£1000ish to spend...what to do.

[oliverp]

Hi all, it's my first post here so be gentle...

I want to spend about £1000 ish on a new system and I've been thinking through my options. In short I want to neaten up my desk and make it look nicer because at the minute I've got a laptop docking and a 23" Samsung LCD tv, and it looks a bit mish mash.

My original idea was to get a reasonable high spec machine for hopefully about £600 (I was hoping for at least a quad core intel with 6-8gb of RAM...that's about all I'd decided) and then spend the rest of the money buying two screens/TVs, one for the TV (I will relocate my 23" Samsung) and one for the PC monitor. Because I wanted it to look reasonably neat I was going to use a LCD TV as a monitor so the two screens looked the same on the desk, sad I know! Is there any disadvantage to this?

Unfortunately though in my hunt for this system, it led to me going to John Lewis, seeing the iMacs and then spending about an hour in the Apple store looking at them in there.

I really like the look of the 27" iMac (2.66ghz Intel Core i5), which as I am a student I can get for £1407, which is a lot, but I'm thinking it might hold my attention a bit more than another PC because it's something totally new.

So my question really is...what would you recommend I do? Stick with PC (and what should I get if so?) or go to an iMac...and if so, which one? I can stretch my budget to about £1500 (gulp) if needs be.

Thanks!

 

[bigsharn]

Stay PC, If you can hold out for the mITX i5 board then that would be a very good option, granted you'll only have up to 4Gb of RAM but most people don't actually need that much, and it'll be nice and small and compact

As for the TV I use a 32" Sansumg TV and it was fine until a friend showed me his BenQ G24xxHD something (it's an old model I can't remember the number of), By all means use the TV you have for TV-ness, but you might want a good monitor as well, a 24" should see you right

If you can't hold out til the i5 mITX board then just go i5 mATX and get a case to suit, you can just about go i5 with £600 (but if you only spend £300 on the monitor you should have a nice fat £700 to play with)