Which of these PCs should I choose?

Looking at buying a decent PC that's capable of doing most things with relative ease including playing the latest games with relatively high settings.

Play.com seem to do the cheapest PCs which look to have decent spec, but they don't include an OS. My budget is £400 max, including the price of Windows 7. Below are some of the PCs

Choice 1

Choice 2

Choice 3

Now I know the Graphics Cards on these aren't great, that's something I can easily upgrade in the future. What I'm more interested in is how good the CPU and Motherboard is as in how future proof would you say it is and which out of those is the better one to go for.

The Intel CPU PC is more expensive, has a lower CPU frequency and half the RAM so I'm more inclined to go with one of the AMDs. Although I'm not to sure what the difference is between the two AMD CPUs.

Thanks

Found another for just under £300, looks to be the same except for the Graphics Card, which I will be upgrading when I have the money.

Choice 4

Looking to buy before the end of the week so just a quick reply as to which is best out of those would be great. Thanks again.

[Tom_the_great]

just buy an ipad

on a serious note i think i may go for choice 3, however i may be wrong kind of out the loop these days.

[L3nny]

I'd go for option 3.

Actually what I would do is get a PS3 to play games and a cheap laptop for comptering stuff.

[SoulKiss]

None of those are great - the Intel wins in that group, but its a last generation Sandybridge i5 and not the fastest one. The AMD Bulldozer chips were supposed to set the world alight - turns out that in some appplications they performed no better than the chips they were replacing.

10 Years ago I would have bought AMD, but they have lost the plot by a long way when it comes to CPU's. If you are going to upgrade to an Nvidia (my preference) gfx card in the future I would go Intel, AMD (Who make the Radeon cards, having bought ATI) are rumoured to not optimise their kit to work with non Radeon gfx - or at least to optimise for Radeon.

All will do what you want tho.

Could I put together better for cheaper - nope and it will do you just fine based on what yiou sayTBH.

A friend of mine bought from these guys: http://www.dinopc.com/shop/pc/-b-NEW...50-93p1364.htm

Thats a quad core intel i5, with a reasonable spec and windows for £425. Dropping th ebudget graphics gets you down to your budget, and means no wastage when you can afford to upgrade. Add a decent card and a SSD over the next year and you will end up with a very fast PC.

Can play around with different specs as well.

I have a PS3 that I use for gaming and a Laptop which I use for computer stuff. However my Laptop is, well old, and I thought instead of buying another laptop, why not just get a PC that is decent and relatively future proof or at least the main components. CPU, Motherboard.

My Laptop is a Sony Vaio with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz and 1Gb DDR2 RAM, 80Gb HDD and an Intel intergrated GPU which is running Vista.

I would like to be able to use my PC for Video Editing, nothing professional. Gaming, Internet Browsing, Graphic Design, Web Design hopefully and other general computer stuff.

So Choice 3 is what you would go for even with half the RAM and slower CPU? Can that be upgraded to 8Gb RAM like the rest and is a 3.1GHz i5 better than the 3.6GHz AMD?

Thanks.

Sorry for all the qestions but I want to make sure I buy the best I can within my budget and it's been years since I last looked at PC components so I'm a bit behind in what's better etc.

Thanks Markc123. I may tempt myself to go over my budget slightly with what you recommended. Looks good and already has Windows installed which is a bonus. Is the extra £13 for 1600MHz Corsair RAM worth the money? If not I may just buy it as it is. Thankyou for the recommendation.

[L3nny]

According to CPU Benchmark the Intel is faster

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_look...4100+Quad-Core

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_look...0P+%40+3.10GHz

The motherboard supports up to 16gb of RAM
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3774#sp

[DJ123]

I currently work in IT sales, so am aware of how cheap things really are. Personally speaking you're better off building a PC. You can get components so cheap it's unreal. The only 2 expensive things will be your OS and Processor. PM me if you want info on anything

So does that mean you're a good source of discount parts?