£700 system spec

[Adam_151]

We are looking to replace the 'family' computer in a couple of months or so, budget is £700 but thats probably slightly stretchable

It needs to be a resaonable games machine, not worried about tip top performance, but should be upto running modern games reasonably smoothly, other than games, its only going to be used for web browsing, and office kinda stuff, so games is the only really big demand

We want a TFT monitor (of a decent brand) either 17" or 19"
also want a legal copy of XP pro (whether that is normal or x64 depends on spec, I guess )
I guess we are looking for at least a gig of memory

Other than that, its pretty much undecided as of yet, so I'm be grateful if people could come up with ideas of specs, I'm open to both intel and AMD systems, but I might be leaning slighly towards intel because we haven't had an intel system since original pentiums (though I guess thats a pretty silly reason )

I'm personally very much out of touch with whats available these days, last time I put together a system the 9800 was the graphics card of choice, and I have no idea whats available these days in graphics at all

Many thanks

Adam

 

[Adam_151]

Thanks for your input so far

As this isn't something thats happening straight away, yes we will be waiting for conroe to arrive by default, I'm just trying to get a rough idea atm, whether or not conroe will be the one to go for, etc etc.

Also even though its dual core 1.86 gig seems slow , it doesn't seem to have any other numbers, like for example AMD advertise chips at 3600+/3800+/etc, but they are really about 2.4ghz, but there is nothing like that on the intel :s. A mate did say something about intel having re-designed it so it runs better and doesn't need to be as fast? if this is the case do they run cooler than the prescott chips?

Oh and I specified XP pro because one day (yeah... ) I intend to have some kind of linux samba server to act as a domain server and have roaming profiles, etc, and as far as I'm aware xp home can't be set up to join a domain... yes I know I'm too much of a geek and a workgroup network would be fine, but you know what its like