£300 gaming PC for overclocking

[AHarvey]

Hi all,

Brother in law wants to buy a new PC, £300 budget and wants to overclock it as much as possible.

Needs everything apart from case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers.

He will be spending extra on case and cooling options.

Main purpose will be gaming and modding Half life

 

[Teaf]

Operating system needed?

 

[AHarvey]

No, he has XP to go on it.

 

[domthecondom]

£300, no more? well actully thats a nice budget PC to overclock, if he already has a few bits

 

[semi-pro waster]

Given what he already has and what he needs I think this might work, if the budget is vital then you could drop the CPU down to an E2180 as it won't affect overclocking much.

Intel Core 2 Duo E2200 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.20GHz (800FSB) - Retail £44.99
(£52.86) £44.99
(£52.86)
Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Intel P31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £39.99
(£46.99) £39.99
(£46.99)
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2 (OCZ2P800R22GK) £23.99
(£28.19) £23.99
(£28.19)
Corsair VX 450W ATX PSU (CMPSU-450VXUK) £39.99
(£46.99) £39.99
(£46.99)
PowerColor ATI Radeon HD 3850 Pro Extreme 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail £59.99
(£70.49) £59.99
(£70.49)
Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7200S 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
(£16.44) £13.99
(£16.44)
Samsung SpinPoint S 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD250HJ) £27.99
(£32.89) £27.99
(£32.89)
Sub Total : £250.93
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.95
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £45.65
Total : £306.53

 

[mitch212k]

Bearing in mind that board doesn't like being overclocked and having all 4 ram slots filled

 

[semi-pro waster]

Bearing in mind that board doesn't like being overclocked and having all 4 ram slots filled

Odd, that goes against what I've heard previously, the P31 DS3L is supposed to be great for a budget overclocking motherboard. Not sure on the 4 Ram slots but then again the budget doesn't allow for anything other than 2x1gb.

 

[pastymuncher]

Bearing in mind that board doesn't like being overclocked and having all 4 ram slots filled

That board does like to be overclocked. I have personally had a E2180 up to 3.6Ghz prime stable on one. It's a cracking board with loads of clocking options in the bios. Don't know about the ram bit as i used 2x 1Gb sticks. I also tried three different makes/speed of ram. They were, Corsair XMS2 PC2 5400 C4, XMS2 PC2 6400 C5 and Geil Ultra PC2 6400 C4. All were 2Gb kits (2x 1Gb).

The MSI P31 board does'nt like to be clocked. In fact it does'nt like much at all and is by far the worst board i have ever had the misfortune of using.