New System Ideas

bigvern · 16 Apr 2006 at 14:02

Thought I would post this as it may be help for others. Have just built a system for the better half and am stunned at the performance for the money. After looking around at cheap prebuilds, I decided to build her one. If anyone is looking for a good solid and very quick system, they might like to consider these parts.

Artic Cooling Case (includes 350W Seasonic PSU and incredibly quiet!!!)
Asus K8N-VM motherboard
AMD Sempron 3100 Processor
512mb Crucial RAM
LG DVD Writer
Hitachi 80gb SATA II harddrive

Ok, so its using the onboard Nividia 6100 integrated graphics, but the board supports PCI graphics cards just in case she has a sudden desire to start playing games in the future (!). What struck me was the quality of the components I was able to get for the price when compared with certain prebuilt boxes you find on the web. The whole lot came to around £250 and to be honest, with the exception of games, there is very little noticable difference between this and my pc in the signature!

So if anyone is looking for a quality system on a budget or any of the parts above, I would certainly recommend them!

hp7909 · 16 Apr 2006 at 14:12

I think systems/compnents/etc of today are well fine tuned for simple day-to-day-running. And like what you built for your missus was made, i'm sure with such users in-mind. All in all, processors have come of age, Windows (with several patches) as come of age, and many other computer parts too. Only thing that hasn't is users. So, make sure she defrags (the hard disk

), etc on a regular basis.

bigvern · 16 Apr 2006 at 14:24

And a lesson well learnt from installing Windows. Activated before service packing (couldn't remember what order this should be done in) and then could not service pack or get up task manager. A quick reconnection to the web and a download of Avast (free anti virus) revealed that my 30 second connection to the web to activate windows had actually netted me 3 trojans and a couple of proebots! So the hardware seems sorted these days, shame about the OS! :rolleyes:

Hlebio · 16 Apr 2006 at 16:24

Great thread.

Me girlfriend wants to break free of her 400mhz PC soon so I am going to be building one for her. She has no intention of playing games and wants to be spending aroud £200-£300 so I may just take your advice.