£500-£850 Gaming PC?

planemad

I love http://www.alienware.co.uk/main.aspx

Psychofly

I feel like I'm always arguing with people's suggestions on here and I don't mean to but here I go again.

An Antec Nine Hundred at £65 is overkill for a budget gaming system. It's simply not needed. The money is better spent on other parts of the system.

Nforce 680 SLI motherboard is again TOTAL overkill. An Nforce 650 would more than cover the needs particularly in a budget system.

For CPU on a budget something like the dual core mentioned in above in the komplett.co.uk discussion is plenty. Quad core is overkill and most of this high end stuff is aimed at high end users at a high end price. Not budget systems.

Bigger your monitor is the bigger you will need in graphics card put up to 19” you will be ok with a GTS card.

I run ALL my games at 1680x1050 on a 22" monitor with an 8800 GTS 320MB and everything runs with all options turned up full. If you're on a budget go for the 320MB if you can stretch to the 640MB then it's a good place to spend the extra cash saved on the case and the processor. Don't even consider the GTX one - you'll never use it to it's potential unless you have a big monitor and a high end system. Without that your system will bottle-neck and you'll never see the full benefit of the near £400 card.

PSU (power supply unit) when it come to modern hardware the bigger the better (some people will say you only need a a 500watt psu )I will say get a good one to start with something like a 620W Corsair CMPSU-620HXUK cost £95

I run with 500W power supply no problems at all. The important thing is the quality of the PSU not the wattage so much. Try the Hiper PSUs from Scan. Cheap and good.

Ram 2GB OCZ SLI Ready Edition Dual Channel Kit put if you want Vista 64 get 4GB cost £55 for 2GB and £110 for 4GB

On a budget get cheap-!!! PC6400 2GB RAM (2 x 1GB chips). Don't go for SLI ready as it's not worth paying the extra if you don't need to. This is on a budget remember. Don't bother with 4GB for XP or Vista - 64bit Vista isn't worth the hassle and 32bit Vista or XP won't reference 4GB properly so you'd be wasting cash.

Hard driver you can us any Hdd you want put if you can afford to get a western digital rapor 150GB has the HDD is the slowest part off your pc and they are the fastest sata Hdd on the market they cost £132 yes I now a lot more than a normal HDD put worth every penny .

Again - on a budget don't even think about a Raptor drive. Yeah they're fast but they're also very expensive. Realistically you'd be best with a Raptor for the Windows boot drive and another drive for your data - not really going to fit into your budget. Go for a decent quality 500GB drive for about £65. That'll be more than enough for the majority of people.

banger9365

overkill is not something that goes with a gaming pc that why it a gamers pc not a normal one.
buget or high end

"Don't bother with 4GB for XP or Vista - 64bit Vista isn't worth the hassle and 32bit Vista or XP won't reference 4GB properly so you'd be wasting cash." for xp yes put vista 64 do some research you will be surprised

Amalea

I'm a fan of overclockers myself, just one of a few in the price range:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-042-OK&groupid=43&catid=781&subcat=

I buy all my components from there, and parents bought a low spec PC when their old one went kaput.

Psychofly

banger9365 wrote: »

overkill is not something that goes with a gaming pc that why it a gamers pc not a normal one.
buget or high end

"Don't bother with 4GB for XP or Vista - 64bit Vista isn't worth the hassle and 32bit Vista or XP won't reference 4GB properly so you'd be wasting cash." for xp yes put vista 64 do some research you will be surprised

Normally I'd agree with you but when there's a budget and on a money saving website like this I would disagree. Overkill is an important factor. In my opinion on a money website like this and on a budget you'd be looking for the best performance for your money without going overboard. 4GB on Vista 64bit is nice but on a budget simply isn't worth the extra cash. I think on the basis of most performance per pound it's overkill - however it's something that is VERY earily altered further down the line if required.

I think that the budget is to include a monitor as well so there's at least £150 out the window since in my opinion to buy any less than a 22" widescreen isn't worth it since anything smaller and you're saving maybe £30 anything bigger and you're spending at least £100 more. That leaves the budget between £350 and £700 for the actual base unit. You could EASILY spend the remaining £700 on a PC but I personally don't think the extra cash spent between that and a £500 or £550 PC is value for money when you look at the performance differences.

CustomPC magazine did a comparison between a £500 PC and an equal spec £1500 PC using premium components. Obviously the £1500 one was faster but nowhere near fast enough to justify the £1000 price hike.

If someone comes on here and says "money is no object - I want a beast of a gaming PC" then I would go all out on Raptors, Quad core, 4GB, GTX cards, X-Fi Elites and the like but I think people coming to moneysavingexpert.com are more interested in getting the best performance for the best price.

PistonBroke_2

Psychofly

I would recommend something more along these lines :

LN18745
2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12, DHX £67.73 LN16546
500 Gb Samsung HD501LJ Spinpoint T, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ£62.73 LN19006
Samsung SH-S203/BEBN 20x DVD±R, 16x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, SATA, Black, OEM inc. Nero £18.44 LN17508
320MB XFX 8800GTS, Standard, PCI-E (x16), Mem 1600 MHz, GDDR3, GPU 500 MHz, 2 x Dual Link DVI-I£178.46 LN19274
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550, S775, 2.33 GHz, 1333MHz FSB, Conroe Core, 4MB Cache, Retail£105.39 LN17547
Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI NF650i SLi, S 775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX£68.15 LN14063
Akasa AK-455 Hi Performance Silver based thermal compound, 1.5gr Syringe£1.16 LN16782
580W HiperPower HPU-4M580 Black SLi Ready 20+24Pins P8 Ready ATX2.2/BTX £48.16 LN7842
EZCool Alpine 7104 Silver Case Midi - Apple G5 Design with aPFC 400W PSU£44.00
LN19801




22" Acer ET.E16WE.003 Silver/Black Widescreen LCD, 1680x1050, 700:1, 300 cd/m², 5 ms, VESA£131.90£154.98



Total : £771.74.

A little under budget and amazing performance for the price - including a great monitor.

You could get it cheaper with negligible performance hit by changing the memory to :

LN11596
[URL="javascript://"][/URL]2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-12£39.99£46.99

You could also save about £30 by lowering the processor from the E6550 to the E4300 but I would only recommend doing this if you REALLY wanted to lower the price.

dbtor

There's no graphics card on that list Psychofly? How much does that come to (inc graphics card)?

Psychofly

Yeah there is mate : 320MB XFX 8800GTS
It's about 5th from the top.

If you've got some spare cash floating around you could throw in the £50(ish) Creative Xfi soundcard but to be honest the onboard sound on the motherboard is very good for once so you'd probably be better keeping the extra cash or using it to upgrade the graphics card to the 640MB version (might need to spend a little more than £50 extra though) or up the processor a bit. Depends what you're comfortable on spending. I know I often set budgets of between £x and £y but I'm really not honestly comfortable spending £y. If you've got an idea of a target amount for it and narrow the price range down a little I could suggest where you can save cash on it without affecting the performance too much.

PistonBroke_2

Are you into Overclocking or would you prefer to stick with Stock Speeds ?