Best Budget PC - £450ish

Hillfly · 4 January 2006 at 9:49AM

Well i finally got round to decorating my study and i promised myself a new pc as a reward. I'm looking for some advice as to what i can get for my money.

I don't need a monitor so the £450 budget can go all on the pc itself.
I deally i would like to use the machine for some gaming, dvd burning, photo editing. If possible some degree of future proofing would be good.

I am quite willing to buy a pc and upgrade components myself (eg RAM, DVD drives, graphics etc etc).

I have looked at the other threads and think the dell spec for £475 in this spec sounds pretty good: (posty by Venus) http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=130729&page=2&pp=10

Can anyone beat this? :money:

wolfman · 4 January 2006 at 11:08AM

Hmmm, you could get close.

If building yourself though you wouldn't be able to afford or include all the extras. What you would gain is better quality components. You'd be able to pick n choose the best reviewed/rated stuff so would probably get a little more out of your system.

For about £500 I reckon you could build a better system throughout, apart from maybe the 2gb ram. You'd probably have to go for 1gb ram which is still plenty.

When I get time I'll have a look around and try to suggest something.

pardal51 · 4 January 2006 at 12:58PM

wolfman wrote:

Hmmm, you could get close.

If building yourself though you wouldn't be able to afford or include all the extras. What you would gain is better quality components. You'd be able to pick n choose the best reviewed/rated stuff so would probably get a little more out of your system.

For about £500 I reckon you could build a better system throughout, apart from maybe the 2gb ram. You'd probably have to go for 1gb ram which is still plenty.

When I get time I'll have a look around and try to suggest something.

Great reply wolfman. I'll try to have a look at some websites and come up with something for you, bearing in mind that you might stay with AGP graphics, single HDD, stock cooling, etc...

pardal51 · 4 January 2006 at 1:18PM

pardal51 wrote:

Great reply wolfman. I'll try to have a look at some websites and come up with something for you, bearing in mind that you might stay with AGP graphics, single HDD, stock cooling, etc...

wolfman · 4 January 2006 at 1:36PM

I was looking at something like:

AMD64 3000+ Retail - £100
MSI K8N Neo4 - £75
1gb Ram (Geil) - £62
160gb SATA hard drive - £45
DVD-Writer - most are around £30

Case/Psu - Antec Sonata II - £80

Graphics - hmmm...

That's getting close to £400 and you need to include £50 for XP Home so my suggestion would probably go £60-80 over budget.

Having said that though, you'd have:
- An AMD64, which are generally preferable to Intel.
- The MSI motherboard is arguably one of the best socket 939 boards about.
- 1gb ram would be more than enough and it'd be decent branded stuff.
- A 160gb hard drive, probably a Seagate as they offer huge warranty period and are very reliable.
- A dvd writer
- And my favourite. A decent case. The Antec Sonata II is brilliant, well built and very quiet (near silent). It also comes with a very good 450W psu, so you'll have something reliable powering the system.

The graphics card I'd go for would be a 6600GT. A reasonable card for around £100ish, although if you did want a decent gaming machine you'd need to spend £175+ alone on the graphics card.

You could make cut backs on the above. The Asus board pardal51 mentioned would save a little. You could also get a regular dvd-rom instead of a writer, and a smaller hard drive. Make too many though and you may as well get the Dell.

Hillfly · 4 January 2006 at 2:32PM

Thanks to both for the help.
Will have to way up the options and time involved in self build against the Dell.

Will let you know when i decide!

Best Budget PC - £450ish

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