Build Me A Pc - I Know Nothing

[Mr Motivator]

That has to be the most stupid thing ive ever heard, put it on the floor, with the laptop power supply? ADSL modems are tiny  :turned:

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Well it doesn't matter now does it?

Does anybody know of a good UK PC forum?

[Tomm]

Does anybody know of a good UK PC forum?

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forums.bit-tech.net :turned:

As for the case, it looks OK. The power supply is only 350W and probably isn't up to much, although you'll more than likely be ok with the kind of spec you are aiming for, just don't go overclocking or sticking a big f**k off GFX card in there (Y)

[Spikenipple]

The TF watermark is over the price, but it's £236.91 for a full system.

While we're on the subject, i've recently picked up a semi-decent mobo, processor, ram and psu you could have off of me for a price below your budget, i've got a case for it all to go in and a spare 52x cd-rom, but the only thing i don't have spare is a hard drive.

Any good to you?

Edit: My motherboard etc also comes with a 3-port firewire card that fits into the ACR slot on the mobo. My motherboard has built-in graphics by the way. Edited July 4, 2005 by Spikenipple

[tank_rider]

spikenipples spec is pretty good, nice and balanced, i would spend the extra £5 and go for a better cooler, something like an akasa one, aim for one that can do at least an athlon xp 3200+ speed, then you will never have any temp problems.

i had one of these cooling my overclocked athlon xp barton 2600+ and it did the job admirably, i only replaced it as i wanted to get extreme on the overclocking (Y) It may also be worth making the jump to the athlon xp 3000+ as it has the barton core which has extra L2 cache making it perform quite a bit better than the sempron, although it will push you nearer the £250 mark.

If you want to investigate going down the Dell route, give them a call and get them to give you a quote for just the tower, without the monitor, keyboard, mouse or speakers, they may not cost much but it should bring the price down a bit.

[Tomm]

You should definitely get an Athlon over a Sempron any day. Barton or Thoroughbred core, both will be way ahead of the Sempron. I have no idea how much the AthlonXPs go for these days (if you can even still get them :D), but it's probably worth it over the Sempron :o

To put a bit of balance on it, a Sempron 2600+ will be about as fast as a AthlonXp 2000+ or something along those lines. Not sure on an exact figure, and it'll vary depending on what you're doing, but you should get an Athlon (Y)

[tank_rider]

Heres what i recommend, it will give you a balanced and pretty powerful system with enough memory and storage to be able to do pretty much anything you want to. It should also run all the latest games on low resolution and detail settings and pretty much any older game on almost max settings.

It is a little over you budget and you would need to factor in the price of a case and PSU, although if you get stuck for a psu you can have my old one for a fiver + p&p. You could go for a cheaper mobo if needs be, something like this, which is still good quality (my experiences with pcchips mobos isnt great) but saves a few quid for only a slight drop in onboard sound performance (the Abit NF7 has particularly good quality onboard sound rivaling some of the cheap sound cards costing £20 or more, mine sounds a lot better than my creative soundblaster live 5.1 card i used with my old mobo).

I went with the seagate drive as they have pretty much the best reputation at the moment for hard drives, the kingston RAM should run at CL2.5 at the 333fsb that processor runs at and will still work if you ever want to overclock or move to a 400fsb processor. The fully fledged radeon 9550 (rather than the se version which only has a 64bit memory interface and hense is a fair bit slower) should perform better than the nvidia fx5500 by some margin, and should be overclockable to nion 9600 clock speeds on the core, if not the memory too. Finally samsung make the quietist cd/dvd drives on the market and have good reliability and design, that one is dual layer meaning you can use the larger capacity (9GB compared to 4.7GB) discs should you want too, it can still write the lower capacity ones too though.

The thing with building up your own system is that you don't get any software with it, and so either have to factor that into the price, or use dodgy copies. Buying from dell youll obviously get a proper copy of windows, but not much else, as you would probably want full office rather than try to struggle with crappy works.