My £600 budget spec

Shure · 14 Oct 2006 at 22:09

I'm looking at getting more of a budget PC than I originally set out for and I'm struggling to find a happy medium. So far this seems to be the best I can come up with, any advice on this is more than welcome!

Sapphire Radeon X1600XT 256M GDDR3 TVO DVI-I PCI-E £65.80
ASRock 775I945GZ SKT 775 conroe support AGI-E (PCI-Ex4 slot) 192MB shared VGA memory 8channel audio mATX £36.58
Antec TruePower II 480W PSU £38.28
Corsair 1GB (2 x 512MB) DDR2 667MHz 2x64Mx64 non-ECC 2x240 DIMM Unbuffered CL5 Lifetime Warranty £62.67
Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATA2/300 16MB Cache - OEM £44.16
LG GSA-H10NBAL 16x16DVD±RW 12x RAM Dual Layer Writer Black - Bare Drive £17.62
Logitech Media Keyboard - Elite £12.32
Samsung Electronics (1penny game offer) SM920N 19" 8ms 700:1 (1280x1024) Monitor - Silver 3 Years On-Site Warranty £122.22
Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86ghz - Skt775 Fsb1066 2mb Cache Boxed In £106.09

Total price inc delivery: £601.01

Shure · 14 Oct 2006 at 22:48

A different consideration was for the Intel Pentium 4 945 Dual Core "LGA775 Presler" 3.4GHz (800FSB) instead of the E6300?

Rroff · 15 Oct 2006 at 00:04

I'd stick with the E6300 - its a lot faster than the 945 in most situations - specially multimedia and gaming - the 945 does seem to be dramatically faster for file compression and database work however - not sure why - possibly because it has 2x2Mb L2 cache instead of the 2x1 on the E6300 - this would stand up as the 4Mb L2 E6600 and other 4Mb core 2 duos regain the performance advantage in compression/database stuff.

Shure · 15 Oct 2006 at 11:52

If you were to try and shave £100 off this spec where would you do it?

naro · 15 Oct 2006 at 12:00

Hmm.. if u want budget, would u mind AMD X2??

the AMD X2 3800+ paired with the Asus M2NPV-VM would be a gd combo. And if ** not a hardcore gamer, u might want to leave out the gfx and use the onboard nVidia 6150 gfx. its decent enough for some light gaming.

just my 2 pennies worth of advise.