£500-£850 Gaming PC?

dbtor

My first post here, been browsing the site alot in the past few days at work, looking for the best possible deal on a decent gaming pc.

I'm looking for a PC to play all the latest greatest games on high/max settings and occasionally do some web design/graphical work. I know it's a PC I want so don't try to tempt me to buy a console! :P

What specs do you think I could get for a budget of somewhere between £500 and £850?

Looking forward to your responses :beer:

banger9365

well for £500 to £850 you can have a very nice gamers pc .will do some spec when i get a min

BillScarab

Komplett are pretty good, their standard Intel gaming machine is here

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/config.aspx?ConfigSystemId=10206&Config.AllOptions=X

Just upgrade the graphics card to a 8800 GTS and you'll have a decent system for £791. The best thing is you can chop and change any of the components, so for instance I would ditch the quad core processor and put in a E6750 which bring sit down to £734.

Wherever you get your PC I would recommend a C2D processor, they overclock well so if you want to go down that route you don't need a top spec one. An nvidia 8800 GTS 320Mb or to save cash a Radeon X1950 Pro or XT. 2 Gb of memory and a decent quality mother board and PSU.

Psychofly

Ummm.... yeah what he said. If you can I would ditch the quad core processor and replace the GTS card with a GTS 640MB one.

The performance difference currently between the 320MB and 640MB ones is negligible - in fact almost identical. The difference comes when the memory on the 320MB runs out which is increasingly more likely with modern and future games. The 320MB is an amazing card and I'd definitely recommend it but if you CAN get the 640MB you'll be more future-proof.

dbtor

Whats wrong with the quad core processor?

BillScarab

Nothing wrong with them, just that most current games are not multi-threaded. So if you run a game on a quad core, one core is busy and three sit there doing nothing, on C2D one is in use and one is idle. Therefore why pay for something you won't use? Also if you spend the same on a Core 2 Duo as you would on a Core 2 Quad the C2D will be faster.

dbtor

Won't games being released in the future be multi-threaded, made for quad core? Just thinking ahead.

banger9365

Right first off all you will need and nice case for the hardware I would suggest an Antec Nine Hundred £65 because they are good at keeping everything cool put are a little noisy.
Motherboard XFX NFORCE LT 680I SLI may not be the best put they are very good for the price and you can us dual and quad core cpus, cost £100

CPU you can us a AMD put the best at the moment are Intel and I would go for a duel core or quad core like Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 form £150 to £175

Graphic card well there only one and that is a Nvidia 8800 card,
Nvidia 320mb 8800gts start at £185
Nvidia 640mb 8800gts start at £235
Nvidia 768mb 8800gtx start at £304
Unless you want to pay silly money do not get a factory over clocked card or ultra card you can do that your self. Bigger your monitor is the bigger you will need in graphics card put up to 19” you will be ok with a GTS 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 .

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

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 .

DVD /floppys and other things it here and there they do not cost a lot any more from £5 to £20

GoofyGAT

I like the look of BillScarab's Komplett suggestion, but to get the best bang for my buck I'd be very tempted to get one of these refurb Dell Dimension 9200s, with an E6320 & above CPU+2GB RAM minimum & stick a 8800GTX from eBuyer (or elsewhere if you can find it cheaper) - price range £610-740 in total.

Getting Item Ref: 2847 (1 in stock) will cost you £378 (incl del) & comes with an E6600 & 7900GS. Sell the card off for say £45 & get the 8800GTX + connector* for ~300-320. Grand total = £630-650. That's £200 (off £850) to just save, or save for future upgrades. G

*You'll need an additional connector/adaptor for the 8800GTX: refer to these posts at the Dell forums.

Some multi-threaded games, another 'unofficial' list. I think 2 cores will be good for a long time. When games are ready for 4 cores, you'll probably be ready for your next PC!

If you don't fancy my suggestion & can build your own, as banger9365 suggests, while getting better value+performance than the Komplett PC, then go for it. G

dbtor

Thanks for the advice guys, any other suggestions or websites that you can recommend buying one from? Prefer customizable/pre-built as I don't really have time to build it myself atm.

BillScarab

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk are supposed to be good, but I prefered Komplett for mine as it was more configurable.

If you've got deep pockets you could try Alienware.