Hi, A friend of mine has asked me to build him a PC for approximately £500. I am familiar with building PC's, as i have built a couple for mysef, but dont really have the time this time to search through the many different components to draw up ome sensible specs. What components would you recommend for a PC of this price, designed primarily to play music and video's on a large television, and some not-so-demanding games such as age of empires? A monitor will not be required. Your help would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks, Greg
You won't go far wrong with this: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2009/07/08/what-hardware-should-i-buy-july-2009/2 I'd probably recommend you put in an E7x00 cpu instead of the E5x00 and you can get the HD4870 512mb for around £95 which is naff all extra for a good deal more performance. I'd also recommend the WD Caviar Black 640gb which will be around a tenner more. You could also install a X-Fi sound card, get it in PCI-Express, and don't spend more than £50 on it. Should be around £500 depending on supplier differences, and which of the above you decide to take
Forget about Creative, and cheap sound cards in general. If you want a cheap card, get the Asus Xonar DX, but honestly, there's no need for a separate one. Onboard will do just fine.
Hmmm, I think a creative sound card will give better sound and a much larger feature set than onboard. Instead I'd say don't get a soundcard if money is tight because most people notice the cpu, gc, ram, etc more.
You won't get ANY better sound from a separate card unless you spend at least $300 on it. As for features, well, Creative's features are basically EAX (which is kinda dead now) and their hideous, dreadful drivers (if there are any for your OS (they still don't have any drivers for 7 for example)).
I find that most on-board sound cards to have noise in them that get filtered on good dedicated sound cards... I will agree that creative is pointless as other manufactures have better cards( and better support). Such as HT | OMEGA CLARO or ASUS Xonar they have really good SNR.
Yeah they do. I have an XFI Audio PCI-Express and I'm running Windows 7. They aren't good drivers to say the least, but I am getting sound
I'm a creative hater too.. they make garbage, always have- I dunno how soundblaster became the defacto standard for so long.. must have been alot of suki suki going on in the good ol boy network
Prime example of thread hijacking. If you want a discussion about the relative merits of sound cards START A NEW THREAD. This is my choice of components. I prefer AMD over Intel and this rig is designed for quietness. Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA770T UDP3 £70 or MSI 770 C45 £60 Processor AMD Phenom x2 550 £75 Graphics Sapphire Radeon HD4670 Ultimate (passive cooling) £55 Hard Drive Western Digital WD6401AALS 640GB Hard Drive 32MB Cache £50 Heatsink & fan Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro £18 Memory 4GB (2 x 2 GB) Corsair TW3X4G1333C9DHX DDR3 £60 Optical Drive LG GH22NS50 22x SATA DVD±RW Dual Layer £16.50 Power Unit Corsair 520W HX Series Modular PSU £70 Case Antec 300 £45 Availability of these is variable, most are from Ebuyer with free shipping and Dabs who are also offering free shipping at the moment. The Gigabyte motherboard is currently available at Microdirect, Dabs are out of stock.
There's no need for that attitude, friend. How is the OP going to know what components to pick if he doesn't understand the benefit/deficit between two different type of component? Equally, he asked for hardware opinions, so what's the problem with people discussing which type of addin board to use? Bearing in mind the OP explicitly stated "designed primarily to play music and video's on a large television" a discussion on sound cards would be VERY on topic in this case, as an audiophile would likely need a decent optical digital-out link for connection to kit.
