£500 for a PC

[Mellish]

Basically if I pass my next exams with flying colours, my reward is £500 (which is largely generous compared to the rewards I usually get). So I bet you can imagine what I want do with this money, build a new PC. So if you have any recommendations for parts that would fit in that budget then point me in that particular direction. Building the PC shouldn't be much of a problem as I'm getting a uncle who does it as a hobby. I've got monitors etc sorted out it's just the core unit I want.

It might seem a bit soon, but I'm too excited about it..

 

[StarBob]

You should be studying.

And I don't know what your fancy L money is.

 

[Dynasty]

Id go for something along the lines of

Core 2 Duo E6550 2.6ghz (or near that)
4gb Kingston DDR2 RAM
BFG 8800GT 512mb OC (Comes overclocked for the same price)
250GB HDD of your choice
Asus Motherboard of choice (just check it has PCI-E slot, takes DDR2 RAM and has the right slot for whatever CPU you put in)
500-750W PSU (make sure its a decent brand name. You want to throw a good £60-100 at the PSU alone, unless prices are ridiculously lower these days).

Or.....just wait for Asus to show up on the thread and give you expert advice.

Im only mentioning that setup because I did the same as you did. This was 2 years ago, and it cost me just over £700 to get almost that exact setup, and prices have plummeted these days.

Ive yet to come across a game on my home PC (that setup) which didnt run perfectly at 1440x900 and max settings.

Yet to try it on DX10 though, might struggle, but DX10 isnt that important to me.

 

[Dinnesch]

What do you think of this?
You should be able to overclock that CPU quite a lot if you want to, the cooler is more than sufficient.

 

[Mellish]

That's perfect dinnesch, though my only worry would be shipping costs for all of it...

 

[Vegeta897]

2 power supplies? Jesus. May I ask what that is for?

 

[StarBob]

2 power supplies? Jesus. May I ask what that is for?

POWER OVERWHELMING

 

[Krynn72]

2 power supplies? Jesus. May I ask what that is for?

There is only one...

 

[staticprimer]

You may want to look again.

 

[kazsymonds]

I'm seeing one as well, does that mean im secretly gay?

Seriously, is one included with the case or something?

 

[Krynn72]

Oh, i was looking for two different entries.

 

[Vegeta897]

How the **** are you guys seeing one. Do you know which one is the power supply? The price is actually what I noticed first, over 100 bucks for a psu is ridiculous, then I noticed it said there were 2 of them.

 

[StarBob]

I was going to make a highlander reference... but I guess we're all serious today...

 

[Dinnesch]

That's perfect dinnesch, though my only worry would be shipping costs for all of it...

I think you should put it together in a shop located in the UK, don't know if you have any decent webshop comparison websites there but you have to figure that out yourself I guess..

 

[Acepilotf14]

How the **** are you guys seeing one. Do you know which one is the power supply? The price is actually what I noticed first, over 100 bucks for a psu is ridiculous, then I noticed it said there were 2 of them.

Oh yeah, I get ya now.

Should probably fix that, dinn.

 

[kazsymonds]

Ohhhhhhhh.

Yeah, I was looking for 2 entries too.

 

[3ssence]

On the subject of motherboard and cpu combination. Your price range means you will likely be looking at one of the new core i3 cpu's with a P55 chipset motherboard. Or an AM3 phenom II of some variety with a 770/790 chipset motherboard. If you go quad core then you will probably have to make cuts elsewhere in the system, which isn't ideal if you want a nice balanced rig, leaving you a little more to spend on the graphics card for example. AMD do do a triple core variant of the Phenom II, but it seems to disappearing from many places.

My choices would be something like this:

Case:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Antec-300-Three-Hundred-Black-Midi-Tower-Ultimate-Gaming-Case-w-o-PSU

PSU:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/400W...eries-PSU-ATX-PS-2-UK-Version-3-year-warranty

Motherboard and CPU:

Intel:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Giga...ess-S1156-DDR3-2200-SATA-3Gb-s-SATA-RAID-uATX

with

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Inte...Hz-4MB-Cache-73W-Integrated-GPU-733MHz-Retail

(the motherboard is mATX, but is an excellent bang for buck option, killer overclocker and still has plenty of expansion slots for what you will need. It's got plenty of great reviews)

AMD:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/MSI-...)-DDR3-1600(OC)-RAID-Blu-Ray-Audio-GB-LAN-ATX

or

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Giga...E-20-(x16)-DDR3-1666-1333-SATA-3Gb-s-RAID-ATX

with

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/AMD-...l-Core-S-AM3-32GHz-7MB-Total-Cache-80W-Retail

(the MSI motherboard is another excellent board for the price, stupidly cheap for plenty of overclocking headroom and performance. The Gigabyte option might give you a little more future options for upgrading though. From what i understand the MSI board may not have the power circuitry to cope with quad core AM3 products whereas the Gigabyte has been found to be fine with quad core Phenom II's)

Memory:

(become stupidly expensive recently)

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-...600)-Non-ECC-Unbuffered-CAS-9-9-9-24-XMP-165V

Graphics card:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1GB-...z-GDDR5-GPU-850MHz-Cores-800-2x-DL-DVI-I-HDMI

Hard Disk:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/500G...HD502HJ-SATA-3Gb-s-7200rpm-16Mb-Cache-8ms-OEM

CPU cooler:

There are many great CPU coolers out now, so it would be very much dependent on which socket type and how much money you'd want to spend.

Those would put you back somewhere between 500-550 and would make a really great balanced system for the money. If it were my money that's what i would be looking at spending it on. However, if i could stretch just a little i would consider adding trying to squeeze another 50-60 pounds onto my budget for a quad core like this:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Inte...ld-45nm-Quad-Core-266GHz-8MB-Cache-95W-Retail

(you'd also need a little extra power for a quad core, so a 500W PSU upwards would probably be needed)

But, that's only if you can stretch to that.

I hope that's of some help to you

 

[Dynasty]

Basically for the UK, you want to be focusing on these sites for getting total prices:

Scan.co.uk
Ebuyer.co.uk
Overclockers.co.uk
Novatech.co.uk

Ive used them all, and they're always reliable.

Just shop around. If one piece is £5 cheaper at another site, buy that piece from them instead of a bulk order from one site for the convenience and piece of mind.

 

[VirusType2]

You should just get a power supply ($50) and a video card ($450) and put it in your pentium 4.

See what happens.


(I have no pound sign)

 

[StarBob]

You should just get a power supply ($50) and a video card ($450) and put it in your pentium 4.

See what happens.


(I have no pound sign)

I just call it a fancy L.

But what would happen is the same thing that happened to me. Well I had a number of things happen. For one my motherboard isn't PCI express 2.0. Also, my processor speed is still a choke point and for processor heavy games like BFBC2 I can't get the framerates that others do with similar video hardware.

 

[VirusType2]

Yeah, it's true. The CPU and RAM would be a significant bottleneck, making a much cheaper ($130 video card) a better idea in an old computer.

Actually, I decided to read the first post again (since I haven't visited this thread in a few days) and it sounds like he doesn't have a computer at all - only a monitor. So never mind with my brilliant plan.

 

[Kaptain H]

Wait, you get money for good grades?

 

[Dynasty]

I got a mahoosive Hi-Fi and speakers for my GCSE results and a year of car insurance for my A-level results.

 

[StarBob]

I got literally nothing for any good grades throughout my life. Well... I mean I had a room and food to eat... I guess that counts.