Should I build?

Associate
Joined
4 Jan 2005
Posts
65
Up until about four years ago I always built my own rigs. For myself or family members or whoever else wanted it, really. But I became a Mac convert and as such haven't built or kept up to date with hardware changes since then.

My parents need a new PC now and I'm seeing this as a good opportunity to get back up to date with the hardware changes over the past four years. My question is, is it still worth building your own? They don't play games or anything, already have a decent monitor and one of the major reasons for building my own was that it was much cheaper.

I always enjoyed building PCs so I'm actually wanting to build one from scratch. They've got about £300 to play with (maybe a bit more) and I know they could get a prebuilt one from Tesco for around that price. If they were big gamers or used any other resource intensive applications then I'd definitely build one but as all they'll use it for is browsing the internet and whatnot a cheapo pre-built one would probably do.

Any suggestions?
 
Yeah, I said Tesco as it was the first place that came into my head (you think it would have been OC as I'm on the forums).

They already own a copy of Win 7 so that's not an issue.

As much as I would regret not building it myself, £250 is an excellent price...
 
At the very lowest end of the market, prebuilts tend to have the advantage, however if you can find a place where you can get super-low-budget parts, you might be able to get something a bit cheaper.

If you're looking to save a few bob, Ubuntu is now incredibly user-friendly and your parents will be able to work it no problem- you might need to install a couple things for them, but it'd suit them better in the long run anyway, as there'd be no issues with viruses and it'd be a lot faster.
 
If you don't need Win 7 then you may also wanna take a look at this one:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-258-OK&groupid=43&catid=1078&subcat=

It's an extra £30 but comes with a better case and 100x better PSU.


http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-270-OK&groupid=43&catid=1078&subcat=

Or for £340 they could get a Intel i3 with hyperthreading technology although for what you said, I highly doubt you need it.


I think custom building it yourself it's good when you know what you want, need something specific and are willing to spend a lot of time and effort reading reviews and looking at benchmarks, if you're into encoding/rendering/gaming, if it's just for your parents for day to day use then I doubt they'd notice much of a difference. Buying it pre-built saves hassle and then they can't blame you if something goes wrong by any chance :P
 
Your basket

Product NameQtyPriceLine TotalPatriot Viper 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C7 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (PVS34G1600LLK)£58.74
(£49.99) £58.74
(£49.99)Asus M4A78LT-M 760G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard£48.99
(£41.69) £48.99
(£41.69)AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 250 3.00GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail£46.99
(£39.99) £46.99
(£39.99)Silverstone SST-PS03B Precision Midi Tower Case - Black£42.99
(£36.59) £42.99
(£36.59)Corsair CX 430W ATX Power Supply (CMPSU-430CXUK)£37.98
(£32.32) £37.98
(£32.32)Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD502HJ)£33.98
(£28.92) £33.98
(£28.92)OcUK 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM£12.91
(£10.99) £12.91
(£10.99) Sub Total : £240.49Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout)Shipping : £11.75VAT is being charged at 17.50%VAT : £44.14 Total : £296.38

Going to be a little more with operating system.
 
If you're looking to save a few bob, Ubuntu is now incredibly user-friendly and your parents will be able to work it no problem

As a Unix user of 12 years I say this with the deepest respect: No Debian ;) I love how Ubuntu has made Linux more popular but I'm not a massive fan, myself. I use Mac hardware for my wife but I'm primarily a Linux user myself (recently moved to Arch from 10 years of Slackware).

It does sound like they're better off with a pre-built rig so I'll probably steer them down that route.
 
Back
Top Bottom