Spec for £400 please.

[Craigius]

Hi people a friend at work has asked me to build him a new machine, he wants it for gaming and encoding the games he plays are bioshock fear and such........ but doesn't want to overclock it............. he has a keyboard mouse and monitor and a good ATI graphics card and will be installing XP on the system

so he will require

case
power supply
DVD/CD burner
Ram
Mother board
chip
wireless pci card.

he has a budget of £400 including delivery can you help me make a spec up for an order please.

 

[Teaf]

Changed:

 

[Craigius]

Thanks for taking the time to do that for me im not sure i think going for the quad would be better in the long run dont you?

 

[Teaf]

Thanks for taking the time to do that for me im not sure i think going for the quad would be better in the long run dont you?

It would in the long run aye. Eventually things will start being utilised for 4 cores on a CPU when the user has a quad. Currently quite a few applications, such as encoding software especially, already makes use of 4 cores. The only thing that isn't as up to date for using all the cores is games, but that's getting there slowly (Crysis will for instance, so will Alan Wake and UT3).

3D Studio MAX using Mental Ray Renderer (>99 % of 4 cores)
Adobe Premiere Elements v3.0.2 (52-85 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
AutoGK v2.40 (30-53 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
Cinema 4d Rendering (>99 % of 4 cores)
Dr. DivX v2.0.0 (47-65 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
DVDShrink v3.2 (~90 % of 4 cores)
Lightwave 3D (>99 % of 4 cores)
Nero Suite 7.x (>90 % of 4 cores when encoding)
Noise Ninja v2.13 (~80 % of 4 cores when doing the noise reduction on an image)
Sony Vegas 7.0e (83-100 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
TMPG XPress v4.2.3.193 (65-100 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
Winrar v3.70 (~85-90 % of 4 cores on benchmark; ~75% in practice)
x264 v0.55.663 (>99 % of 4 cores when doing the 2nd pass of a 2 pass encode)

Benchmark/Distributed Computing Applications
BOINC Clients (most of them) (>99 % of 4 cores)
Folding@home SMP client (>99 % of 4 cores)
Muon1 DPAD (~85 % of 4 cores)
OCCT (>99 % of 4 cores)
Prime95 v25.3 (>99 % of 4 cores)
wprime v1.50 (>99 % of 4 cores)

That's a list of programs that do use 4 cores, it isn't limited to that however, just gives an example

 

[Craigius]

Thanks a lot for that going to have a word with him and report back if anyone else has any suggestions please feel free to post them

 

[Craigius]

Forgot he needs a hard drive too

 

[Teaf]

Forgot he needs a hard drive too

Updated my original post to show what I would get then, includes a hard drive albeit not a big one but his budget and what he is after I don't think he's going to be able to get a huge one without downgrading the CPU to something like a E2160, and I wouldn't do that just for hard drive space.