Gaming PC(£700-£1000) Help please!

-TangleFoot-

You're welcome.

hethmar

-TangleFoot- wrote: »

When did this happen? I've had mine for about three years now.

Google MESH complaints and youll find pages and pages of forums and articles. It was so bad that it even went on WATCHDOG and Trading Standards in London appointed a team to deal with the complaints!

Awful service, this was my second computer from MESH and whilst I had some regrets about the customer service with the first one, it did work fine. The second one was iffy from day 1 and if you have ever tried to ring MESH you will know you can sit on a premium rate number for literally hours before you get a reply.

I literally gave mine away even though Id paid for 5 years guarantee because it was causing me so much stress. I actually bought a Dell then, which Id never considered but after looking at WHICH decided it couldnt be worse than MESH. What a brilliant customer service I got and get from Dell. They answer on the first couple of rings - Id actually forgotten to order speakers with my spec, when I rang them, THEY apologised to me for not pointing out that I may want them and gave them to me free.

-TangleFoot-

hethmar wrote: »

It was so bad that it even went on WATCHDOG...

...in 2007, according to Wikipedia. So, you have in fact answered my question in a roundabout sort of way. :rolleyes:

Lum

Doesn't say what motherboard it is, therefore I am going to assume it's a PC Chips heap of crap and tell you not to buy it. Also quad-core is unnecessary for gaming so you're just wasting money.

Edit because I didn't notice a second page had appeared: Also, I wouldn't worry too much about the resolution on that monitor. You're running Vista so you can just crank up the DPI if you find stuff to be too small to read. Some pre-Vista apps don't play so nice when you do this but for gaming it'll be fine.

joe_pesci

Lum can you help me in what to look for in a motherboard. No decent articles on what all the numbers and words mean.

Any useful links?

hethmar

-TangleFoot- wrote: »

...in 2007, according to Wikipedia. So, you have in fact answered my question in a roundabout sort of way. :rolleyes:

Well, the complaints didnt happen at any particular time, but they reached the Watchdog screaming point that year.

Avoid at all costs!

Lum

Helps if you post the specific bits your having problems with, They tend to have complicated model numbers which you can pretty much ignore, it's the spec that matters

But they'll list things like "6x SATA2" which is simply how many SATA devices (ie. modern harddrives and optical drives) you can attach, as well as the number of slots, which on a modern board will be, PCI or PCI-E (PCI Express). These are for expansion cards such as for a sound card.

PCI is the old standard, it's been around since the last of the 486 CPUs back in the 90s, there's lots of devices out there that still need a PCI slot

PCI-E is the replacement for it. It comes in several variants, x1 x4 x8 and x16. An X16 is basically 16 of the things stuffed together on one slot and is typically used for graphics card. An x1 isn't much faster than the old PCI. You can tell the difference between the different types by the length of the slot. In theory.
It gets complicated because an x1 card will fit in a larger slot and run just fine, it'll just use the first part, likewise an x16 card, if you were to hacksaw the end off of an x1 slot you could stuff the x16 card in there and it would work, albiet not at full speed. For this reason a lot of boards implement their x4 and x8 PCI-E ports using an x16 socket. They'll usually do them a different colout when they do this.

For a gaming PC you'll just want one or two (if you plan on going SLI or Crossfire in the future) x16 slots for your graphics card, and a couple of the slower PCI-E slots for future upgrades. Edit: If you want SLI or Crossfire, make sure the board actually supports running this.

The other stuff will just be onboard devices (eg. sound and network) and a listing of what ports are on the back of the PC.

joe_pesci

Thanks for that Lum.:beer: