£400 max budget new pc - best offer?

divadee

My brother has asked me to ask you lovely techy guys whats the best desktop he can get on the market at the moment for £400 maximum budget.

He does like playing games on the pc like call of duty and doom etc... so his main requirement was for as good a graphics card as he can afford.

Other than games he only really uses the pc for surfing the internet etc....

I havent bought a new pc for a couple of years so dont know if athlon processors are better than intel etc.... which graphics are the best (it always used to be nvidia is this still the same?)

Having a monitor would be nice but not a big big necessity as he has one from his old pc that he could use if need be.

Please help but £400 really is max max budget nothing over that.

Many Thanks

BillScarab

You won't get a gaming PC with a monitor for £400. Personally I think the Intel Core 2 Duo processors offer the best price/perfomance ratio at the moment. As for Graphics cards he needs the only ATi ones worth considering are the HD3850 and HD3870. Nvidia are dominating the market at the moment and I would recommend he tries to get a card based on the Nvidia 9600GT chipset. They're relatively cheap and offer superb performance.

Hwever if £400 is really his max budget he's going to struggle to get an up to date gaming machine. He may have to look at older Graphics card like an ATI X1950 pro which are pretty good and a bit cheaper.

He could have a look at www.pcspecialist.co.uk and see what he can configure there. Start with one of the cheap ones and drop all the non-essential stuff, but I think he'll struggle to come in under £400. For £500 he could get a nice base unit.

One other option is to have a look at Dell, you can get an Inspiron 530 for £319 with an E4500 Core 2 Duo CPU and a Nvidia 8300 GS graphics card. It's not a good card for games but he could then save for a month or two and buy soemthign better to put in then. The equivalent machine with an Athlon 5000 processor, the Inspiron 531, is only £289 so he could get that and a decent card straight away.

EDIT: Forgot to say the only issue with a Dell may be the PSU, modern Graphics cards need a lot of power.

bnorth

I think thats true - gaming PC's are usually more than £400

if you're looking for a cheap gaming PC don't be tempted by Eclipse Computers
they seem to have a terrible reputation for product reliability and customer service.
for the most part the feedback on numerous boards is frighteningly negative.

"The Trading Standards say this is illegal and they will act against the company if enough people complain - so DO IT TODAY! "
http://www.smallworldmedia.co.uk/web...se_comp_1.html

and
"Eclipse computers are COWBOYS and extremely useless."
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/electronic-s...entry/reviews/

and
"I would NEVER EVER order from them again, biggest bunch of cowboys under the sun imo.
Took over two weeks to send my order and there was a whole load of things wrong."
http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ml#post1324630

and
"IF I DIDNT STOP MYSELF FROM PURCHASING FROM THESE MUPPETS, I WOULD HAVE PROBABLY LANDED ONE ON THE MANAGERS! "
http://www.ciao.co.uk/Reviews/eclips...try__ 5262036

and
"DO NOT USE ECLIPSE. THEY ARE ROTTEN TO THE CORE"
http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...uters-com.html

and
"Do not be tempted to use this company - they are cheap but their after sales service stinks"
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/...d.html?t=16173

and
"When the system arrived initially, after a five week delay, it didn't work, wouldn't even switch on."
http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews55635.html
photos here !!!
"Note all 6 of the plastic supports for the front of the case are snapped "
http://photos.offline.org.uk/showgal...p?galleryid=34

and
"Thought id just write this to imform people about this company and what a cr*p experiance i have had of them."
http://www.deadmen.co.uk/forum/archi...p/t-10831.html
and
"Their pc's get good reviews in the magazines, but I wouldn't ever recommend them to anyone."
http://www.ciao.co.uk/eclipse_comput...Review_5622830
and
"I emplore you to read and heed the reviews posted about them, and steer clear at all costs!"
http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Eclipse_Computers

Seagull

I recently bought a base unit (no monitor) from Ebay, they have an online shop.

QuadCore Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 2400 MHz (9 x 267)
Motherboard Asus P5N-E SLI
4 gigs DDR2-800 SDRAM
GeForce 8500 GT (1024 MB)
500 gig SATA II Hard Drive

It doesn't come with an operating system so you need to install that yourself. Windovs Vista 32 bit wont run correctly with more than 3 gigs ram installed, XP may be the same ?

The downside for me was that they fitted just a 512mb card (by mistake??) so I had to chase them up on that issue, not good when they use a premium rate phone number for support. http://www.palicomp.co.uk/
I paid £414 for my system, I would have built my own but it just wasn't worth it for the price.

Battlefield 2 and Call Of Duty 4 run great, I've noticed a big performance increase with video editing etc too.

BaileyB

Keep an eye on this

http://www.bigpockets.co.uk/product.php?lang=&product=IQON001

It's not sold out but not live on their system yet. Add your email address and they will email you when they get them in.

IQON QUINTAL 2028VX PC
• Intel D925 Dual Core 3.0GHz + 2x 2M Cache
• 2048M RAM
• 250G 7200RPM HDD
• DVD-RW
• Intel GMA 950 Graphics
• USB 6x, PCI Express, Serial, Parallel.
• Modem & LAN
• Card Reader
• Philips Keyboard, Optical Mouse & Powered Speakers
• Vista Home Premium, with recovery partition on HDD.

This unit is not supplied with a monitor we do expect some 19 inch Philips widescreen monitors as part of our bankrupt stock clearance which we hope to be retailing for approx £89.99 as an optional extra with this pc. We will keep you updated via this thread. We expect this product to sell out really fast so get your name down on the sold out notifier.