Dell Dimension 1100 £292 del. with 17" Flatscreen (merged)

biblejohn

bargains83 wrote:

I think and have always thought PC Gaming is a bed territory to be in, particularly if you want to money save. A Hardcore PC gamer will need to upgrade their system every 6 - 12 months. Games are out right now which require at least a 128MB graphics card, and 256MB and 512MB cards are now coming onto the market.

Infact I have never been able to understand the fascination with PC Gaming, If you buy a games console it will last you at least 5 years and games come out at a faster rate. I can only assume its the higher resolution and realism that has the appeal.

Ive always prefered PC gaming as you get better graphics/performance than a console, plus are able to use it for emails, surfing, business use, music editing, and pretty much anything, as well as playing games. Not only that, you get the option to upgrade the PC if you require when new technology comes out, rather than having to sell the console & buy another one.

Your right, a hardcore PC gamer who wants the state of the art system will upgrade every 12 months, but then a hardcore CONSOLE gamer will probably upgrade their console everytime a slightly more powerfull one comes out.

The average PC gamer however will not need to upgrade their PC, and its only if you want the fastest possible framerate, or you want to use a fractionally higher resolution etc.. etc.. or that you have money to burn!

Ive had various consoles & to be honest prefer my PC to any of my consoles. Have I upgraded my PC every 12 months? Nope. My current graphics card is 4 years old now. It wasnt top of the range when i got it, but it still cuts the mustard and all the latest games I play still look fantastic on it.

If you do your research properly when purchasing a PC & components you can get one for extreemly good value which will last a long time.

identitymismatch

TDIfurby wrote:

All this talk of buying PCs, yet I've just seen the light. Its building your own PC. I've just spent £150 on the essentials, CPU, case, board, PSU, and assuming a value for other bits, excluding my time putting it together - for £200 I've got myself a AMD64 3700+ PC, Asus board, silent 430w PSU, 512 ram with basic CD/HDD tower. Now you don't see many AMD64 systems around that price. Build your own, its the future.

(coming from a total I.T numpty too. Anyone who can follow instructions is capable of this feat)

Well done for making a PC, it *is* a good thing to do, but cheap doewsn't always mean good..

What you get from Dell, (normally) is good build quality. Seriously, those machines are normally nicely made and have a good internal design. The know how to get a processor cooled efficiently, they use good quality power supplies. All of this helps make their PCs run fairly quietly. Now, if you want your PC to sound like a hoover then feel free to buy a cheap PSU, case, processor heatsink and fan...

As it happens, you decided to buy an AMD64, which was a Good Choice; these beauties dynamically underclock. Huh??? Okay, when you're not using the full oomph of the processor the system thinks "I'm being underused" and makes the processor run a little slower. This generates less heat, so the machine requires less cooling which involves slower fans which means a quieter PC. For example my AMD64 3000 processor would run (at full speed) at 2GHz, but as I don't play hard core games or anything like that it mostly runs at 1GHz. The processor fan doesn't run after it realises it's not needed (takes about 15 seconds to reach 0rpm).

The noisiest thing about my PC is the cheap ADSL modem I bought which has developed an annoying buzz.

What's my point? I don't know.