Heya guys, I am going to be building a new office style pc for my dad soon. But im not sure where to start, the budget is about £450-480 that needs to cover everything except peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse). Heres a list i came up with very quickly, any suggestions? Mobo: ASUS P5N-EM HDMI - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150279 CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130485 Memory: Crucial 2GB - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/119279 HD: Seagate ST3250410AS 250GB - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131301 PSU: Corsair 400W CX PSU - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150985 Case: Coolermaster Centurion 5 Silver - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/103565 Plus a copy of windows xp (about £80-90)?. all that comes to £271+90= ~£360 so there is plenty of room for an upgrade. All help is welcome!!!
go intel e7200 as only a lil extra, though i'd get the e5200 and a descent cooler aside from latest nvidia chipset i'd stay well clear of integrated graphics rather go for the bit-tech gigabyte p31 ga-ds3l and a discreet card from the 4600 or 4300 ati ranges Vista is coming along nicely so go for Home premium 64 and get a 2*2GB DDR2 6400 kit but check program compatibility and if going to be using VPN's remember Sonicwall Vista 64bit is still beta though worked ok for me one time had to install it and also Cisco doesn't have a 64Bit client nore has any plans of releasing one
Does it have to be Intel-based? If not you could put togehter a great office pc based on a 780G/790GX motherboard and of the the energy efficient Athlon X2s. They make for a very quiet combination. Built one as late as yesterday. Also, personally I'd skip Vista completely and stick with Windows XP, possibly upgrading to Windows 7, if it turns out to be any good. You might want to put in a bigger HDD as a 500GB is only slightly more expensive. Some examples: Motherboard: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151961 or http://www.ebuyer.com/product/142347 CPU: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149212 HDD: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/144339 RAM: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/133709 (yes, it's CL5, but that's hardly noticable)
I agree with Azrael in saying an energy efficient AMD would be a good buy. There's not much reason not to go with Vista though, it's a great OS (yet there are still those people who hate it because that's the cool thing to do). Last thought, 4GB should be pretty much standard these days.
Well, the latest Dell offerings pretty much suck. Shoddy build quality and way too noisy. The Dimension series is sorely missed...
Has to be XP, its gonna be a work pc and the program is XP only. Happy to use Intel/AMD whatever. Don't really want to go Dell, ive had too many bad experiences with them.
It was in reference to Cjshuck and what he said was a bit ... wishy washy (yes, that is a technical term), the graphics card isn't needed, a better CPU could be bought for cheaper... I'm sure you can see?!
+1 to Dave's suggestion. Perhaps "upgrade" to a 5050e for 4 quid more? Shame that 790GX-based mATX boards are so few and far between, because it's an even better chipset than the 780G.
I was thinking about the 5050e but it didn't seem worth it for just 100MHz more. Agreed on the motherboards, took me a while to find/think of a decent board.
General office stuff, ie web browsing, documents, watching videos, and the main work program which doesnt have very high requirements. However it needs to last 5+ years so it needs to be reasonaly future proof
What Dave suggested looks perfect. Much better than the first setup screenshot posted IMO. The 780G chipset kicks ass, the PSU is great too - which is important.
