Building my pc

Percy1983

This is true, for a general use PC and 'off the shelf' PC can be fine it may be worth looking at PC world refurbs as an example.

Really for gaming I would recommend you build yourself, as mentioned its easy to fit it all together the main skill in PC building now is getting the right bits and getting a good balance. I would recommed overclockign as it can save a fortune as mentioned an E5200 overclocked is more than enough and will cost £60, this will perform on a similar level to a £130 processor at standard clocks, yes you can overclock the £130 processor but its fast enough anyway and there will be very little gain. THe same goes with ram, the E5200 won't be pushing much over 350 FSB so cheap 800mhz RAm running at a 1:1 ratio will be great.

Basically you can get a load of highend bits, put it together and will get a great computer, or you can buy mid range bits overclock and get something which may even be better than all the high end bits for a lot less.

Pitchshifter

That £200 PC has a dual core AMD and 2GB RAM and 250GB HD, my dad won't fill that in his whole life! It is powerful enough to do most stuff including playing back HD video files. It's integrated graphics chip has limited 3D capabilities so if he ever wanted to get into a bit of casual gaming (highly unlikely :-) he would have to add a graphics card, something like a Geforce 9500GT or 9600GSO about £50-£70 should be plenty, and a reasonable match for the lowly processor.

DatabaseError

Pitchshifter wrote: »

.... 250GB HD, my dad won't fill that in his whole life!

Famous last words....I came across HDDs in 1984/5 and thought then there was not enough data in the world to fill them...then later using ~20meg drives in 386 machines I couldn't imagine ever needing more storage.
Now I'm struggling (honestly!) with 800GB...I have to keep deleting/archiving things to keep a bit of free space

Pitchshifter

Yeah well his last computer had a 20gig HD with 15GB still free after 4 years use.

I, on the other hand fully understand the benefit of massive HD, with 640GB internal and a 1TB external rapidly filling up. Not struggling though. lol