Build me a PC for £1,000

timberflake

Ok guys, I posted yesterday about bulding a PC and at the time I had a budget of £2,000. However, after reading some of the responses I got, it made me re-evaluate what my needs were and I've come to the conclusion that I think a budget of £1,000 will be plenty.

I was originally going to venture into PC gaming, hence the £2,000 budget, but I've decided to ditch that idea now as I have a perfectly good PS3 with over 50 games + accessories. Plus we're getting a new, bigger TV in January.

So, what are my needs. Firstly, my £1,000 budget is for a base unit only, I already have a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Next, the PC will be used for general office, internet, iTunes etc. I also do some video encoding so this will need to be taken into account.

I don't need a lot of HDD space as I like to keep only what I need on my PC's and will be investing in a network attached storage device soon. To give you an idea, I'm currently running a laptop with a 200GB HDD which has 119GB free!

I'm leaning towards pumping my money mainly into the processor and memory + a decent video card for video encoding but I don't really know what would be best. The only abolsutes I have are:

1. It needs to have a gigabit ethernet port.
2. It needs to have a cool looking case.

Apart from that I'm pretty flexible. It goes without saying though that I want to fastest PC possible and the most band for my buck!

gonzo127

to be honest even £1000 would get you a pretty decent gaming system, without even looking to deep into things something like this http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/system/Infinity_Andromeda_SE/ with a few upgrades would give reasonable gaming ability

edit - this is also pretty respectable basic spec http://www.dinopc.com/shop/pc/configurePrd.asp?idproduct=773

andih98uk

I'm an IT Manager by trade and buy\maintain a few pc's for friends family and other contacts. I always buy through cclonline.com as all their systems are built from off the shelf parts so if something dies\needs upgrading on it you can just replace it with an off the shelf part or take it to a local PC shop.

Even though we buy all dell kit at work i can't really recommend them for home use unless you have a good 3 year warranty. Working out what part to buy to fix\upgrade something from Dell\HP etc is very difficult.

Go for something like...

CCL Eclipse Tempest Gaming System
CODE - CCL-EC-HIGH

CCL Elite Hex Gaming System
CODE - CCL-AMDEL-HIGH

GeoffX

If you're not in a rush to upgrade then it's worth pointing out that both Intel and AMD are about to launch new processor families, and AMD (formerly ATI) its HD6??? series graphics cards. I'd wait for them as £1000 is a very healthy budget for a new machine nowadays, particularly as you don't need a monitor. Regarding cases, have a look at Dabs, Scan, CCL, Novatech and the like and see which cases appeal to you. Then Google them and check the reviews.

BitTech publishes a monthly hardware buyer's guide. This one is just under £1000.

JasX

andih98uk wrote: »

I'm an IT Manager by trade and buy\maintain a few pc's for friends family and other contacts. I always buy through cclonline.com as....

Christ that spam came in quickly...... little wonder if you read the reviews that company gets online

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/misc-systems/ccl-computers/reviews/


A firm 1* service company it seems :rotfl:


If you want a basic PC spend £300-500 on a bog standard one, alternatively you can get a very good gaming machine for £1000 odd and see why consoles struggle to keep up

gonzo127

JasX wrote: »

Christ that spam came in quickly...... little wonder if you read the reviews that company gets online

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/misc-systems/ccl-computers/reviews/


A firm 1* service company it seems :rotfl:

to be honest JasX i have personally never had a problem with CCL either and have been using them for ~10 years on and off,

bonus is at the moment is if you sign up on the bit-tech forums and link your account you get free delivery http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=187959 - although if course if you get problems thats going to be very little comfort, but you can get problems with any company

andih98uk

No sorry not spam, i can put hand on heart and say every dealing i've had with CCL has been excellent, i've bought well over £5000 of stuff over the years, returned things, collected things, had stuff delivered and they've never put a foot wrong. I'm sure there are better online retailers and i'm sure there's worse but when it comes to simple, ease of ownership i find they're the best for the reasons i stipulated before.

I have no connection with CCL at all and have built my own PC from parts bought from them and Ebuyer depending which is cheaper.

I have no connection with Ebuyer either.

Toxteth_OGrady

I'm putting together this gaming rig for £1500

Silverstone FT02 case

Intel i7-950 CPU

Asus Rampage III Extreme mobo

2 x MSI Hawk GTX460 SLI

Corsair AX850 PSU

Crucial C300 64G SSD

Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB

Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler

3 x 2G Mushkin Redline Frostbyte 998805 RAM DDR3-1600 CL6-8-6-24

Will be v.easy to o'clock cpu and gfx.

I'll wait and see how the delayed AMD (ATI) 6000s pan out but may upgrade later.

:cool:

TOG

timberflake

Thanks for the replies guys. I've decided not to go down the gaming route as I don't want all the money I've spent on building up my PS3 to be for nothing. Plus, all my friends have PS3's for online gaming too.

With that in mind, can anyone suggest a PC that's not geared towards gaming? The most intensive thing it will be doing to video editing.

Also, I'm unsure about going for a SSD primary drive and a 7200rpm as a back-up. Would this mean that the OS and programs would be loaded onto the SDD and therefore everything would load up instantly, and the slave drive would be used to store docs etc??

andih98uk

In that case i'd go for the CCL Spark Elite
CCL Code: CCL-EL-BSC

It will play most modern games perfectly well albeit in not huge resolution and you can always upgrade the graphics card\cpu\memory at a later date. Just buy games second hand off ebay and you're not putting much outlay into it.

crucial.com/uk is the cheapest and easiest way of upgrading RAM.

You're correct about the SSD that is the best way of using them. Windows & apps on the SSD Any video editing type stuff would go on the Hard Disk

* Please note i am in no way connected to crucial either. Or CCL just in case the post police are still lurking.

timberflake

The more I think about it, the more I think my budget is still a bit high. I only do video encoding every now and again, so the PC is mainly going to be used for home office, internet, iTunes etc.

I want it to be good value, but as fast as possible. Any suggestions?