Advice

millermilla

millermilla

millermilla

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Joined
23 Dec 2014
Posts
243
Location
Burgess Hill, West Sussex
Hi,

Sorry to be asking questions with my first post but there seems to be lots of great advice on here.

I have been watching with interest the release of Elite Dangerous and I would love something to play it on. I also used to like flight siming. My current laptop is an i3-2310M with no dedicated GPU so not up to the job.

Having thought long and hard I think I would prefer to stick with a laptop even though I mainly use my laptop like a desktop.

My budget is around £600 and looking around I see I can probably get an i5 with a GT840M GPU and 8GB of RAM. Any idea what Elite would run like on this sort of setup and any pointers of what setup to buy.

Finally would I get a much better desktop setup for £600 compared to a laptop?


Thanks in advance
 
Hi and welcome,

I cant help with finding a laptop as I dont pay much attention to them.

But I can spec you a pc for £600 certainly.

What parts are you looking for? tower/OS/keyboard/monitor etc??
 
Hello & welcome to the forum :)

I have not kept up with the latest range of laptop graphics but I still believe that for £600 the desktop will be more superior and have a easier upgrade path.

If you did go with a desktop would you need a monitor and Operating system?
 
Hi, yes I would need a Tower, OS and Monitor. I wouldn't mind getting a usable setup to start with knowing I could upgrade GPU, Monitor or RAM at a later date. Not sure if I could handle a full build, I've changed GPU's, RAM, Drives etc. in the past but never done a build from scratch.
 
I was asked just a week ago to spec a laptop for gaming for close to that amount. Looked at several sites, nothing I saw was on a par with what you could get with a PC. Dual core i5M and 850M was best I saw. Also, I see people regretting buying budget laptops for gaming quite often, so have a good think before buying. Ideally you'd want to spend £700+ for a gaming laptop, whereas you could have the same performance or better with a £600 PC, which would also be more upgradable.
 
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YOUR BASKET
1 x AOC E2460SH 24" Widescreen 1ms Gaming LED Monitor - Black £113.99
1 x MSI AMD ATI Radeon 7950 BE 3072MB PCI-Express Graphics Card **REFURB 90 DAY WARRANTY** (R7950-3GD5 BE) £85.99
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-6 Six Core 6300 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £79.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-Bit DVD - OEM (WN7-00614) £77.99
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 550W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £59.99
1 x Avexir Core Red Series 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (AVD3U16001104G-2IR) - Red Light £59.99
1 x Gigabyte 970A-DS3P AMD 970A (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £50.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD £43.99
1 x Xigmatek Mach Midi-Tower Black £23.99
1 x Asus 24x DVD±RW DRW-24F1ST SATA ReWriter - Black (Retail) £13.99
Total : £632.32 (includes shipping : £17.85).




Theres something to start with.
 
Firstly many thanks for your replies

I've been looking round and doing some research and although I first said I would prefer a laptop from looking at what I can build for the same cost it's a no brainer to go desktop.

I found some decent ready built machines but I'm really keen to build my own, just a little worried I will get something wrong. I have no problem at all with the physical assembly, I just worry about setting everything up correctly like RAM and HDD configurations.

Looking into the spec above it looks really great. I just have a few questions and possible changes.

1 x MSI AMD ATI Radeon 7950 BE 3072MB PCI-Express Graphics Card **REFURB 90 DAY WARRANTY** (R7950-3GD5 BE) £85.99

The performance of the card looks amazing for the price but what exactly does refurb mean?

I have just dug out of the loft 2 X Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 320GB Hard drives from my old system P/N 9BJ14G-505. Assuming these are O.K as storage drives is it worth re-configuring with an SDD and how would all these drives work together?

I know I will get the bug and will be looking at upgrades in 6 - 12 months time so what is the system above going to be like for upgrades?

Lastly I have always been into Nvidia / Intel. What would a similar performance system look like cost wise?
 
These are repaired cards from the manufacturer rather brand new variants.

The drives would be ok, but you can configure them in RAID 0 which combines them as one drive or keep them separate, a SSD will also be good.

Is your budget still around £600?
 
YOUR BASKET
1 x AOC E2460SH 24" Widescreen 1ms Gaming LED Monitor - Black £113.99
1 x MSI AMD ATI Radeon 7950 BE 3072MB PCI-Express Graphics Card **REFURB 90 DAY WARRANTY** (R7950-3GD5 BE) £89.99
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-6 Six Core 6300 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £79.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-Bit DVD - OEM (WN7-00614) £77.99
1 x Gigabyte 970A-UD3P AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £71.99
1 x TeamGroup Vulcan RED 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit (TLRED38G2400HC11CDC01) £59.99
1 x Crucial MX100 128GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter (CT128MX100SSD1) £54.98
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 550W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £49.99
1 x Xigmatek Mach Midi-Tower Black £19.99
1 x Raijintek Themis Direct Contact CPU Cooler £19.99
1 x Asus 24x DVD±RW DRW-24F1ST SATA ReWriter - Black (Retail) £18.95
Total : £679.26 (includes shipping : £17.85).




Use SFCASE and you should get free shipping saving £17 ~
 
Just to let you know I recently bought one of the 7950 refurb cards (the twin frozr) and the only thing different to new on mine is a slight scratching on the cover so nothing terrible. Other than that it's fine so don't worry about the cards condition. For a budget like yours I couldn't recommend a better card :)
 
RJCs spec is darn good. The case is the only weak thing but for £20 you won't get much better. Overall the spec looks solid. SFCASE is valid until the 31st so be quick.
 
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