Spec needed, £1000 budget for basics

Jet · 22 May 2006 at 00:15

A friend of mine has around £1000 to spend on a new gaming machine.

Monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, DVD-RW etc, are not needed. AMD is preferred.

He has suggested the following spec:

Mobo

Sapphire PURE RD580 CrossFire Advantage (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (PC-A9RD580Adv) (MB-004-SP)

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA4200BVBOX) (CP-126-AM)

RAM

Mushkin 2GB DDR XP4000 Extreme Performance Dual Channel Kit (2x1GB) CAS3 (991483) (MY-000-MK)

hard drive

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 300GB ST3300622A ATA-100 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-068-SE)

just to use for the time being i will get a couple of external ones to go with this as well

Case

Thermaltake VB1000BWS Soprano SuperMidi Tower - Black (CA-015-TT)

GFX Card

Gainward BLISS GeForce 7600 GT "Golden Sample" 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (471846200-7777) (GX-036-GW)

2 of these ones, or could spend £250 on a 7900? good idea or bad idea?

Total £916.09

Any comments or other spec suggestions. Paticularly on whether to go SLi or not.

Thanks.

Jet · 22 May 2006 at 13:01

My friend replies:

"thanks for the responces, i have £1000 to spend so that setup will be fine big dom, maybe even stretch it a bit further? i defenatly want the thermaltake soprano case, it looks very nice!, i can stretch to about £1100-£1200 if i have to and if it is worth it, i want something that will own hl2 on max settings and will be good for upgrades for a couple of years, my current setup is now obsolete and upgradeing it is becoming pointless due to the price of new kit.

can ati cards run on SLI? i am just thinking that as an easy upgrade i could get an 7900 now and in a years time get another to run in sli as a cheap upgrade, can i do that on the ATI? i am a bit of an ATI newb, the last ATI card i had was a banchee, lol been nvidia since then.

i am not interested in overclocking, i have done it on my current setup but only because i was too skint to upgrade at the time, lol and i would rather keep the new setup standard and maybe overclock it in a year or so if i have to, i am not interested in benchmarking or "mine is bigger then yours" etc competitions but just something good and decent "

Thanks.

Jet · 22 May 2006 at 17:22

Friend replies:

after looking on that post zen i am thinking about this spec:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA4400CDBOX) (CP-127-AM)
£264.95 £264.95

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS3 (GE2GB3200BDC) (MY-046-GL)
£104.95 £104.95

ATI Radeon X1900 ***Crossfire Edition*** 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-045-CO)
£259.95 £259.95

Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Crossfire (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-131-AS)
£109.95 £109.95

Thermaltake VB1000BWS Soprano SuperMidi Tower - Black (CA-015-TT)
£42.95 £42.95

Q-Tec 650W Triple Fan Gold PSU (CA-003-QT)
£19.95 £19.95

Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 NCQ 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (0A31636) (HD-002-HI) X2
£52.95 £105.90

Subtotal £908.60
VAT £159.01
Total £1,067.61

I'm sure you'll have something to say about the PSU

but any other improvements? I appreciate there are better cases for cooling but they are largely a visual thing.

Jet · 22 May 2006 at 23:30

BigDom said:
WRONG!!!

Actually cases are largely a functional thing...

Cooling
Ease of assembly/maintence.
Weight

all are of higher priority than looks ( not to mention that the PC7 looks a lot nicer in the flesh than in pictures ).

Listen! The case is final, now drop it