can really use 4GB, and not unless you do heavy duty video/photo editing and/or run virtual machines that you'll need more than 4GB. RAM is another area where people have gone crazy over having 1238912037128 GB of RAM when they really only need much, much less--don't let it fool you, 2GB is still plenty by today's standards.

ASRock Micro ATX motherboard

ASRock and Gigabyte are two of the best motherboard manufacturers, especially for mATX boards.

Micro ATX is all you need. Standard ATX boards let you install multiple PCI-E graphics cards in SLI/Crossfire, but since you're not gaming you don't need any of that nonsense.

Compatible with SATA III and USB 3.0 for futureproofing.

Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM SATA III HDD

Western Digital and Seagate are the best storage drive manufacturers.

Again, SATA III for teh future speedz.

Crucial 64GB SATA III SSD

Solid-state drive. If you're not familiar with SSDs, they are a technological step up from HDDs. HDDs access stored information by moving an arm on a spinning plate, which is where RPM Rounds Per Minute come into play (ex 7200RPM). Solid state drives are just that though, solid--no moving parts, meaning that they can access data faster than HDDs since there is no mechanical action to be performed. This is the same type of storage USB flash drives use.

SSDs provide a significant speed boost to computing tasks over HDDs, but they are much more expensive per GB than their HDD counterparts. For that reason it's best to buy a relatively small capacity SSD and load just your operating system and applications on it so that they load much faster than they would on HDD, but keep all your other data like music, movies, photos on an additional HDD.

Cooler Master 460W PSU

Solid PSU. 460W is, again, more than enough for your needs. It is really not unless you have a dual graphic card SLI/Crossfire configuration that anyone might need more than that.

Cooler Master Micro ATX Case

I use this case myself--does its job well, no complaints. Again, mATX is all you need since you're not running any massive SLI/Crossfire/10x HDD RAID configurations.

ASUS SATA CD/DVD Burner

I also use this. Does its job, no complaints.

For an operating system, since you're not playing games, there's no need for you to buy Microsoft Windows. Run Linux for free instead: check out Ubuntu and/or Linux Mint. These are two great beginner Linux distributions that Windows users will have no trouble adapting to. They let you do everything you can do in Windows--browse the web, check email, chat, etc. without needing to purchase anything (LibreOffice is the included Microsoft Office substitute that is compatible with MS Office formats). The only thing Windows has that Linux doesn't is DirectX, which is only used in games designed for Windows and a few professional-grade multimedia applications. Since you don't do that stuff I can guarantee you'll hardly even notice the transition, because Linux has a 100% free substitute for every Windows applications, and distros like Ubuntu/Mint make it super easy to figure it all out.

All in all this comes to around $400USD minus shipping, and this is a build I can easily see lasting you 5-6 years before an upgrade.

Also, some good places to read guides on this type of stuff:

http://makeuseof.com/pages/download - this page has downloadable PDF guides on topics like building a PC from scratch, solid state drives, and getting started with Linux, all written with the beginner in mind. Really good place to start. The password to download guides is makeuseof

http://lifehacker.com/nightschool - Another good collection of beginner-oriented guides. Getting started with Linux and how to build a PC from scratch are two classes they've created.

youre building a PC to mainly surf the web?

any hamster should do fine.