Help me buy a PC?

[northwind]

I'm in the process of looking for a new desktop PC, since it's inconvenient stokign the boiler on the old one every time I want to send an email. But I'm a bit baffled by science.

Quite tempted to go with one of Dell's refurbished units- these are usualyl warranty returns or misspecced machines that they've fixed and stuck up for sale at discounted prices. I've got an absolute ceiling of £750, but that doesn't need to cover network card or router, and doesn't really need to cover screen or speakers (though screen might be nice, this one's ot bad but it's not great.

Soooo.

First of all, processors. P1 vs P4? Is it worth spending mondey to go up from 3gb to 3.2 or 3.4?

Next, RAM- I figure there's no point cutting corners here, looking at 1gb (my first PC- from which some parts are still in use, like this keyboard and the sound card, was a P75 with 8mb of RAM...)

Where I'm really lost is graphics cards. This is an internet/work/gaming one. I don't play first person shooters much, but I do love strategy and RTS games, and since the 3D bug bit those all like to abuse graphics cards. SO it doesn't have to be uber, but it does have to be pretty good.

A lot of the Dells come with the ATI Radeon X600 256MB HyperMemory... Now, I'm assuming that'll be better than my 4mb Xpert@Work But is it actually good? Some come with the 256MB nVidia Ge Force 6800, but I think they're now a little old hat? I checked some recommended specs and I was seeing 7200s show up...

Command me, oh computing lords! And remember, Northwind is good with bikes, but not much god at all with PCs, so I'm not looking for a flatpack here

i've got a 3.0 P4 and an ATI Radeon 9700 pro, it was top of the range about 2 years ago when i bought it, and it still runs things like Half Life 2 brilliantly at 1280x1024 res.

i think for what you want, get the cheapest processor (3.0 Ghz), the most amount of RAM (1GB at least) and the best graphics card you can possibly get (FYI the x600 is worse than my 2 year old 9700 Pro) - the processor is pretty much irrelevant for office/work apps like Office as anything will run fast, but as you say a lot of games require a hefty amount of 3D processing without making too much of a demand on the CPU as it's all offloaded onto the graphics card!

if that makes sense - i'd look for a system like:

P4 3.0
1 GB RAM
120 GB SATA hard disk
ATI Radeon X800 or GEForce 7200 or higher
17-19 inch TFT with a low response time (critical for gaming)

the rest is academic (CD/DVD, keyboard, mouse, etc)

Alright Northy...

I bought a new refurbished Toshiba laptop. Very happy with it I have to say. (Miss-speced)

Network cards are normally already on the mother board. Nothing to really worry about.
Router... why do you need a router? You have a few machines there or something? We use Linksys ones, and they are fine.

Em.
1 gig Ram is fine probably. Find out how many slots the mother board has, and how big the DIMMs are. It can be nice to have a couple of slots spare unless you are really sure about you memory requirements. (I need 12gigs for a lot of the things I do... )

Graphics card... havnt got much of a clue, the one you mentioned seems nice enough though.

See if you can get a CPU with 800Mhz Front Side bus. And, then buy the CPU at the inflection point on the price/performance curve. Like, you know, at a point you start paying disproportionately more.

One of the most important things in my opinion is a nice 17" LCD monitor.
I spec'd out a machine, OptiPlex GX620 Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 521 with HT (2.8GHz, 1M, 800MHz FSB), MS Gimpdows OS, 1 Gig RAM, with slots available, decent looking graphics card, with a 17" ultrasharp flat panel for just over $1000. 750 St should buy you this with change...

What Gnan said is pretty good, go for a low level processor like a 3.0GHZ as you can always overclock it if your feeling daring. They easily go up to 3.4/3.5

Def. get a good graphics card and healthy wad of Memory, also alot of good motherboards well just alot of motherboards come with onboard sound (pretty decent stuff at that) and built in networking and more besides that. Theres various makes to consider such as ASUS or MSI, just a registered make.

Could also be worth upgrading mouse and keyboard with a nice logitech combo deal.

Check out overclockers.co.uk for some good makes and writeups, though they may not be the cheapest they offer good stuff and good prices. Scan also has some good deals on today only offers

Make your own, it's not that difficult. You won't save anything, but it will allow you to have exactly the components you want.


.

I'd go with Jonboy on that, easy to build your own... get exactly what you want in there.. plus instead of paying for an extended warranty, you will probably find that the components are warrantied for 3 to 5 years anyway!

