Spec Help With Build for Parents

[Westovski]

Hi guys,

I posted a while ago intending to build a rig for my my parents.

Mostly it's used for my dad listening to Music (he has a relatively large music collection and intends to rip his Vinyls to MP3) and my Mum for web browsing.

However, my Dad also enjoys the Command and Conquer games and other RTS games (he bought Supreme Commander but has never been able to play it).

So the rig i'm looking at building should have decent enough graphics to run slighty outdated RTS games and enough space for a decent music collection (1TB maybe).

The original Spec was as follows:

OCZ Platinum 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C7 1333MHz Dual Channel (OCZ3P13334GK) £80.99 (£70.43)
Asus M4A785TD-M Evo AMD 785G (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard £67.99 (£59.12)
AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 240 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £45.99 (£39.99)
Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD502HJ) £39.99 (£34.77)
Antec Basic 350W Power Supply £27.99 (£24.34)
Sony Optiarc AD-7240S 24x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) - OEM £18.99 (£16.51)
Akasa Genesis AK-5004 Midi Tower Case - Black £16.99 (£14.77)
Sub Total : £259.93
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £10.00
VAT is being charged at 15% VAT : £40.49
Total : £310.42

However, this was a while ago, and now the budget is around 360-380 pounds and i imagine the price for some of the other bits and bobs has cheapened a little.

FYI, they don't need an OS or any peripherals.

I think they key details here are graphics acceleration, onboard may be ok, providing it will happily run most RTS games.

Sorry for the long post, i've been out of the game for a while, i've been using the same PC for a while now sat inside my trusty Mountainmods U2-UFO case

 

[Gary*]

 

[Redmint]

Can get a slightly better graphics card in the £380 budget if you skimp on everything else:

Included the card as I'm not sure how well the onboard would handle those games, somewhat depends on resolution of course. If you decide to go for this option you could ask overclockers to change the hard drive to one of the 1TB drives and it should bring the cost to about £380.