£500 new pc build budget

saadz2k5

hiya, i am about to build a pc for a friend who has a budget of £500

she says she must have 8gb ram and 2TB storage, and a HD graphics card so that it can be plugged into a lcd tv etc

also she wants as many usb ports as possible

can moneysavers advise on differant combination of parts...

the purpose of the pc is for all round usage for surfing the web to heavier photoshop usage etc.. so im not sure if AMD would be better suited then intel in this case?

i only use Aria PC, Microdirect and also eBuyer, although the first two are preferred as they are local.

the budget is for the system only. screen, keysboards etc are not required!

many thanx :cool:

Psychofly

Define heavier Photoshop usage ? Is it really heavy usage or just what a home user calls heavy ?

For genuine heavy usage a quad core CPU will be the best bet. If there is no gaming being done then a motherboard with onboard graphics will suit and there's plenty around with HDMI outputs that could easily plug into an LCD TV.

4743hudsonj

saadz2k5 wrote: »

hiya, i am about to build a pc for a friend who has a budget of £500

she says she must have 8gb ram and 2TB storage, and a HD graphics card so that it can be plugged into a lcd tv etc

also she wants as many usb ports as possible

can moneysavers advise on differant combination of parts...

the purpose of the pc is for all round usage for surfing the web to heavier photoshop usage etc.. so im not sure if AMD would be better suited then intel in this case?

i only use Aria PC, Microdirect and also eBuyer, although the first two are preferred as they are local.

the budget is for the system only. screen, keysboards etc are not required!

many thanx :cool:

8gb of ram is an awful lot of ram for that usage

4gb will suffice and much more

as for processors amd are cheaper but its often discussed in this forum and most people advise intel


there is actually another post today with the same budget

something like great budget gaming pc challenge


they had the same budget as you

look at the posts on their an switch the high end graphics cards for a lower end and go quad core for the processor

timbim_2

I'd stick with ebuyer, their prices tend to be a fair bit lower across the board, so even with delivery, they'll usually be cheaper.

8GB of RAM is almost certainly over the top, and you'd need to be spending a lot more than £500 on a system to build somthing wich could actually semsibly use that much without the other components letting it down. Stick to 4gb and spend the difference on a better processor or PSU. Don't overlook the PSU or case, a bad one can quite happily kill the rest of the parts.

Lets break the budget down a little bit. Two 1tb HDD's will be the best way to get a 2tb volume. You don't mention if you need that as a continuous volume; if so, get a mobo with RAID0 capabilities. Two of these will do that job, costing £120 between the two of them. I've seen good reviews of them, but since a RAID0 array is twice as likley to fail as a single device, a good backup strategy will be required.

That's my suggestion for now, from that it leaves you with £380 for the rest of the system. Might be a little tight.

spakkker

What type of ram does your friend want ?
Don't think you'll get more than 12 USB's on any motherboard, tho' you could get USB hubs.

Marty_J

Having lots of RAM won't make the computer go any faster; it just stops it from slowing down sooner when it has to start paging things to disk.

That your friend wants a computer for less than £500 would suggest to me that she's not a power user, and so is uniquely to see any benefit whatsoever with 8 GB of RAM. Power users I know who do lots of intensive stuff use things like the Mac Pro (which start at £1,899).

Why not just see what Dell have?

timbim_2

I'd go for a controller card if you need any more ports, as they'll all still work at full speed, using hubs really chokes the bandwidth.

saadz2k5

by heavy photoshop usage i dont mean professional, just home usage

8gb is needed because she doest wish to have to upgrade the ram later on

2tb does not have to be continuess, infact i dont think that would make any differance to her experience, i was thinking 2 seperate 1tb drives would be perfect

Marty_J

saadz2k5 wrote: »

by heavy photoshop usage i dont mean professional, just home usage

8gb is needed because she doest wish to have to upgrade the ram later on

It's total overkill then.

Is she ever going to use 8 GB of RAM?

saadz2k5

thats actually exactly what i said to her but she was insistant on 8!

4743hudsonj

saadz2k5 wrote: »

thats actually exactly what i said to her but she was insistant on 8!

haha me too!

i couldn't need 8gb if i tried i dont think

id have to download loads of stuff and run it at once

maybe a few trojans etc mite get me up to 8gb of ram usage

lol

4 gb is more than sufficient