New PC help

[Eliganza]

I'm looking for a decent pc for general net browsing duties and maybe some RTS gaming and im willing to spend around £300ish, looking for a base unit only. Any suggestions? I was thinking something like this: http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/st...m=null&tm=null&sku=759076&category_oid=-37540

 

[Jason_E]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-200-OK&groupid=43&catid=1078&subcat=

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-186-OK&groupid=43&catid=1078&subcat=

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/176490

These are ok for the price!

 

[Drobbly]

build one its easy :rasp:

 

[Eliganza]

how much do you think it would cost to build a decent pc? Doesn't need to be too hi tec but I don't want it to be crap either haha

 

[Ads_172]

I'd recommend building your own if you're mildly competent, it's easy. Even if you buy a half decent base unit, there will always be short cuts taken to bring the cost down. Your
PC will only be as good as it's weakest component...

 

[Eliganza]

I'd consider myself mildy competant lol. What parts would I need then? Case, motherboard, harddrive, graphics and sound cards, RAM, help me out here haha then I can look at how much this is going to cost...

 

[Darren S]

Think of the Pyramid Rule when building a PC. The core three components (in terms of real-world perfromance) will be CPU, motherboard and memory. As Ads 172 says, skimp on one of these and the other two suffer.

You could argue that there is a fourth element to this in the graphics card. But unless you're chucking a fair few £hundred into the PC pot, I wouldn't worry about this too much.

D.

 

[Ads_172]

Agree, people always w**k over the latest GFX but they upgrade so often that the truth is that you can get a fairly cheap card (older model, not budget brand) that will do the job for casual gaming.

There's better people than me on here for specc'ing up a system but I'll have a look for you when I get home. It's oddly fun putting together baskets on Ebuyer!

 

[Eliganza]

ah cheers mate, I've had a little read up and I think I know what I'm doing. The only thing is I don't know which components are the best for the price really

 

[conneh]

Your CPU will suffer if you also buy a rubbish graphics card, as it will choke it.

 

[mugglesquop]

i built a PC, about a year ago, possibly more. got all the bits from eBuyer, apart from the RAM, which i bought direct from Crucial (same price)


AMD Phenom 2.6 Quad - £120
ASUS M2N-SLI mobo - £50
Nvidia 9500 GT 1Gb Graphics - £60
Sony DVD/CD/everything (SATAII) - £15
Piano Black Case - £20
Good Quality, Quiet PSU - £40 (cant remember make)
500 GB SATAII HDD - £70
4GB Crucial RAM - £cant rememeber

cost me £420 altogether. runs all the latest games on full graphics. might have been some other bits i missed. prices are rough from what i remember. will all be cheaper now.

ah cheers mate, I've had a little read up and I think I know what I'm doing. The only thing is I don't know which components are the best for the price really

i started with the Mobo, as it was on offer, then matched everything to it

 

[Ads_172]

Sorry, haven't had a chance to look at it tonight.

Tell you what's easier... go to the www.overclockers.co.uk forums and join up on there. Post a "spec me..." thread in the General Hardware forum with requirements and a budget and they'll post up various baskets of stuff that'll do the job.

Then, go and buy it from ebuyer or somewhere cheaper!

 

[Eliganza]

while im waiting for my overclockers account to validate, what do you experts think on this spec? obviously i want to play blu ray on it and want it to display on my 32" tv so it needs hdmi outputs

 

[KDF]

I just put together a new system, my needs were different to yours as I needed a high speed system but not for gaming (hence the cheapo gfx card). Not on that list is a high end 128GB SSD. I would 100% recommend going SSD over hard drives for anything other than archiving/storage.

I also didn't need a case and psu as I already have high end modular psu's