New machine time :D

[Uhtred]

Hi Guys,

My parent's machine is a duron 850 with 512mb of RAM, it's seriously old now and it's doing some pretty heavy stuff, web design, desktop publishing, music publishing, audio editing, image editing, general web surfing, encoding etc. To be fair it’s still running very well but its time has come

I need pretty much everything, case, psu, dvd writer (sata), graphics card, chip, tft, ram, and hard disk (160gb). No OS or sound card required

Budget? Well i'm not sure yet, i'll have to ask my dad but probably as cheap as possible, £400-500 or as near as poss

I'd like it to be vista compatible although it will be running xp. So one gig of ram and dual core, i'd like the graphics to be passively cooled as they like how quiet the current machine is. No games will be played on this box whatsoever and I have a soft spot for intel

Fire away

Thanks

 

[semi-pro waster]

This is a little bit overbudget but I think it meets all the criteria, the graphics card is passively cooled, you could save about £5 by going for the 7300 model though. If it won't be overclocked then you could get a cheaper motherboard and finally if the budget is really important then you could get a 17" monitor although a 19" monitor is easier on the eyes because it is slightly bigger for the same resolution as a 17".

Asus GeForce EN7600GS Silent HTD 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £51.99
(£61.09) £51.99
(£61.09)
OcUK 1GB (2x512MB) PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 Dual Channel Kit £34.99
(£41.11) £34.99
(£41.11)
OcUK Value Hanns-G HW191D 19" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Silver £99.99
(£117.49) £99.99
(£117.49)
Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 NCQ 160GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (0A32728) £29.99
(£35.24) £29.99
(£35.24)
Samsung SH-183LBEBN 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer Serial ATA Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - OEM £17.99
(£21.14) £17.99
(£21.14)
Antec NSK4400 Mini Tower Case - 380W SmartPower PSU £39.99
(£46.99) £39.99
(£46.99)
Gigabyte GA_965P_S3 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £59.99
(£70.49) £59.99
(£70.49)
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 "LGA775 Allendale" 1.80GHz (800FSB) - Retail £92.99
(£109.26) £92.99
(£109.26)
Sub Total : £427.92
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £12.95
Vat : £77.15
Total : £518.02

 

[Uhtred]

Thanks semi-pro waster, I like the look of that. I should have said that i don't intend to overclock this at all. What cheaper motherboard could i go for? That said i have the same motherboard on my machine and it's been as stable as anything.

They like the Hyndai 19" that i have but is widescreen the best option for the kind of work they do? I would have thought a 'normal' screen would be better?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Either or for the monitor I think, I don't imagine it makes much difference other than lots of people seem to like widescreen monitors now. They are the same price if you go for a 1280x1024 as a 1440x900 so whatever they are happiest with.

This ASRock motherboard should support the 4300 just fine although you may need to confirm it is bios 1.40 or higher and costs a bit less as well.

 

[Uhtred]

Thanks very much for this.

I think i'm going for the Asrock which has the added bonus of an AGP slot which means i can use their exsiting graphics card saving another 50 quid and i will also get the non widescreen version of the TFT.

Total cost should be around £430 and i'm ordering on sunday

Any more comments?

Edit - Just noticed the board only has 2 sata ports so i'm going to get the IDE version of the dvd drive just in case they need to add a hard disk in the future.