What ever you buy will always be out of date in about 6 months but that doesnt mean that it wont still be up to doing what you want most modern games can quite happily be played on machines from a few years ago.

I have built my own PC's from about 1995 onwards. I generally upgrade bits now and then and go for a major rebuild every few years. AS for the chip and from what you have said you want it for it doesnt really matter whether you go for an AMD or Intel.

I personally would never buy from Dell or PCworld or the like as you generally pay over the odds for what I personally consider to be parts I would never buy in first place.

my favourite web site is Overclockers.co.uk I get alot of stuff from there and they have a wide range of parts. they also do bundles (chip, Motherboard and Memory) guranteed to work together so for the less experienced builder it can add comfort to the fact you know they will work.

If you are going to build a PC I would defintely advice that you upgrade your case and PSU at the same time modern PCs generally need more juice and an old power supply wont be upto it. They have also recently changed the pin configuration of the power plug on new boards, so your old one may not be compatible anyway.

My advice would be go for it and build it yourself. Its a bit like working on your bike . Its a bit daunting when you first start but youll soon be well into it and gaining knowledge all the time and you will wonder why you ever worried about in the first place.


Hope this helps

I found, when I got this one, that nobody else could come close to matching Dell on price. This PC including 19" screen, 2.8ghz Pentium D (was a while ago, before Core 2 Duo came along), 1gb of ram, mince graphics card and all the usual trimmings, was £600. I thought I'd managed to beat that from someone else, till I found it was without a screen.

Not saying they're brilliant, in fact they're definately not, but in the lower price ranges they're hard to top. The factory store can have some brilliant deals too. Wouldn't buy one of their expensive ones though.

Where it gets interesting is when the salesmen start competing amongst themselves :) I was quoted £700 for mine. Phoned up and got the same price "I'll think about it" "OK, we'll do it for £650" "I'll think about it" "OK, here is my name and phone number and a reference, call me back and I'll give you it for £625 but I can't go lower" "OK." Then, 2 days later, phoned back, got a different guy "I'll give you it for £650" "I've alreayd been offered £625, give me £600 and we have a deal" "OK". Just ridiculous really, but quite fun.

ok since ive recently built my new one ill tell you what i have and how much it cost, i think it should be capable of lastest ames for a few years yet,

i have a
XFX GeForce 6800XT 512MB DDR3 PCIE Dual DVI TV £113.57 shipped
1 gb ram (prob upgrade it to 2g in future) £69.99
dvd writer £27.69
Intel Pentium D 940 Socket 775 3.2GHz 2x2MB FSB800 £153.91
MSI S775 Intel 945G ATX A L board 98.46
650 watt psu £35 quid
zalman cpu cooler 35 quid
250 gig sata hard drive (bout 50 quid ish)

thats about 580 quid ish, and to me thats a decent spec at a decent price, i got a few other bits an bobs like a card reader (10er) but i got that from my old pc,

and then whatever case you choose,

You can get an E6400 conroe for about the same as that 945 was now... And the graphics card, 7600GTs are ridiculously cheap from Overclockers- the BFG vanilla one is £85! That's with standard speeds, but they overclock well with the stock coolers. Fantastic value.

It sort of goes without saying that no matter what you get, you can get a faster one cheaper tomorrow. The trick is to never buy a bleeding edge PC- if you do, by tomorrow it'll be an expensive second rater. If you buy second rate, tomorrow it's still second rate but cheap :)

Hmm. If you're interested, I should have a Dell case, PSU and motherboard (fit to take any Pentium D, don't know if it'll run a Conroe) going spare fairly soon...

Cheers for all the help people. :)

Hadn't really thought about trying to build my own, as someone mentioned it is a little daunting. Most of the words and specifications that were described there went well over my head! I've been having a read round last night and I think i'm learning! Maybe I will have a go at that! :?

If you are building a PC you need to install your own OS and software. Legal copies are very expensive.

Forget PC's buy an Apple and revel in unparallelled reliability and mind blowing processor speed. :lol:

Windows XP Pro OEM version about £90 shipped. Not Expensive.

It is when it takes up 1/6 of your budget...

xlewdx, "mind blowing processor speed", you'd mean "Uses the same processor as everything else", right? :)

Almost Northy.....the difference is that Apple uses it effectively. :D