Help please-what spec PC

tinalee32

Hello,
I need to buy a new desktop PC, the old was was very old and has now died!!!
My 15 year old son loves to spend most of his freetime on the PC, and he wants it to be able to run games without too much slow down.

The problem is I only have a budget of about £400-£500 and I know how expensive good graphics cards are.

Can anyone advise on what is a decent PC, with a decent graphics card, and anything else that I need to know regarding the processor.

Very many thanks:D

BillScarab

Are you hgoing to use an existing monior, keyboard and mouse? If so £500 shoudl get you something capable of playing gaames. Maybe not at the highest detail levels but certainly usable. If the budget includes a new monitor then it will be more of a struggle.

Personally I'd look for something with a Core 2 Duo processor (even a low spec one will be fine), 2Gb RAM and probably a Radeon 3850 graphics card as that is about the best value for money budget card around. If you can get one with the 8800GT card even better.

davetrousers

Don't buy a PC with Windows Vista on it, that will use up a lot of system resources. Novatech give you the option of Windows XP on their computers

BillScarab

davetrousers wrote: »

Don't buy a PC with Windows Vista on it, that will use up a lot of system resources. Novatech give you the option of Windows XP on their computers

It does use a fair bit of RAM but so what? 2Gb RAM is plenty for Vista and won't increase the price of a new PC dramatically. If you're buying a new PC you shouldn't have any issues with Vista unless you have some very old or unusual peripherals.

petemcpete

I have just used a site called PC Checker that Web User magazine recommended as I was looking for a laptop and wasn't sure what to look for either!

On there with your son's requirements you should be looking at either the entertainment or ultimate desktop computers and within there the best entertainment compuer for your budget would be the Dell Inspiron 530 DT that scores 55.0% with the following parts WITHOUT a new screen for £418.99 as it has the following

• 2 GB Memory.
• 320 GB Hard Disk
• 16x DVD +/- RW Drive
• 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro graphics card

Or PC World have a few reconditioned bargains on there like the PACKARD BELL iXTREME 2711 which has the same bits as above but a better graphics card in the 256mb 8500 GT (it gets a better score on PC Checker)
for £504.94 delivered.

BillScarab

the only problem is that neither the Radeon 2400 or 8500GT are particularly good for games. These are the best buys in each price band last month according to Tomshardware the only issue is that the two cheap cars they recommend are older DX9 cards and you may struggle to get a new build machine with them fitted. You may be better going for a machine with onboard graphics and then buying a card yourself once you've got the PC.

Smirch_This

Recommendation (I just did this):

Acer T180 (AMD X2 4000, 1Gb RAM, 160Gb SATA disk). Comes with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (based on XP Pro believe it or not!) from here: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-T180-GB7Z-Desktop-PC-AMD-X2-4000-160GB-HD_W0QQitemZ190190300339QQihZ009QQcategoryZ179QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Add another 1Gb of RAM from http://www.crucial.com/uk/ .

Integrated graphics is CRAP but it has a PCI-Express x16 socket. Add a fairly respectable graphics card (8600GT) from: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/126985

And you're sorted.

I've got all this kit (although I bought the Acer base unit new for £299 from Tesco!). Never a problem with it and I use it for professional software development (as well as a bit of UT3 occasionally at 1280x1024 with no visual lag at full detail ).

Don't worry about the disk space. 160Gb is a lot!

TOBRUK

Surely if it is for game use I wouldn't have thought you should go for less than 512 graphics card, especially with the demands of many games nowadays.

Smirch_This

It makes little difference as far as I'm concerned. You lose some texture quality but the effect is minimal as most of the cool stuff is done by the card's pixel shaders.

I can't tell the difference between that card and a 768Mb 8800GT running UT3/ETQW at full whack settings at 1280x1024!

tinalee32

Many thanks for all your replies.

I now know what I need to look for, and dont feel so lost.

Thank you:rotfl: