Decent desktop PC for >£650

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If gaming isn't a priority, you'll just be throwing money away spending that much. What's wrong with the one you have?

A 10 year old pc can do "Internet browsing and word processing, maybe watching films, tv programmes." with ease, as will a £300 laptop.

gonzo127

well a couple of things that have been brought up do need to be considered

a laptop should be considered if you are not planning on gaming due to the portability however this being said you could split your budget and get a proper desktop for main work and a netbook for taking to lectures

now on to the upto £900 system, stay away from that packard bell system as its shockingly over priced - most of the money is on the multitouch screan which IMHO is not needed

now the SSD yes they are faster however i dont think it is needed just yet especially considering the £ per GB of them a good mechanical hard drive is plenty fast enough for most people and as for hex core, that is currently just a case of bragging rights of i have more cores than you, most programs can not even use 2 cores fully and even less use 4 cores properly let alone 6

a quick look on cyberpower systems gives this base system
Infinity i5 Achilles XT

• • Free CPU Overclocking to 3.6Ghz
• • Intel i5 760 Quad Core
• • ATI HD 5770 1GB Graphic Card
• • 4GB DDR3 1333MHz Memory
• • 1TB SATA-II Hard Drive
• • Gigabyte P55M-UD2, P55 MB
• • Xtreme HDT120 CPU Cooler
• • Antec Three Hundred Case
• • 850 Watts Power Supplies
• • 22" TFT LCD Full HD Monitor
• • 24X Double DVD±R/±RW
• • Windows 7 Home Premium

£748 (£637 ex. VAT)

now i would make a few changes to the base spec up such as max cooling fans, upgrading the ram to the corsair XMS3 ram, upgrade to samsung f3 drives in raid 1 which knocks up the cost to £875

the above system would be pretty fast and is suitable for gaming

however please note i have not used Cyberpower myself and do not know what the service is like so am just using this system as a idea on what you can get - as ever if you are thinking of purchasing from them do your research into them to see if you feel comfortable buying from them

Lil306

This is to highlight the flexibility of custom building more than anything else. It's pricier than your range, however with custom builds you can get rid of pieces that knock prices up and swap them around. So for example....

EDIT -
Some people have replied since I've typed this but I'll be reading them. The poster who made the one about cyberpower brought up valid points (sorry I just quickly skimmed them)

• Ditch both HDD, buy the SSD, spend £50 on a smaller HDD (1tb) or so, and you still come in with the same budget but with better performance
• Ditch both HDD, buy 1 small HDD (£40 - 1tb), add in the graphics cards, come in £30 under than original price but with good graphics performance and storage.
• Ditch the big monitor, get a smaller one.

Also you can shop around and probably find cheaper. I've included a reason why I chose the parts. Also please note, you CAN find other parts cheaper, however at times I've went for the branded version either because I think the cheaper ones where of inferior quality and bad for longevity or the branded versions make the PC more future proof.

AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Six Core 2.8GHz Socket AM3 - Retail - 165.98
You need multicore processors, 6 x 2.8ghz, is better than 4 x 3.2ghz. In terms of raw clock speed it's faster, but technology is advancing by multitasking. So to become "future-proof" you should look for cores over speed. Also Intel do provide CPU's which are hexacore that support triple channel DDR3, however that will knock up your budget and I don't think you will see the benefit in spending the extra money for what you plan on doing

Corsair XMS3 TwinX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit 84.99
4GB of memory, dual channel (I don't believe triple is supported with AMD, not 100% sure). Runs at 1333mhz and is made by a well trusted manufacturer. So you will get stability and reliability.

OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Modular Power Supply - 75.99
This can be changed, I initially picked it because I added in a different graphics card, however to fit things "within" budget, I removed the graphics card. I could have changed this PSU, which you still can which will save your more money. However this PSU is modular which makes it easier to work with, is from a trusted manufacturer and supports the latest graphics cards.

LG W2261VP 22" LCD Monitor 16:9 DVI HDMI Black - 139.99
I just picked this because I wanted to include a monitor in the selection to keep in budget. You can get them as cheap as £90 however I think 22" would be a nice size. The monitor supports 1080 HD resolutions which makes it good for things like Blu-Ray media. Personally I wouldn't bother with Touch Screens. Unless you have a reason to use them why waste the money. Same as the monitor, if you don't see the reason to view all the extra screen, just downsize. Although in terms of monitors you can never have enough screen

CoolerMaster Elite 334 Case - 31.98
I picked this one over the cheaper versions, because it has tool-less installation. It's a good case with ample storage and room. Consider replacing with cheaper cases if you need to save the money

Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 AMD 880G (Socket AM3) ATX DDR3 Motherboard - 89.98
Motherboard that supports Dual Channel DDR3, Hexacore CPU and is future proof because it supports modern graphics cards. It has USB 3 and SATA 6.0 GB/s. Also it has built in HD Graphics which saves you money over an expensive card.

LG CH10LS20 Blu-Ray Reader and DVDRW Black SATA - OEM - 59.98
This allows you to play blu-ray movies, whilst providing the capability of future permanent backups to DVD/CD, aswell as being able to transfer media onto CD's/DVD's.

Windows Ultimate Edition 7 English DVD - Retail - 170.01
I decided to go for the Ultimate Edition for a few reasons. Yes, it was more expensive. However, here's my reasoning.

• It's retail, which minds you can resell it. OEM you can't (this is why it's more expensive)
• It comes with the 32-bit AND 64-bit DVD's. Which means you can replace the O/S with 64-bit build when multitasking technologies become more popular. Since most things operate around 32-bit at the moment

2 x Western Digital Caviar Green Power 2TB 64MB Cache Hard Disk Drive SATAII 300MB/s - 183.96
4TB of raw storage for your data and operating system. I ditched the SSD because it bumped up the price. However you can play around with these to what suits you. A config of a small SSD (i.e 32/64gb) for the Operating System / Apps / Games would provide great performance, with 1 x 1TB - 2TB drive for backup / storage purposes. You also have a benefit of a DVD Burner for permanent storage of data for future archive.
Comes in at : £1002.86


OPTIONAL "LUXURIES" YOU COULD CHOOSE
OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive - 139.99
For pure future performance you could have an SSD hard drive. You can find other cheaper models, but the latest OCZ 2E comes with insane read AND write speeds. You'd need to ditch a hard drive and perhaps get a smaller one for £40-50 (around 1TB) but it would be more than enough for current usage, and you'd easily be able to expand in the future

Novatech ATI Radeon 5770 1024MB GDDR5 TV-Out/DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Graphics Card - Retail - 119.98
More of a card for the budget really, easily capable of handling todays games whilst still being cheap.

Random 5.25" multibay drive - £30
This would just be a drive where you can install your memory cards etc for digital photos. Those type of things.

Lil306

Also, just came to my head. An alternative method of saving money, would be to buy a motherboard bundle (RAM, CPU, Motherboard) that meets your desired spec and then spend the money on Graphics, Case (with PSU), HDD's etc

This would help your budget come down.

One advantage of the manufacturer builds like Dell is they give you an O/S, in these builds you have to budget for one.

EDIT....
Noticed your bit about you aren't happy with custom building. Although I stress it is easy, if you still don't want to venture this avenue, what I would recommend is get an idea of a specification you want. What you want it for and go to a custom builder / shop to do it for you.

An example of something you could say....

I want a PC, my budget is ~£900. I would like a PC that is future proof, allows me to play the latest games, watch movies. Do my Uni work on it. Has plenty of storage

The builder should then discuss you're needs further and should then help you decide what you need. Obviously if you're not a heavy gamer or only considering it, they should be looking at motherboards with HD graphics or builds with cheap(ish) graphics cards (around ~£60). They should know your doing uni work, which won't be intensive, but to make it future proof they should be looking at multicore technology.

Hope that helps, got work tomorrow so rambling on a bit as I'm a bit tired now

gonzo127

although Lil has shown a decent system i am still not convinced by the multi core arguements of a hex core CPU

extract taken from techspot website on the AMD hex core review

Moving down a notch, we have a similar situation between the Phenom II X6 1055T and Core i5 750 processors. Although the Core i5 750 doesn't support hyper-threading, it still performed very well and held its own against AMD's hexa-core that will retail for $20 more.
The Phenom II X6 1055T was faster when testing with HandBrake, delivered the same level of performance in the x264 benchmark, and was considerably slower when testing with TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress. Then when looking at application and gaming performance, more often than not the Core i5 750 was considerably faster when compared to the Phenom II X6 1055T.
Further examining these results, we observe that on a majority of tests the hexa-core processors face a lack of support for multi-threading. Microsoft Excel is one program that is able to max out six-cores, but the problem here is that Intel processors are simply much faster. HandBrake is another real-world application that can fully utilize six-cores and AMD did have some success in this case.
Although we tested a limited number of games there is no denying that few games fully utilize quad-core processors, let alone hexa-cores, though this is slowly changing. Resident Evil 5 is one title that is able to stress multiple cores, but the Phenom II X6 processors were still slower than the Core i5 750.

Lil306

gonzo127 wrote: »

although Lil has shown a decent system i am still not convinced by the multi core arguements of a hex core CPU

extract taken from techspot website on the AMD hex core review

Moving down a notch, we have a similar situation between the Phenom II X6 1055T and Core i5 750 processors. Although the Core i5 750 doesn't support hyper-threading, it still performed very well and held its own against AMD's hexa-core that will retail for $20 more.
The Phenom II X6 1055T was faster when testing with HandBrake, delivered the same level of performance in the x264 benchmark, and was considerably slower when testing with TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress. Then when looking at application and gaming performance, more often than not the Core i5 750 was considerably faster when compared to the Phenom II X6 1055T.
Further examining these results, we observe that on a majority of tests the hexa-core processors face a lack of support for multi-threading. Microsoft Excel is one program that is able to max out six-cores, but the problem here is that Intel processors are simply much faster. HandBrake is another real-world application that can fully utilize six-cores and AMD did have some success in this case.
Although we tested a limited number of games there is no denying that few games fully utilize quad-core processors, let alone hexa-cores, though this is slowly changing. Resident Evil 5 is one title that is able to stress multiple cores, but the Phenom II X6 processors were still slower than the Core i5 750.

Multi-core is purely for making it future proof, you could save money by going to Quad Core (hell even dual core). Personally I would have gone with Intel, simply because they allow for multi-threading and I'm more of a fan of Intel CPU's.

However, Intel will always win out with their multithreading support but AMD provide better bang for buck and you can always increase performance through overclocking.

Given that technology is always advancing, eventually we will come to the stage where we will see systems utilising more cores. So even though currently there is no need for it and yes the Intel is faster it will benefit in the long run. The OP could have a system which was Dual Core and still use it as word processing isn't really intensive, but more cores provides roof for future expansion.

rdpro

gonzo127 wrote: »

the CPU is good and is pretty easy to overclock to around 3.5ghz, and can be gotten to around 4ghz with a bit more effort

Haven't yet met a Dell bios that allows overclocking like this, very bog standard (hell, ancient) bios setups.

Just browsed ebuyer, found this (no monitor): http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200545

mix with: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168144

seems to fit your budget.

gonzo127

True Lil, as i said i am personally still not won over by the future proofing arguement when it comes to multi core, as when you look how long quad core has been around (4 years now) and they are still not making software which makes full use of it unless you are into media editing so i just cant see a hex core being of much use to the average user for the next 4-5 years at the earliest, once again this is my personal feeling on the matter and i just feel a better, faster quad core would be more than enough for a average user - in this case the OP

rdpro - well i have never had the pleasure of dealing with a dell system because i build my own + my friends and family usually come to me to build theirs so i only tend to only deal with good motherboards

fazza82

Ok ok.... So technical jargon isn't really my thing..
I trust these forums cause they're full of knowledgable people like yourselves.

Say, with the budget I have, I'd go to curry's/pc world etc... What would be the best package (spec wise) I'd be able to get...

I really like the fact I can trust a company with warranty after spending this amount.

Once again, thanks for the input.

Lil306

rdpro wrote: »

Haven't yet met a Dell bios that allows overclocking like this, very bog standard (hell, ancient) bios setups.

Just browsed ebuyer, found this (no monitor): http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200545

mix with: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/168144

seems to fit your budget.

Good find!!

One major advantage of buying from the manufacturer, you get the best discounts lol. I wouldn't say no to that build myself.

gonzo127 wrote: »

True Lil, as i said i am personally still not won over by the future proofing arguement when it comes to multi core, as when you look how long quad core has been around (4 years now) and they are still not making software which makes full use of it unless you are into media editing so i just cant see a hex core being of much use to the average user for the next 4-5 years at the earliest, once again this is my personal feeling on the matter and i just feel a better, faster quad core would be more than enough for a average user - in this case the OP

rdpro - well i have never had the pleasure of dealing with a dell system because i build my own + my friends and family usually come to me to build theirs so i only tend to only deal with good motherboards

Agreed, speed has it's good points. At the moment intel will always be better than amd because it's hyperthreading basically doubles the number of available cores so it's a good cheap mans build if needed. I think I remember reading somewhere there was a really good overclockable CPU (Q9650 or something) which can be overclocked to 4GHz (and dual core) - was in CustomPC. With me personally I'd prefer custom building all the way merely because I have the know how and because I like choosing the components. I think you've got the point right on the head, for the current period it's probably better going with a quad core cpu (be that amd or intel - ideally Intel lol) because technology advances so fast there will be something better out in 6 months anyway!

fazza82 wrote: »

Ok ok.... So technical jargon isn't really my thing..
I trust these forums cause they're full of knowledgable people like yourselves.

Say, with the budget I have, I'd go to curry's/pc world etc... What would be the best package (spec wise) I'd be able to get...

I really like the fact I can trust a company with warranty after spending this amount.

Once again, thanks for the input.

STAY ! - AWAY ! - FROM ! - THOSE ! - SHOPS !

Seriously, you're asking for trouble. Stick to places like ebuyer / novatech.

Ebuyer will give you some of the best discounts (like the link mentioned above) and Novatech have outsanding customer service. I actually spend more money with Novatech just because I love their service so much, I'd rather return to them and be hassle free than spending £50 less and have no end of problems