Which of these PCs?

monstermedia

HI All,

Which of these barebones systems do you think is best? reasons for for and against would be good.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/Barebones.html

Could push to £230 max but if any of the cheaper ones are just as good that would be even better.

Main Use: Internet, messing about with Digital Images for camera, burning and wathcing DVDs.

Don't Play games on pc ever.


(I already have a 17" flat screen, hd, dvd rom etc from my old machine)

Thanks,

Chris

loobs40

My OH who spends his whole life messing with PCs (Hasn't heard of of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it) especially burning DVDs, video editing etc swears by a minimum of AMD athlon chips.

rchddap1

loobs40: Same here. The day my lounge isn't packed full of PC bits is the day I start to worry about where he is.

Personally I wouldn't go for a pre-built system, but would buy the seperate components and put them together myself (or OH would anyway). However, it all depends on what specifications you need, and whether you feel like putting something together yourself.

wolfman

Yeah, like mentioned above I'd always build my own system. It'd cost a little more, but you can be sure the quality of components will be much better.

If budget is of concern though you probably can't beat the prices. Without going into tech talk, I'd go for the 64 3000 model. £204 is a good price for a bare unit.

monstermedia

Thanks for the info - i probably could put the bits together but wouldn't really know which bits are compatible with each other when ordering from part lists. So i thought this would be a good move.

Do you think the parts in these will be pants then??

wolfman

Oh, no, they'd be ok. Just when you build a machine yourself you can pick the best parts for their price. Whenever buying new parts I'll always go off to sites like https://www.anandtech.com and tomshardware.com to check benchmarks etc...

The only part I'd be wary of is the case and psu. I'm a big believer in having a decent case and psu (especially psu). I'm in the process of upgrading my psu now, and will be spending £70 on a new one. For the price though, the Antec Sonata is a brilliant case and comes with a pretty decent 380W psu, which should be more than enough for you.

If you are worried about compatibility, post on here or other techie forums to get people's opinions. You sure to get plenty of help.

Basically it comes down to what you want. If it's to a budget then one of the Novatech pc's will be fine and I can't see you having any problems. If you maybe want to learn something, have a better quality system (but more cost) and hopefully the satisfaction from it all working smoothly then I'd build yourself.

Stevenj214

could someone provide a checklist of parts that could be used to build a decent low cost system if you have the time please

T4i

-Case
-PSU
-Motherboard
-Memory (RAM)
-HDD
-CPU
-Graphics / Sound card (if not built into motherboard)
-CPU Cooler (Fan&Heatsink)

---

Extras;

-Keyobard
-Mouse
-Network Interface Controller or MODEM (NIC's sometimes built into motherboard)
-CDROM (DVD or CDR)

boogiemaster

Just buy a good motherboard and cpu, you can add decent quality memory at later date.
cheap memory has a lower cass latency and decent memory had faster cass latency.
The higher the cass latency the faster the memory and faster pc