General gaming, 400£ budget help please

AssaTM

AssaTM

AssaTM

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Hey all, my uncle is looking to buy a £400 pc for his son including the monitor and he'll probably be using it for general gaming, doesnt need to be high intensive, extrme hardware or anything but just able to play some games would be nice, it may be a tight budget since he needs the monitor too, but any advice on good builds at that price would be greatly appreciated as i'm a little out of the loop at this moment in time so it'd help me greatly, and thank you for your time
 
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I'm going to ignore the word laptop... this is a good starting point, i'll let others tell you where to shave parts off (tehe :p )

Product Name Qty Price Line Total
BenQ G922HDL 18.5" Widescreen LED Monitor £89.99
(£76.59) £89.99
(£76.59)
AMD Athlon II X4 Quad Core 630 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £83.99
(£71.48) £83.99
(£71.48)
VTX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB GDDR5 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail £73.99
(£62.97) £73.99
(£62.97)
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-ES3 MA770 (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £64.99
(£55.31) £64.99
(£55.31)
Corsair Value Select 2GB (1x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Memory Module (VS2GB1333D3 G) £49.98
(£42.54) £49.98
(£42.54)
Corsair CX 400W ATX Power Supply (CMPSU-400CXUK) £39.99
(£34.03) £39.99
(£34.03)
Coolermaster Elite 330 Midi Tower Case - All Black £30.64
(£26.08) £30.64
(£26.08)
Pioneer DVR-S18L 22x DVD±RW SATA Labelflash ReWriter - Black (Retail) £20.99
(£17.86) £20.99
(£17.86)
Coolermaster Hyper TX3 CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/940/AM2/AM3/775/1156) £13.99
(£11.91) £13.99
(£11.91)
Sub Total : £398.77
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £13.25
VAT is being charged at 17.50% VAT : £72.10
Total : £484.12
 
Hahaha, we were discussing Laptop's before I made the thread, sorry, it's been a long day so had Laptops on the brain :p

And thank you for the suggestion, looks like a good start, that would be a nice pc
 
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your not going to get it much cheaper than what superewza has suggested unless you go for an x2 dual core instead of the quad, go for a socket am2 motherboard / ddr2 memory, use the stock cpu cooler instead of the coolermaster one and lower the gfx card down to a 4670 or similar.
do you need an operating system as well ?
 
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Nah just the base PC and the Monitor for now thank you, but yeh thats what I was worried about, I didnt want to suggest a prebuilt PC thats all
 
No £400 prebuilt will be suitable for gaming. There's a few quad core deals they're putting up now, don't be fooled. They use the hopeless Q8200.
 
you could squeeze it down to almost £400 making the changes i suggested and a custom built one would be much better for future upgrading than one bought from high street stores.
it's probably better to spend slightly more and go socket am3 and ddr3 though i would say.

so get this instead of the quad and save £37 - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-252-AM&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=803

and this instead of the 4770 and save £18 - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-184-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1274

and save £14 on the aftermarket cooler and your build would cost about £415 and would play most games at medium to high settings on that BenQ monitor.
 
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Yeh i'll let him know that, what kind of a price would I be looking at for a Socket AM3 PC with a Monitor then? and again thanks for the help and advice, it's greatly appreciated

edit: ahhh, that sounds quite nice though, that may be the way to go, thank you :)
 
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I'd say £500 for a 'good' gaming system with monitor. But it's worth noting that OCUK isn't really a good site for budget components, you could easily save on the motherboard and memory etc.
 
But you would recommend going for those components at least? the AM3 motherboard etc would offer upgradability in the future? :)
 
i would say what we have suggested between us would be the least you would get away with for a decent gaming pc from OCUK :)

and socket am3 would let you drop in a phenom x4 or similar at a later date with no worries, the corsair psu would handle something like a radeon 5770 with no problems and ddr3 ram will only come down in price i think where ddr2 will probably stay the same or go up so would cost more to increase to 4gb in the future.
 
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If you want 'upgradability' then you could wait for the 870 chipset, that should support Thuban. But by the time they felt that they needed something else it probably wouldn't be the best bet. It's damn near impossible to make a PC 'future proof'.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, they're definitely greatly appreciated :)

and what about this card? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-209-SP&tool=3

The extra Memory Size etc for barely a price increase, would the 400w PSU handle that ok or would that need to be upgraded for it? thank you for the help

edit: and we all also forgot about the hard drive haha, I didnt notice that until now
 
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for the extra £3 you might as well get that 1gb version, the corsair 400w psu would handle that fine.
i never noticed the lack of hard drive either :o, a samsung spinpoint f3 would be a good one to get as its pretty quick and reliable, the 320gb is about £36 and the 500gb £41.
 
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