Some help with budget PC upgrade.

sakluce · 29 Dec 2012 at 16:08

Hi guys, i'm here again with some help over a budget PC. I am in Germany a lot due to my fiance living there. I dont have much info on where to buy PC components here, my german is basic so its difficult to get the info I want and can trust on prices, so i'm likely to order from OCUK for delivery here.

Basically, our PCs are around 7-8 years old now, both running AMD 64 3200+ CPUs, i've tried to prolong their lives as much as possible but multitasking is really chewing into their performance. Just waiting for them to boot up can be a frustrating experience in itself.

So i'm looking for a good budget PC that will be capable of running games at mid to max settings on the CPU/Ram front but I dont plan on getting graphics card until later on so i'd like to get an on board gfx chip included in the build to do a half decent job until then.

I guess i'd like to keep it at under £200 but less is even better or more if what I want is not possible within this budget. Monitor, mouse and keyboard are all fine, could possibly use the old case if necessary. I'll be building the PC myself as I have decent experience but i'm not up to date on prices and which CPUs work best with which MoBo and ram etc so i'd love it if you could help me as a lot of you have done before.

zakblood · 29 Dec 2012 at 16:32

1 x AMD Piledriver FX-4 Quad Core 4300 3.80GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £89.99
1 x Gigabyte 970A-DS3 AMD 970A (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £54.98
1 x TeamGroup Xtreem LV 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (TXD38G2133HC11DC01) £39.95
Total : £196.32 (includes shipping : £9.50).

or

1 x AMD A10-5800K Black Edition 3.80GHz (Socket FM2) APU Trinity Quad Core Processor (AD580KWOHJBOX) £95.99
1 x Asus F2A55-M LE AMD A55 Chipset (Socket FM2) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £55.99
1 x TeamGroup Xtreem LV 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (TXD38G2133HC11DC01) £39.95
Total : £202.73 (includes shipping : £9.00).

or intel if it takes your fancy,

1 x Intel Core i3-3220 3.30GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £89.99
1 x Asus P8Z77-V LX2 Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £72.98
1 x TeamGroup Xtreem LV 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (TXD38G2133HC11DC01) £39.95
Total : £213.72 (includes shipping : £9.00).

shadow_boxer · 29 Dec 2012 at 16:43

Unfortunately I don't think your budget is going to stretch to what you want at the minute. Given your current systems are 7-8 years old, you'd probably need to replace your power supply and hard drives (as it's probably IDE rather than SATA). You could get a basic system and use the onboard graphics for the moment but don't expect it to play any games at any sort of reasonable or playable frame rate. Then when you do have a bit more £££ buy a dedicated gpu.

sakluce · 29 Dec 2012 at 17:29

Ok, the budget is for one PC and i'll likely copy it or do something similar for the other later on. For now the £200 budget is for just the one PC. The PSU in it is a Xilence XP480, not sure if it would be enough for a new gfx card but would it power the rest of the PC until I look to upgrade the gfx card? at this time I could upgrade the PSU too.

Edit: if the budget is too little, please give me a suggestion on a cheap build that you think would suit my needs.