Another spec me thread, £500 budget

skippy2421 · 31 May 2009 at 20:46

as the title says budget is 500 with a little room for manouvre, keyboard, mouse, monitor (1680x1050) and speakers are not needed, OS will be however (vista 64 bit please).

If it's of any use he currently has an intel core2 6400 (in case any of you want to keep it in your specs)

Case needs to be smallish so no massive great big towers please (as a guide smaller than cm690)

Only used for gaming really

Thanks in advance guys.

siumatfung · 31 May 2009 at 21:10

but erm cant we reuse his RAM?

i have missed out the case on purpose cos his bro wants a p180 mini well is looking anyways

we'll over clock ur bros chip to 3ghz

skippy2421 · 31 May 2009 at 21:42

his ram is awful mate, plus it's only 2gigs worth so new stuff is most definitely needed

skippy2421 · 31 May 2009 at 22:46

oh come on guys, i'm struggling here, what if the budget was upped to an absolute max of 600?

*edit*

Here's my last attempt:

I know PSU is excessive however it is on offer.

1337z0r · 1 Jun 2009 at 00:45

If you re-use the E6400 this should be a decent spec and handle most games and other tasks, although I'd strongly recommend overclocking the CPU as you will gain a lot of performance and it means a CPU upgrade wont be needed for a while unless your playing games at very high resolutions.

But if you get that E6400 to 3Ghz, which should be do-able as I can get my E6300 to 3.3Ghz on the same cooler I have included in your spec. There should not be any bottleneck on system coming from the CPU, although with newer CPU's coming out you should start being able to pick up newer processors quite cheap soon enough.

As for your OS, is it really worth shelling out for Vista right now? Alternatively you could go down the Windows 7 route and install the Release Candidate. It's very stable at the moment and it's also free until next year. You can then buy the final release of Windows 7 once it's available around October time.

siumatfung · 1 Jun 2009 at 01:27

i thought we needed to add vista into the spec skippy

but 600£ now we're talking

siumatfung · 1 Jun 2009 at 01:32

skippy2421 · 1 Jun 2009 at 02:16

ermmmm i may of forgotten vista lol, yes vista is needed and trust you to pick that out (however you didn't remember it in your spec). Damn thought i had a good spec then, till someone ruined it

He may have a hard drive we can salvage, i know he has 2 and 1 is definately IDE however i'm unsure on the other so i'll have to check (don't particularly want to use IDE as main drive

user1453 · 1 Jun 2009 at 02:45

here's my attmpt

However I would suggest mot getting vista and instead use win 7 RC until win 7 is released then buy win 7, I much prefer it to vista

leexgx · 1 Jun 2009 at 03:48

i agree wait for windows 7, use what ever you have got now or use windows 7 RC like i am now (it work untill 2010 march so plenty of time to move over to it when it comes out soon)

get the 4890 in its place

skippy2421 · 1 Jun 2009 at 04:49

well, i'll try to get him to go 7, i've gone 7 myself, i can't say i'm too impressed by it, infact it rather annoys me, but it's free so i'm not complaining. If he decides to stick with vista i might explain to him it's holding his build back and he might up his budget, he's doing quite well for himself so a extra 100 shouldn't hurt him

leexgx · 1 Jun 2009 at 05:44

going from vista i am far more impressed, mite be more due to the SSD in my desktop, but i have an low spec laptop (1.7 M, 756mb ram, 160gb hdd, 915 IGP) seem to work very happy on it, a lot of the system restore stuff runs far less aggressive as the trusted installer would faf around a lot on my desktop a lot and most of my customers laptops and desktops i fix, i find that does not happen on windows 7

the laptop does not but me when using it as most stuff opens quite fast

skippy2421 · 1 Jun 2009 at 16:23

right well windows 7 it is, so far i've gone for the following:

Any alternatives? or changes people recommend?

RJC · 1 Jun 2009 at 17:41

Only thing I might change is the hard drive to this, But thats just a personal choice

wbc1 · 1 Jun 2009 at 17:44

I'd get this (same price as the corsair):

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-032-OC&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=

And swap the GPU to a 4870 or 4890 so you can go crossfire in the future.

RJC · 1 Jun 2009 at 17:48

If he goes with the memory he will need to change the board, as it supports DDR2 only.

wbc1 · 1 Jun 2009 at 17:51

RJC said:
If he goes with the memory he will need to change the board, as it supports DDR2 only.

Good point, sorry, when I saw the AM3 I assumed it was DDR3 compatible also. *edited my comment*

skippy2421 · 1 Jun 2009 at 22:34

so i can assume this spec is fine then? i was a little unsure on the motherboard but i assume all this will fit together fine? (I know very little about AMD you see)

siumatfung · 2 Jun 2009 at 13:28

skip you not reckon this thread gone a bit off the rail? i mean does ur bro realli need a 700£ pc lol

skippy2421 · 2 Jun 2009 at 14:23

siumatfung said:
skip you not reckon this thread gone a bit off the rail? i mean does ur bro realli need a 700£ pc lol

Where did 700 come from? Last time i checked it was 600. But does my bro need a £700 pc? hmmmm maybe, oh the ideas come flooding in.

*edit*

It's all ordered now, in the end went for ddr3 ram and the gigabyte ddr3 board but stuck with the 260 and tri core am3