@MinerBoy23
Description of your new PC sounds solid and yes you can use storage drives that you already have in your new PC. You'll have to install Windows one more time, but you don't have to lose your data. If I were you I'd buy your mate a beer or two and ask him for help with that.

Going back to storage drives. As I said before you can have a lot of those in your system and you have two types of drives currently available on the market:

1) HDD (hard disk drive). Old time-tested technology (kinda amazing thou). The main pro of it is that you can get a lot of capacity (the amount of GB) for relatively low price. For example, you can get THIS popular 1TB HDD for the low low price of 42 quid. Main cons of HDD drives: they run hotter (thou that's almost never an issue), they are kinda fragile (there's a lot of very intricate, sophisticated "stuff" inside) but unless you drop it on the floor this also won't be a problem. The last, most important con is that they are kinda slow. In the last decade or so processors and graphics cards got kinda fast and HDD's stayed the same therefore HDD is usually the one element lagging behind all the others if you need your computer to do something fast.

2) SDD (solid state drive). New-ish tech (they are way more mainstream nowadays than they were like 2 years ago). Main pros: they are really fast, they require almost no power and therefore they stay cool during operation. Also, they are much less fragile, you can drop one on the floor and it will probably stay alive and well. Main con: price. You get much lower capacity for a higher price then if you bought HDD (EXAMPLE), but the speed is amazing. Once you use PC with SSD in it you won't go back. Ever. SSD's are also important for poker because Holdem Manager and Poker Tracker operate on very large amounts of very small files and HDD's don't like that.

If you have both SSD and HDD in your system you can make the SSD into your main"C:" drive (if you don't know how ask a mate for help or if he can't do that for some reason get back to be and I'll help) and keep everything you want to run fast on it (Windows, web browser, poker room, Holdem Manager and other important software) and you can make your HDD into "D:" drive (or split it even further into "E:", "F:" drives etc.) and keep all of your data there (movies, music, games etc.).

Hope that helped you understand the issue. If you have any more questions let me know.

Firstly great idea for a thread and thank you.

I am an amateur player who might be about to go pro. Looking for advice on a laptop upgrade

1) What's your budget? I am in Australia so looking at AUD $1200.
2) What will you be using your PC for? Poker only
3) If it's mostly for poker provide me with some details about your poker sessions. Playing 12 tables, HUD and equilab only on 1 27" monitor
4) Do you need a monitor, operating system, mouse, keyboard? Good for mouse and keyboard, just upgraded the monitor however keen to hear your advice on operating system
5) Where do you live? Prices can differ depending on your country of residence. Also, if you want to buy in specific shop please provide me with a link to their website (thou I'd advise being flexible because some shops have limited stock/high prices etc.) Perth, Western Australia

Let me know if you need anything else from me

@ChipDouglas1
I'd advise you to get a legal copy of Windows. Pirated versions often come with viruses and even if you know how to find clean version using legal copy makes your system more secure. Also if you get Windows 8.1 now you'll get a free upgrade to Windows 10 when it releases.

Australia is tricky. You have relatively high prices, but I managed to find a well-stocked shop that offers ok deals on the parts. I'm not sure if they can build your PC for you, but you can do that on your own (there's a bunch of tutorials online on how to do that and even thou first time might be somewhat intimidating it's not hard) or maybe ask a friend that has some experience in the matter.

So anyway here's a beast machine for poker that you can get with your budget:
CPU: Intel Core i7 4790
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H
CPU Cooler: Raijintek Themis
RAM: Avexir Core 8GB
SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
HDD: Western Digital WD Blue 1TB
PSU: Be Quiet! Pure Power L8 500W
Case: Fractal Design Define Mini
OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1

Total: 1255$ - I went a bit over your budget. If 1200$ is an absolute max let me know and I'll modify this build to cost a bit less. Also, if you end up using a different shop and they won't have some of those parts let me know and I'll find alternative options in their offer.

Hows this?

@Jon-PokerVIP
Assuming you also have SSD in your system, it looks like an amazing machine for poker:) At least when it comes to performance because I can't evaluate reliability without knowing the model of your power supply, motherboard and case. I assume they are good enough though.

how would i find that information? Finding the above took me long enough lol

@Jon-PokerVIP
To check if you have SSD in your system download and unpack THIS software with 7zip or WinRAR. When you open it your disk name will appear at the top before all of the statistics. If you have more than one storage drive in your system click 'drives' to switch between them and give me the names of both.

As for the case and power supply, you can't check those using software. You'd have to unscrew the left (when looking from the front of the case) side panel in your PC and take a picture of the internals (power supply is a box with cables coming out of it placed at the bottom or less often nowadays at the top of your case). If you decide to do that you can make one more picture of the front of your case so it's easier for me to figure out which one is it (there's a lot of different cases on the market).

You don't have to do any of that of course:)

Hey Matt,

I am buying a new laptop very soon.

It's either one of these

HP Laptop

Acer laptop

Which one do you think. I'm leaning towards the Acer. I am using it only for writing content.

