This is a great build for the money. I agree, go for the G860 - extremely capable little chip. Get out.
Just did another build price-up on Scan using the G2020 cpu. I included a Seagate Barracuda 500GB and the total came to £263.26. You can get a Windows 8 Pro upgrade on Amazon for £43.19, so the total comes to £306.45. I doubt you will find cheaper than that for new parts. Go second hand on a GPU like a GTX 460 and you'll save £30.
Fractal Design Core 1000 Amd A6 5400L Asrock FM2A55M-DGS 8Gb (2x4Gb) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 LP 1Tb Seagate SATA3 HDD 430w Corsair Builder series PSU £258.28 inc vat, ex delivery. From Scan. It won't be stellar but it'll be a marked improvement over the old machine and there's still room to upgrade to a decent GPU. Personally I'd try & aim for a £300 budget to get a quad & maybe a slightly better mainboard (pref one with 4 memory slots instead of 2). Going the other way, drop down to 4Gb ram and you're inside the £250 challenge.
Thats brilliant. I saw that APU playing BF3 on medium, Skyrim on High, and Mafia 2. Good build for the money. He can also save a bit on the HDD if 1TB isn't needed, 4GB of RAM as you said. The cpu has a good speed for a dual core at stock. I like it!
I can get it to £253 without operating system. Thats with A10 5800k, 4GB 1600mhz ram 500GB HDD (1TB was £7 more) a gigabyte A75 chipset motherboard and a corsair CX430 psu.
Thanks for all the replies everyone. Been at the pub watching England. This^ does sound like a good build as well as the Intel one mentioned before. Prefer Intel myself even though I was an Amd fan back in the day. As for people mentioning operating systems, they're no problem I can get my hands on them... 1TB storage is probably not necessary although seeing as they're a bit compute illiterate they may never delete/uninstall anything. From an old build I have a core 2 duo e6320 (think that's right) which I had overclocked at 3Ghz for a couple of years. I also have a 512mb 8800gt. Seeing as I was going to flog these on eBay I suppose I could use these in the build for a small price out of the £250. Saves me the trouble of selling them plus she's a close friend. Would be a DDR2 build though which may be a bit aged was hoping to build a core i3 and ddr3 build. Just worried an E6320 wouldn't be up to modern games. Bearing in mind her grandson is only 9 I doubt he's expecting top of the range graphics.
Actually, I really like this build too! Better APU = faster in windows and faster in games. You've got the 4GB of RAM, and 500GB should be fine for a budget build. I also had the CX430 and its rock solid, the only downside being the single PCIe plug, but on a A10 build like the above, that doesn't even matter. Isn't building budget rigs fun! So, this is what I have based on the above - comes to £274 with a case.
The new ivy bridge core celerons can be had for as little as £30 and they are very capable little chips.
personally i would go for cas9 1600 ram over cas 11 - you might as well get 1333 @ cas 9 as bandwidth wise is scarily similar to 1600 @ cas 11
May opt for this build. Gonna have a look at measurements though and see whether I can fit it into the dell case. It's a pretty strict £250 budget she doesn't have a lot of money.
Got the Dell today. Got it plugged in and its not as hideously slow as I thought it would be. It bleeps twice on startup and states: Drive 4 not found: Serial ATA, SATA-4 Drive 5 not found: Serial ATA, SATA-5 Floppy diskette seek failure Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility. on pressing F1 the PC boots fine to windows no problems. Tried deleting these drives off the boot priority to avoid this message but to no avail. Anyway, the HDD is 250GB. I can't decide whether to pinch this for a new build, saving £40 for a new one, and then flog the Dell Dimension E520 (Pentium D processor, 1GB memory) for £10-15 without the harddrive or flog the system as it is and get a new HDD. The disk drive is very loud and is a bit broken when opening and closing, but actually seems to be working fine, if I did a new build I would need to buy a disk drive. The Dell also has a card reader, but I have no way to test whether this is working. I'm stuck on what to do.
Here. Now you just sell whatever you can from the Dell. You just need a DVD drive. Scan do a card reader for £1.19.
So which build are people preferring? Pentium Dual-core G860 MSI H61M-P31 4GB Corsair DDR3 1333Mhz Cas 9 430W Corsair psu 1GB XFX Radeon HD7770 Fractal Design Core 1000 250GB HDD from the Dell pc. £260 or AMD A10-5800K MSI FM2-A55M-E33 4GB Corsair ddr3 1600 CAS 11 500GB WD Caviar 430W Corsair Fractal Design Core 1000 £275 (£235 if I take the HDD from the Dell) Not sure I'm keen on AMD and worried about integrated graphics.
As much as I love Intel, to keep under budget you may have to go with the AMD build. Its a lovely build, and this coming from an Intel fan. If you go with a single stick of RAM, you can just add another 4gb stick down the line. The Core 1000 is a lovely case, the psu is great, and the integrated gpu on the amd chip will be fine for any games a 9 year old is going to play. This system also leaves you room to add a graphics card down the line.
Couldn't see what you had changed then to get £15 off but it was postage . Okay I like this build. So you reckon these integrated graphics will be adequate enough? Like I say its a relatively small budget so I told her I could only do my best for that price.
