Looking to make a uber budget games pc, advice?

[jamesdean]

Hello.

I am looking to make a new PC; I need Motherboard, memory, CPU, Case, Hard Drive and graphics card.

Money is an issue but I am not too tightly bound IE if spending £10 more on a certain component will improve performance or reliability substantially I will take it.

Basically I want a good solid and fast system, I won’t be over clocking or messing about I was a system that will work well. So what advice, can you give?

Basically what are the things that are a must have, IE graphics card chipsets, motherboard chipsets. And so forth, I am in the UK if that affects anything. Not looked for ages so I thought I would ask the voices of knowledge instead of wasting my time getting it wrong.

 

[(Shovel)]

What's the budget?

A standard nForce2 or KT400 motherboard will do you good since you'll get onboard LAN and onboard sound, saving around £90.

Athlon XP chips come in some many flavours now that there is certainly going to be one in budget.

There are low end Radeon cards for £100, or Geforce 4 Ti4200 cards for around the same.

Hard disk drives - there are other threads on this - but an 80 GB Western Digital "Special Edition" will get you back around £70, you can do a lot cheaper if you want.

RAM is also cheap right now. Two sticks of 256MB DDR will cost around £50. As for cases: Anything from £30+ - it depends what you have. The very good Chieftec Dragon cases are available for around £60 on Komplett, or with front mounted USB ports (always nice) for £80. You can get far less nice cases for much less though.

Overall, now is a good time for buying a cheap PC.

 

[(Shovel)]

Also: Are you replacing an old system, or is this going to stand alone?

This is important, since we need to know whether this budget (some figures would be useful) has to cater for a monitor or not. The different is massive.

 

[jamesdean]

no the moniter speakers, keyboard mouse, etc and sound card are coming from my old pc. And the network card I use to connect to the net via my ntl box as well, got all that. Just want new case to put new motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics card and hard drive in and then plug the rest in from my old pc.

and I am looking for in the range of £400 - £600 ? allthough like I said I am fairly flexible but I am looking for a good value machine. IE a good price - performance ratio if you know what I mean, I am not looking to overclock either but I want a very fast solid machine. Reliable. Not fast by the overclocker computer ppls standard but fasts by todays standard

 

[(Shovel)]

OK, that sounds pretty reasonable.

One thing to bear in mind is that many current motherboards are following the trend of including sound and LAN, so you might just have to take them - unless either of your existing parts are top of the range, in which case you can disable them in the BIOS.

At £600 tops this will be dead easy.

In fact, to start you off, I'm going to paste in the initial spec of my borther's new PC:

Case	Chieftec	Dragon Medium Tower + USB DX-01B-D-U	£81.05	Komplett
CPU	AMD	Athlon XP 2800+ Barton	£148.40	Komplett
Fan	Termaltake	Silent Volcano 9+ SoA XP 2800+                                	£11.00	Dabs
Motherboard	Asus	A7N8X Delux	£103.53	Komplett
Memory 		2x 256MB 184Pin DIMM PC2700 DDR RAM Non-Parity	£52.00	Dabs
Hard Drive		Western Digital Caviar 80GB IDE 7200RPM Special Edition 8MB cache WD800JB	£73.80	Komplett
Graphics card	Winfast	GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x 64MB DDR               	£98.50	Dabs

 

[(Shovel)]

That is a bit scrappy, but it might help you out to start with.

 

[leggy]

Thermaltake are noisy bastards despite saying "quiet"

Zalman babeh

 

[Jonty]

(Shovel)'s advice is very sound (as usual ).

If you're looking for something a little smaller, then a Shuttle system may be for you.



A sample system may be as follows:

Product							Price

Shuttle SN41G2B nForce2 Barebones System (Black)	£203.35
TwinMOS 256MB DDR PC2700				£48.00 (£24.00 x 2)
Western Digital Caviar 40GB Special Edition 8MB Cache	£48.50
Samsung SD-616QBB 16x48x DVD-ROM (Black)		£28.95
Connect3D ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB DDR			£117.50
AMD Athlon "Thoroughbred" XP 2600+ 333FSB		£93.00

					Subtotal	£539.30   
					VAT		£94.39   
					Total		£633.69

I know this comes in way over budget, but it should be noted how good the nForce2 motherboard's components are. This means you could then sell your old components such as your soundcard and network card etc. and put the money towards such a system.

Kind Regards

Jonty

P.S. These are all priced from one store, and hence aren't necessarily the cheapest.

 

[Wilier]

Originally posted by leggy
Thermaltake are noisy bastards despite saying "quiet"

Zalman babeh

Its ok though, 'cos he recommended a Termaltake fan.

 

[jamesdean]

thanks for your help I have decided to go for

Asus A7N8X Deluxe nForce2 - £100
CPU - AMD *Retail* Athlon XP 2600+ *333 FSB* (2.08 GHz) - £90
Memory - 512MB PC3200 Non-parity - £60 X2
Case - £70
Hard Drive - £100 Western Digital 8mb cache 8.2 ms 7200 rpm 120gb - £100
Graphics Card - http://www.ati.com/products/pc/radeon9500pro/ - £150

= £630 and in my opinion of researching its definatelly the best you can get bearing in mind the price - performace ratio, factoring in I want reliablity and wont be overclocking, thanks all !

 

[Clowneh!]

nice, i wish i had money