Both laptops are certainly powerful enough for the purpose you mentioned. Personally if I was buying a secondary computer just for writing out of this two options I'd snap call that Acer. Mostly because of 1920x1080 anti-glare(!) screen (sounds much better than the one in HP) and 120GB SSD (which will make everything work buttery smooth), oh and more powerful CPU is also nice but it's not that important for writing. That being said, Acer doesn't have DVD drive (so you'll have to rely on USB drives, SD cards and internet which I'm totally fine with since I haven't used DVD drive in ages) so that might or might not be a problem for you (you can always buy cheap external DVD drive if you really need one) and even thou SSD is light years faster than HDD in HP you only get 120GB instead of 1000GB (which again I'd be totally fine with if that was my secondary machine for writing only, but your workflow might be very different than mine and maybe you need additional space).

Oh and one last thing. I find Acer more reliable than HP. I don't have official failure rate statistics or anything like that but from my experience HP laptops are notorious for overheating. Thermal performance of every laptop deteriorates over time no matter the company (it's hard to design efficient and reliable cooling solution in such a small space) but those new Intel mobile CPUs should run relatively cool and you should get decent amount of work hours from both laptops but if I was a betting man I'd say Acer will serve you better/longer.

I'd happily swap systems with you any day! beastly machine for poker

lol that's like taking a nuclear bomb to a knife fight.

If i was to get a computer tower (already have monitor, mouse etc), and it needs to have a good processor I think for streaming as well as running poker sites, HEM etc at the same time as streaming. Does it just need a good processor or anything else? (we have "superfast" broadband) Is anything else needed?

hey matt

I want to buy a pc for my room just for playing poker on and maybe streaming something everynow and then to watch in bed.

I play from 3 tables to 12 and use hm2.

I live in north London and I don't have a clue where to start so if u could give me some help id appreciate it.

Thanks Robbie

@killjoy1987
You can approach streaming in many different ways. You can use capture cards, you can build 2 PC-s and use one as streaming server etc. etc. but yeah the most cost effective and the most practical way of going about streaming poker would be to just get a single machine with powerful CPU. If you want to stream poker then you don't really need anything else (if you wanted to stream some video games too you'd also need at least midrange graphics card depending on what games would you like to stream). Let me know how much would you like to spend and I'll come up with something for you.

@robstars7
Sure thing. Just tell me what's your budget and I'll be happy to help.

Yeah I'll only be streaming poker from the same desktop so don't think I need capture card or anything. ATM I do it on a laptop and it's fine for the most part as long as I don't have too many things running at the same time. Not got too much of a budget (right now) but if I sort of knew a decent processor speed or whatever I need to be looking for that would be ace.

erm well as cheap as possiable tbh, what sort of price range do you think is reasonable?

@killjoy1987
You can probably get away with streaming poker using i5 4460 though streamers usually recommend something like i7 4790. If you want to build a PC using the first part then you'd have to spend around £500-550 assuming you don't need monitor and windows (maybe ~£400 for barebones version) and in case of i7-4790 it would be closer to £650 (if you need windows add £80 to those prices).

@robstars7
I have no idea how much you're able to spend. If you need some advice I'd say that £300 is probably a bare minimum though £450-500 would be much better and that's if you only need the case (Windows + Monitor is an additional £200).

Nice one, cheers Matt

Hey Matt! I'm looking to get a new Tower for paying on as atm I'm using my laptop which is kinda slow and crappy :/ What are your suggestions? I would like one that is fast with a decent chunk of memory and obz decent graphics. I'll be getting a second screen also to have a sweet setup!

Budget is going to be around £400- I looked around and found this This setup what does this look like?

@CrazyCookie
This PC looks good and it will work waaaaay better than a slow laptop. That said it's really hard for me to recommend PC for poker without an SSD storage drive. The problem is that Samsung EVO 850 costs 100$ bucks and you'd have to make quite a lot of sacrifices if you can't increase your budget. The good news is that you can buy an SSD in the future if you can't find funds for it now and you can install it in your system with ease (you'd have to reinstall windows thou since computer works waaaay better if you have your operating system and important programs installed on your SSD).

You don't need Z97 or even H97 chipset on your motherboard since you can't overclock your CPU. You can get away with a bit less expensive but really solid Gigabyte B85-D3H for example.

Oh and the case. It looks solid thou the lack of dust filter on top means that after a couple of months your internals will look really messy. Cases are often overlooked when building a PC, but I'm a big fan of choosing something a bit better especially when it's silence optimized (I'm using Fractal Design Define R4 and I literally can't hear my PC while typing this, I can't hear it while playing poker and I'd have to open really demanding game to hear some noise coming out of my case). If you change the motherboard to the one I mentioned above you can get something likeFractal Design Define Mini (MSI motherboard that's included in your build by default wouldn't fit in this case).

Oh and speaking of silence even thou Intel includes small CPU cooler with all of its CPU's I wouldn't rely on it. It's really noisy and it's not very good at keeping CPU temperatures low. I'd invest in cheap CPU cooler that will work way better (like Cooler Master 212 EVO or better yet: Raijintek Themis)

Other than that your build looks really solid and I'm sure you'll be very happy with it.