I would suggest going AMD... they have the fastest stuff around at the moment, plus they are mostly 64bit chips now, so at least there will be a bit of future proofing in there as well... plus as a side not, dont beleive the Intel v AMD stuff.. Intel spend a fortune trying to down everything AMD do.. even though AMD stuff usualy outperform Intel

[fizzwheel]

Depends.

Making your own has the benefit that you can get exactly what you want. Northwind I dont know what your PC experience is like. It can be tricky doing this sometimes, especially if you have driver problems with individual components. It can be a git to sort out.

Personally if you dont want any hassle then by a prebuilt machine. Dell as you probably have already realised have some stonking deals on their website. I think with your budget you'd be able to get a good spec machine.

Personally I would go for the highest CPU you can get. Definatley a P4 if you can stretch to 3.4ghz then go for that, but dont sacrifice the amount of ram you get, 1gb like you have suggested is a good start, but if you can afford to buy more then do so.

As for AMD Vs Intel, if you're planning on playing alot of games on your PC then definately thinkg about an AMD chip.

HTH

I built my PC specificaly for games its now out of date ... still doesnt hide the fact I spent £300 on my graphics card alone, and £300 for RAM as well
Dont think I will be doing that anymore!

Now with everyone obviously baffling you with technical jargon, on my post there will be a dummies spin

To build your own pc now is a bad option imo, with companies building thier own pc's for a very little amount of money, the only way you wouldnt lose money is if you had access to a trade account of some kind.

I recently priced up the spec of computer i wanted, after searching the web and high st for a month or so, i found on average i would make a loss of £210!

A nice all round system for £700 (according to a recent mag) is the panrix magnum(iq 3700 Not 3500) , it has:

2.21ghz athlon 64 3700+
1gb of ram (as recommended by everyone here)
A nice geforce 6600GT graphics card ( i dont know whether you a gamer but its a nice card to have)

So that provides a very nice basis to a good all round system, but it also has all the additional components that adds to the entire package:

19" flatscreen TFT
5.1 Surround sound speakers
Firewire ports for your camcorder
250GB hard disk drive (more than you should ever need)
Mouse keyboard etc etc all included in the box.

Should be a very nice PC for a good few years for non gamers etc, and has plenty of space within the case for upgrades and additional components.



http://www.panrix.co.uk/Pages/produc...SystemID=81000

[northwind]

Right, thanks folks: from the top

First a new question. Jp's link has a GForce 6600GT 128 in it. Now, I've ben advised to get a card with 256Mb (which frankly blows my mind, that's 32 times more than my whole PC had not so very long ago!) But from what i can fin, this seems to be a better card than many with 256mb. So, which way to jump, more ram or more card? Or just don't worry about it?

Gnan- thanks for that, I'll consider pretty much all the graphics cards in the Dell refurbs to be pretty much disposable then. They're still cheap enough to cover a pretty good seperate card.

philipMac, I don't need a router, I already have one... We used to have 3 PCs here running off it, now there'll probably just be the one, but since it's all set up and we don't have any hardwiring to the room the PC's going it, we're going to carry on with the horrible Belkin wireless for the moment. Probably putting a hard conneciton upstairs at some point, but not just now- got some rebuilding to do first.

Seems like most of the processors I've looked at- all the Dell P4s anyway- have 800mhz fsb. So that's good then?

The monitor I have is a reasonably good, but old, Dell CRT 17". It'll support pretty much any resolution I care to throw at it, and has a fairly good picture, but it#s nothing too impressive. So I might try and put off screens til later, to help boost the main system.

Falc, thanks for the links.

Jonboy, if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd consider building on that had exactly what i want

Valleyboy, I'd be inclined to go with AMD myself from what I've read, but a lot of the prebuilt systems in my range come with Intel P4s- seems like Intel are winning that particular scrap

Fizz, I'm sure I could sort it, given time. i've never had to deal with the insides of a PC, having a brother ho's an electrical engineer and generlaly competent PC person- but I don't really want to be depending on him for my own machine. So I don't obect to figuring it out, but it seems like from a purely economic point of view, some of the pre-built systems are simply a better deal. Shopping around, I can't match the spec of the Dell Dimensions in the factory store even before taking into account things like cables, keyboards, meeses, psus, cases even.

Valleyboy, definately won't be spending £300 for the bleeding edge... I've been ding htis long enough to remember how fast the current must have becomes a paperweight. Luckily I'm not really desperate to have a top line system, I'm happy to have a second line, then upgrade it as and when bits fall off the bottom of the scale.


Jp, good link!