Spec me a pc, £400 budget!

holly35 · 2 May 2006 at 16:56

Basically I need to upgrade my pc, becasue i want to buy a new soundcard, but as I only have a shuttle I dont have enough available pci slots. Its also abit cramped in the case, and I can only have external secondary drives.

I already have:
RAM, Monitor, Keyboard/Mouse etc and Speakers (might upgrade them at a later date though) I have a graphics card, although Im assuming with a new motherboard i wont be able to use an agp card. I play games, Im not a hardcore gamer, but like to play hl2, sims2, san andreas far cry etc, so a decent one would be good although not too overly priced!
I have an 80gb hd, and an 80gb external hd already, but would i need an sata hd?

Im looking to spend £400, i also will need to buy xp home edition, and a version of microsoft works (the cheapest one with word and outlook!)

Knock yer selves out

semi-pro waster · 2 May 2006 at 17:08

holly35 said:
Im looking to spend £400, i also will need to buy xp home edition, and a version of microsoft works (the cheapest one with word and outlook!)

Do you actually mean Outlook as in the full program or just Outlook Express? As far as I am aware Outlook is only available with a full copy of Office XP Pro or Office 2003 which would really mess up the budget.

What graphics card do you currently have? There is a dual AGP/PCI-E motherboard in the ASRock SATA Dual II which comes in at ~£50.

Anyway I'll try to put together something suitable and you can still use IDE hard drives fine.

//edit this may be just about ok.

MB-041-GI Gigabyte K8NMF-9 nForce4 Micro ATX (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-041-GI)
£41.95 £41.95
CA-048-AN Antec SLK3800BUK Black Quiet Midi Tower Case - 400W SmartPower PSU (CA-048-AN)
£51.95 £51.95
OS-001-MS Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition inc. SP2 - OEM - 1Pk (N09-01528) (OS-001-MS)
£51.95 £51.95
SW-018-MS Microsoft Works Suite 2006 - OEM (SW-018-OEM)
£36.95 £36.95
GX-053-PC PowerColor ATI Radeon X800 GTO 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-053-PC)
£49.95 £49.95
CP-118-AM AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3200BPBOX) (CP-118-AM)
£89.95 £89.95
Subtotal £322.70
Shipping (City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)) £9.95
VAT £58.22
Total £390.87

holly35 · 2 May 2006 at 17:24

semi-pro waster said:
Do you actually mean Outlook as in the full program or just Outlook Express? As far as I am aware Outlook is only available with a full copy of Office XP Pro or Office 2003 which would really mess up the budget.

What graphics card do you currently have? There is a dual AGP/PCI-E motherboard in the ASRock SATA Dual II which comes in at ~£50.

I meant outlook express! sorry, it comes in that cheapo microsoft works package.
Atm i have an NVIDIA geforce4 ti 4200 agp x 8, quite an old second hand one!

semi-pro waster · 2 May 2006 at 17:41

holly35 said:
I meant outlook express! sorry, it comes in that cheapo microsoft works package.
Atm i have an NVIDIA geforce4 ti 4200 agp x 8, quite an old second hand one!

Ok that is fine then as I've included Works, I'd sell/scrap that card along with the rest of the Shuttle that is unneeded, the Members Market may be a good place to get rid of it. I'm making the assumption here that your Ram is ordinary DDR of whatever speed(ideally PC3200/ddr400 but no real matter). The graphics card is a major improvement over what you curently have and you have a decent CPU there.

Sepheh · 4 May 2006 at 01:55

If you still have the spec I sent you, try posting it... just to see if I made a good choice with the components!

ErNciLator · 4 May 2006 at 03:12

doesnt express come with most versions of windows?

Mr Mag00 · 4 May 2006 at 09:20

Save the money on MS works and download Openoffice, completely cross compatible! There's another £40 that can be used on components.

holly35 · 7 May 2006 at 11:16

Open Office? Can that work with Word files? etc sounds like it coud be an option, although i dont mind spending 40 quid on word really, considering how much i will be spending hehe

semi-pro waster · 7 May 2006 at 11:38

Open Office can do pretty much anything it appears, it will work with Word files or PDFs etc. I haven't got around to trying it yet as Office XP does everything I need of it but it seems worth a look anyway and is supported in part by Sun Microsystems so ought to stick around for a while. If you do decide to go for it then I'd spend the extra on a faster CPU or possibly more Ram depending on what you already have.

roid · 7 May 2006 at 13:36

Does everything that office can do for free. Supports word format and exel sheets and everything that i've thrown at it in the past!

Mr Mag00 · 7 May 2006 at 14:20

buying MS Works does equate to 10% of your budget!
My feeling is why pay for something when you can get something for free and not ms which is proven to be attacked maliciously, and i dont mean copyright theft!
Openoffice was selling as Staroffice until recently they made it open source, so ppl have access to code and can develop plugin etc. it is very good, yes takes some time to get to the small amount of differences if you have worked with Ms products for years, i have

.
Also available is something called Mozilla Suite which contains a browser Firefox and Thunderbird the email package. These are very stripped down on cpu, ram requirements, with again a large amount of open source plugins, diaries, calculator, calender, signatures etc have a look around, there is a large amount of free, shareware utlilites out there