£400 now, £600 a week later

Audigex

Audigex

Audigex

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Joined
3 Feb 2009
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2,245
I've got a rather strange request, but hopefully it can be done.

What I need is:
A working tower PC for £400 (easy enough)
That can be upgraded to a £600 gaming PC (also easy enough)
But without removing any of the £400 build's parts. (ah, tricky)
And I want the £600 PC to be based basically off this £650 rig, so I need to bring the price down.

idea1eq1.jpg


My first thoughts:
£12 can go, this won't be ordered until my free shipping comes through.
£30 from the fans, the stock will do for now

Is there a decent replacement for the P5Q with onboard graphics? As long as it does the job for getting into windows, I can take £100 out straight off for the GPU.

So basically, what would you change on this build to get it down to under the £600 mark, delivered... and is it possible to get it working for £400 then add more later?

I'd prefer 4gb in a 2x2GB, but if it makes a significant difference I can probably go with 4x1.
EDIT: Holy hell, that RAM's jumped 30% in a couple of weeks. Was wondering why it'd gone from £640 to £660.

I really like the features on the Asus board, but it's not 100% required... and I can probably do without crossfire.

No monitor/OS required. No speakers/keyboard/mouse etc.

Anyone up to the challenge?
 
You could start by loosing the fans & working with stock. If noisy, free/cheaper ways to reduce the speed = noise.

PSU is OTT. This will do for even a HD 4850.

A tight budget is a good opportunity to overclock. Go for a Intel E5000-series chip & a decent cooler (this) instead.

To conclude... Antec 300 ;)
 
Audigex said:
£12 can go, this won't be ordered until my free shipping comes through.
Click to expand...

i suggest you pay for shipping, with the direction the pound is going, your £400 is going to cost £600 by the time you order if you wait for your free shipping
 
Get a 2nd hand cpu instead, I just bought an E8500/3.2 ghz for 120€ 2nd hand, 150 quid for an E8400 is taking the **** tbh. Can't stretch to a HD4850 btw ?

Also overkill motherboard imo, what's the point in spending so much on a mainboard that will be outdated very soon anyway, I'd grab a 2nd hand P35 or 965p board.

PSU very overkill for that spec, get a 500w psu. I have a far more requiring pc and a 3 year old 550w akasa psu is fine.
Imo just get a pc6400 cas 4 kit, ram speed is overrated, anything above 1:1 with the fsb goes to waste in my experience.
Get a cheap 15 quid case, or well, save on the case. I can understand that if you like working with your pc that a cheap case can be annoying due to space and or sharp bits, but if you're on a budget spending 50 quid on a case is WAY OTT imo, get a 15 quid case, it's only a metal box that holds things together.

Save on the fans too, I mean 24 quid on 3 fans? Come on, buy a few 1 quid ones or used ones instead. Or pull them out of an old pc.

Case cooling is overrated imo, with 1 inhale and 1 exhaust fan, no matter what fan size, it's more than enough for a mere dual core pc with a medicore card.


People forget that overclocking is there to save money, if you have to spend like 2x the ammount than usual then it negates the effect surely?

I got my P5B deluxe for 20 euros, a Q6700 for 125 euros, and 6gb of ram 66€ (2x1gb and 2x2gb all ddr800 4-4-4-12), an AC freezer 7 pro for 15€ a cheap case for 10 euros and happily run all that with no cooling problems or any other trash at 3.2ghz with low temps... I regret buying my gpu for so much, payed 360 euros for it as I bought it in the first week of release, if I could redo it I'd just have bought a 7800GT used back then and wait till the 8800gt's dropped in price.
 
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Its gonna be 2-3 months til your shipping comes free, by that time a totally different spec can prob be recomended, I also reckon youd be better just waiting the week and spending the 600 in one go
Alternately if you can spend now the new prebuilt machine looks great value, and is at 600 notes, here
 
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The Deuce said:
how would you test it, any different from how they done it?
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Well look at how they approached it. They never opened up the power supply so we have no idea what quality of components have been used inside, which in this model's case have been shown to be sup-par by other sites. They put together some random system and don't think to mention what wattage it draws, yet they expect us to accept that because the power supply performs fine with it that it will work fine throughout the range it is rated for. They also just accept the efficiency numbers given to them by OCZ instead of testing them. Guys like JonnyGURU have been preaching for ages about how to test PSUs properly so there's no excuse really.
 
Nullvoid said:
Well look at how they approached it. They never opened up the power supply so we have no idea what quality of components have been used inside, which in this model's case have been shown to be sup-par by other sites. They put together some random system and don't think to mention what wattage it draws, yet they expect us to accept that because the power supply performs fine with it that it will work fine throughout the range it is rated for. They also just accept the efficiency numbers given to them by OCZ instead of testing them. Guys like JonnyGURU have been preaching for ages about how to test PSUs properly so there's no excuse really.
Click to expand...

agreed ;)
 
The Deuce said:
it matters because it's inaccurate ;)
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It's not inaccurate at all. OCZ make poor quality psu's and that's a fact. The one i posted a link to is the next one up in the range. They are all made on the same line so will all be just as bad.

If you want to recommend a poor psu then that's up to you. Loads of other's on here feel the same way as i do about the OCZ's. Yes i have had a OCZ psu. It blew up after only 10 days of use!!
 
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