Am i expecting to much for £600 £650 quid?

[custard80]

I bought last week a dell 9150 from the outlet shop. It is as follows.
2.8ghz pentium 4 d 820,
2gb ddr2 533 ram
320 hd (2 160 Raid Striped)
16 dvd/rw
keyboard etc.
256mb x600 hypermemory g card.

All for £520 delivered.

I bought FEAR and due to the graphics card it looks like the first halflife as it has no graphical finery!!

So i've been looking around the site and thinking either a better graphics card or just to build from scratch. As a better graphics card is gonna cost upwards of £100. Other dells come with an nvidia 6800 but they do not say what version.

I'm totally confused with Amd and intel cpu ratings eg is a 3700+ better than a 3.0ghz p4?

At the moment the dell is being returned on tuesday so i need to decide if i can do better before then.

Any help appreciated.
I want to do my usual cad, photoshop, dvd burning and play some stellar games. I have a pioneer 106 burner in my current lowley duron 800mhz!

Cheers.

 

[custard80]

Thanks for the replies so far. Seems i'm doing the right thing in sending back the Dell. It's the first time iv'e bought a pre-built system as iv'e always built them before. Shouldn't be so lazy!

If i raised the budget to £700 what could i get?

I'm trying to build a machine that will cope with things today and in the future. This could be my last pc for a couple of years as we have a big expediture coming in the form of a baby.

I have keyboard, mouse, speakers, monitor , printer and scanner. So its just the base unit.
Would like to use my 120 gb ide drive in it somewhere but only for additional storage for recording t.v. from my usb DTV stick. Could this be piggy backed of the dvd cable? or could i mount it externally via a caddy? I would like to go sata drives for the main disks.

Looking to buy this week.

Thanks.

 

[custard80]

I do have a copy of xp pro.
Thanks for the specs.
Quick question should i get an sli motherboard for future proofing?
Is the ati x800 thats on deal of the week any good? if it can cope with fear, doom 3 and quake 4 then that will probably do me, but i am tempted by the 7800's but they are a lot of money. So many choices!! Is the 6800 any good.

The x600 in this dell is poor. Just played fear again and it stuggles so badly with no fancy effects turned on.

I bought this for general use but as usual have got dragged back to pc games again. The difference from my humble cube and xbox is stark and i cannot bring myself to fork out £45 a game for an xbox 360 when i could play the best on a decent pc.

I'm presuming that given all the new technologies such as sata that have come in since my last build, that it's still as simple to put one together.

cheers again.