Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[supermop]

New PC of good spec = around £400-600. Some pre-built systems often come in at around £300 but use entry level components.

That graphics card is pretty decent. While AGP is old tech, the top-end AGP cards are really rather meaty. Would be a shame to ditch it, but since the industry is using PCI-e as the standard, you dont have much of a choice if you want your PC to remain upgradable with new bits.

The motherboard you got listed there is from a budget manufacturer. It uses a pretty poor chipset (VIA's lower spec chipset range really does suck), however, it looks like it was DESIGNED to be a stop-gap board for people making the jump to the newer technology, meaning you can use your old RAM & Graphics board, and stick new stuff in when you can afford. If you cant spare the money at the time of buying, get that and upgrade at a later date.

As for CPU's, the E6600 looks the best bang for buck. The Core2's beat AMD on the majority of benchmarks, but AMD still hold their own when it comes to gaming, so you may want to consider an Athlon X2 (the X2 5600 is a good buy). Then again, if you do go AMD, you'll need a different board.

[TheBoy]

New PC of good spec = around £400-600. Some pre-built systems often come in at around £300 but use entry level components.

That graphics card is pretty decent. While AGP is old tech, the top-end AGP cards are really rather meaty. Would be a shame to ditch it, but since the industry is using PCI-e as the standard, you dont have much of a choice if you want your PC to remain upgradable with new bits.

The motherboard you got listed there is from a budget manufacturer. It uses a pretty poor chipset (VIA's lower spec chipset range really does suck), however, it looks like it was DESIGNED to be a stop-gap board for people making the jump to the newer technology, meaning you can use your old RAM & Graphics board, and stick new stuff in when you can afford. If you cant spare the money at the time of buying, get that and upgrade at a later date.

As for CPU's, the E6600 looks the best bang for buck. The Core2's beat AMD on the majority of benchmarks, but AMD still hold their own when it comes to gaming, so you may want to consider an Athlon X2 (the X2 5600 is a good buy). Then again, if you do go AMD, you'll need a different board.

I agree with above, except the part about reusing AGP.  Putting on an AGP slot now does mean budget upgrade, which, alas, means compromising badly.

Ditch the card. It falls into the 'good budget' category.  You can still pick up ATI X600 for similar/less, which is possibly a better card anyway (Supermop can confirm if good for games).  That way, no compromise on the system board.

Don't forget other components you may need - some boards coming with nothing but usb - no ps/2, serial,parallel etc.  Memory will now be DDR2. HDD's now SATA2.

Advantage of self build is your choice of components.  Disadvantage is cost and noise. Self build for the last few years costs more than prebuilt, and tends to be quieter.

If noise is an issue, check out Dell's E520 and 9200 - these use the BTX chassis format, and are extremely quiet.

[Robin Hood]

And I was drooling over some 750GB HDDs

Is this machine to be used for video editing then?  

[TheBoy]

And I was drooling over some 750GB HDDs

Is this machine to be used for video editing then?  

In that case, 1Tb drives are under £250....

And further to what I said earlier about DVD writers, I see 18x DVD writers are under £13. Crazy price...

[Martin_1962]

Window shopping currently, but must be built by January due to O/S requirements (the O/S I would use for a replacement rather than update what I have and use current licence - OK Vista avoidance XP Pro is pretty good except for the file open dialogue).

However there is the room aspect, do we have room for 2 PCs?

Our current one will be 4 years old in November.

After repairing ours I am happier with self builds, and I am looking at medium quality bits.

[Martin_1962]

Branded DVD writers are cheap too.

A04 was nearly £200 the 111 was under £30

[TheBoy]

Window shopping currently, but must be built by January due to O/S requirements (the O/S I would use for a replacement rather than update what I have and use current licence - OK Vista avoidance XP Pro is pretty good except for the file open dialogue).

However there is the room aspect, do we have room for 2 PCs?

Our current one will be 4 years old in November.

After repairing ours I am happier with self builds, and I am looking at medium quality bits.

IIRC, you had an OEM licence? If so, NOT transferrable.

Its new yet, but don't be too harsh on Vista. Don't believe too much of the trash computer mags scare tactics of DRM. DRM existed in XP and W2K. Did it get in your way then? Unlikely.  The difference is DRM is implemented deeper into OS, should applications care to use it. This is far safer/robust than the apps doing it themselves - remember the Sony mess a year or 2 ago?


As said, though you are perfectly capable of building a PC, as is every single person on this forum^*, it may be cheaper to buy prebuilt, so don't rule it out. Unless you want to have the 'fun' of building (I have built far too many to call it 'fun' now).

^* Virtually anyone can build a PC so it works. Very few do it properly, including PC shops. How many make the HDD cables the correct length?  How many lace the troublesome power cables properly?  Specialist tools required for that.  And how many use ESP stuff? Virtually none - "Oh I touch the case occasionally" doesn't work

[supermop]

New PC of good spec = around £400-600. Some pre-built systems often come in at around £300 but use entry level components.

That graphics card is pretty decent. While AGP is old tech, the top-end AGP cards are really rather meaty. Would be a shame to ditch it, but since the industry is using PCI-e as the standard, you dont have much of a choice if you want your PC to remain upgradable with new bits.

The motherboard you got listed there is from a budget manufacturer. It uses a pretty poor chipset (VIA's lower spec chipset range really does suck), however, it looks like it was DESIGNED to be a stop-gap board for people making the jump to the newer technology, meaning you can use your old RAM & Graphics board, and stick new stuff in when you can afford. If you cant spare the money at the time of buying, get that and upgrade at a later date.

As for CPU's, the E6600 looks the best bang for buck. The Core2's beat AMD on the majority of benchmarks, but AMD still hold their own when it comes to gaming, so you may want to consider an Athlon X2 (the X2 5600 is a good buy). Then again, if you do go AMD, you'll need a different board.

I agree with above, except the part about reusing AGP.  Putting on an AGP slot now does mean budget upgrade, which, alas, means compromising badly.

Ditch the card. It falls into the 'good budget' category.  You can still pick up ATI X600 for similar/less, which is possibly a better card anyway (Supermop can confirm if good for games).  That way, no compromise on the system board.

Don't forget other components you may need - some boards coming with nothing but usb - no ps/2, serial,parallel etc.  Memory will now be DDR2. HDD's now SATA2.

Advantage of self build is your choice of components.  Disadvantage is cost and noise. Self build for the last few years costs more than prebuilt, and tends to be quieter.

If noise is an issue, check out Dell's E520 and 9200 - these use the BTX chassis format, and are extremely quiet.

I was getting at the fact the board hes linked to has DDR and DDR2 slots, as well as AGP and PCI-e graphics slots. Ideal for a stop-gap temporary board as it uses LGA775.

The nVidia 7600 is better than an x600 in virtually all areas (i used to have an x700 and the 7600 is even better than that). The GeForce 7x00 series is one generation above those ATI x00 series.