As it says on the tin!

My computers on it's last legs, it's a shame really, we've had some good times, bad times, and I've spent many many hours playing Football Manager on it, alas, it's time for pastures new for my old computery friend.

Anyone know of any good deals going on at the moment? I've been with Dell 4 computers in a row, any other companies I should have in mind? And is there anything I can have instead of that new silly windows platform? (Not XP, ..the new one..hence the term 'new')

Budget of say, ..£500-600?

Cheers yo!

I would avoid anything based on an AMD processor, they're very off the pace at the moment. Intel Core2Duos or (if you can afford it) Core2Quads are the processors to aim for - avoid the Celerons or Pentium Ds, they're usually cheap knock-offs of the Core2s. As far as RAM (memory) goes, 2GB is very much the standard these days with Vista's memory-hungry antics and various other programs being more bloated.

If you're serious about it, I can spec out a machine for you and build it - though you would have to pay for postage between Witham and wherever you live.

Faraz, Craig is right - buy the parts seperately and build the computer!

You could get something truly 1337 well within your budget, this also means you can have everything how you want it, like, for example- getting Windows XP not that Vista bullshit!

or check out novatech.co.uk, they have some pretty awesome machines for sale, they spec em and build them to order

Build it yourself, or get craig to do it it seems.

Craig i do insist that you don't spend a load of his budget on getting a licensed version of xp when it is cracked to kingdom come.

With the budget you have advertised Faraz you could get a very respectable rig, especially if you let craig do it as he is super hyper at this.

I mean i am semi decent, but he is premier league.

I'm world cup mate

If there's £60 left on the spec when I'm done then I don't see a problem with it

I generally flip between Novatech, Scan and Dabs when it comes to suppliers, depending on who gives me the best price for individual parts.

One thing to watch out for when building your own machine is matching the CPU's FSB speed to the RAM's clock speed - if your RAM runs faster than your CPU (eg 1066Mhz RAM vs 800MHz CPU) then there'll be a bottleneck at the CPU. It's generally all about matching the components to your needs, quad-core may not be for everyone - there's few programs that actually take advantage of all four cores, so you may be better off with an overclocked Core2Duo than with a Core2Quad.

I would go for something like this (whether it comes in-budget or not is another question - this is just a rough spec):

CPU - Intel Core2Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping) - 1066Mhz FSB
RAM - 2Gb PC2-8500 OCZ Reaper HTC (1066Mhz clock speed)
Hard Drive - 750Gb Samsung SpinPoint F1 SATA-II
Graphics - BFG nVidia 8800GTS OC (factory-overclocked, awesome value)
Motherboard - Generally anything that will support your other hardware
Case - Completely up to you, there's literally hundreds out there
DVD-RWs - They're all fairly similar but moving towards SATA-II drives rather than IDE now because of the data transfer rates
Monitor - 19" widescreens are pretty nice, though you may want to keep your current monitor if it's good enough
Sound Card - Most motherboards have decent onboard sound, but if you really want to go for it, the ASUS Xonar series is pretty good

thrash metal maniac wrote:I'm world cup mate

Seriously compared to Craig you are not.

My laziness is my main hindering factor. I am pretty much 100% confident that there is nothing i can't do on computers if i gave them a try, but that is the problem. I really can't be arsed at all.

Yeah, its worth to shop around a bit, sometimes you can save 20% just by using a different site

I brought a this from tesco's on christmas day.

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.901-2286.aspx

the above model has 1gb more ram then mine mind

Yeah, my current spec on my August rebuild is split across four different suppliers (the I mentioned plus WaterCoolingShop for the watercooling rig).

The spec itself is fairly similar to the one quoted above, so my first spec may need to be toned down slightly to come into the £600 spec, but £240 of my £1k budget is on watercooling and £141 is being spent on the case. Those are the only differences, and I'm really only going for watercooling because (1) I'm planning to overclock the machine as close to 4GHz as I dare (the stock CPU speed is 2.4GHz) and (2) I'm trying to get the machine as quiet as possible.

Craig wrote:Yeah, my current spec on my August rebuild is split across four different suppliers (the I mentioned plus WaterCoolingShop for the watercooling rig).

The spec itself is fairly similar to the one quoted above, so my first spec may need to be toned down slightly to come into the £600 spec, but £240 of my £1k budget is on watercooling and £141 is being spent on the case. Those are the only differences, and I'm really only going for watercooling because (1) I'm planning to overclock the machine as close to 4GHz as I dare (the stock CPU speed is 2.4GHz) and (2) I'm trying to get the machine as quiet as possible.

Is it true that the parts on those 'whole solution' pcs are inferior to parts used in, say, ASUS products??

Yeh Craig, that sounds well good - altho there is no time frame, I'm maybe looking to have something by the end of the year.

Maybe when you're back near London (Essex was it?) we could sort something out.

thrash metal maniac wrote:Is it true that the parts on those 'whole solution' pcs are inferior to parts used in, say, ASUS products??

It depends what you mean by "whole solution" - if you mean retail PCs like HP, Dell etc, then there's no real difference, they all use the same gear (more or less, some companies produce their own graphics cards) but those kind of companies have their profit margins to worry about whereas custom-build PCs tend to be built for the price of whatever you can get your hands on. The August issue of CustomPC has a Dell XPS system vs a custom-build of as close as possible to the XPS, and it worked out cheaper to build one yourself.

zykloned wrote:Maybe when you're back near London (Essex was it?) we could sort something out.

I'm already back in Essex, so whenever's good for you - I'll be working full-time from 30th June but it's not going to be a massive hassle so I can do it whenever you're ready

Would it be feasable to build a PC within that budget to be capable of playing games like Oblivion comfortably?

and how much would you charge to built it anyway??

yeah it is poss man, for sure, might not be able to have the graphics on FULL everything, but it would definately handle that

also it depends if you want a monitor with it, cos thats another £100 at least