My girlfriend needs a computer for college. She has come to me asking for a computer. I am having a hard time choosing for her because I just want to build a gaming machine (she doesn't play games she's into makeup and fasion ). So she likes to watch movies, surf the web, and listen to lots of music. I want to build something that will meet her needs and last the duration of college. She would also like it to be as cheap as possible. I would like it to have great reliability and quality. Option 1. Asus P5Q-EM -------|||------ Maybe the Asus Maximus II Gene if its under $140 intel Q8200 OCZ 4GB DDR2 800 WD 250HDD - will add more when its needed. Antec 180p mini case Option 2. Asus M4A78-EM AMD AMD Phenom II X4 920 OCZ 4GB DDR2 800 WD 250 Antec 180p mini case
If there's no gaming or heavy duty processing required then you'd be better off saving the cash and going dual core, at least on the Intel setup anyway.
#2 Both are overpowered, maybe drop the RAM to 2Gb and the CPU to the E5200 and then get like mm ve said, a 500Gb HDD. Does the onboard video chip allow for HD? It may be worth using the money saved to get a cheap card like the 8400GS?
If we all followed this logic, this forum would not exist. It's not just about the end result, it's everything that leads up to it that really makes it your (or her in this case) computer. /off topic I agree with the HDD change. As cheap as storage is these days, there's no reason not to.
Dell, cause she'll only blame you if it goes wrong. Been there, did that, didn't like playing tech support.
Asus M3N78-VM AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C5 WD Caviar Green 500GB Antec Mini-P180 White My reasonings, the motherboard has on-board Nvidia 8200 graphics, but also has a PCI-E slot for a more powerful card if blue-ray decoding is required later on. CPU, well its a dual core and its cheap dirt cheap in fact and for basic surfing and music playback, DVD's its perfect. Memory 4GB is becoming the normal amount, vista is a pig but Win7 is on its way. Personally i would hold out for Win7 skipping Vista. Memory is ideal for multiple tabs in firefox and huge playlists in winamp. HDD, the green drive might save some cash on the old elec bills, so every little helps in the long run. Speed of the drive isn't really important for her. Antec Mini-P180 isn't as small as you might think, its the same size as my Lian li V1000b sat next to me, which was a shock to me at first. The mini really is a brick! I suggest it in white, as it will be 'cool' and more than likely match her ipod. And possible result in envy from her new friends who all were bought Dells by there parents. If you really care about her, forget the performance spec of the machine, and get her a quality screen, keyboard and mouse. There isn't anything worse than a bad combination of screen, keyboard and mouse, hands ache and eyes ache. Set the screen up for her and show her how to adjust it, so she dose become blind whilst twittering or facebooking in a dark room due to an over bright screen.
Agreed, my previous had her entire family using me for everything even remotely computer related. If you don't want a Dell/HP/Acer/whatever, then find an nvidia board with some decent enough onboard graphics and put an E5200 in it, 2/3/4GB of branded but cheap RAM, 400W (if that) branded PSU and however big a HDD you can afford with what's left.
i recently gave an old pc to a friend, amd 3700+ 2gigs ram 250gb HDD nvidia 5**FX series 256mb graphics... 400watt psu he uses photoshop alot.. (illustration student) games, (it can run WoW and HL2 no problems ) and has a butt load of music, as well as record his own + edits obviously, it wasnt amazingly fast. but it was never too slow, and was capable of anything he needed doing. so from this, i would imagine your quad core, asus maximus gene motherboards and 4 gigs of ram is overkill. and as stated above, would go for a dell orrrr if you want to build it yourself, go for a e5200, motherboard with onbord sound and graphics: like this? http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigabyte-GA-EG31MF-S2L-iG31-Express-S775-PCI-E-(x16)-DDR2-667-800-SATA-II-SATA-RAID-Micro-ATX 500gb HD, and a cheap psu, like 300 watts or something.
I make my partner follow a simple rule, dont download or change anything with out my permission! I play tech support for her, but we live together. i set up the machine or laptop so it dose everything she requires, and then i think ahead a little of what might be needed. I then make sure its updating when it needs to. I pretty much install the most stable drivers availble at the time and leave it at that. She's pretty good at not fluffing around in settings. Only thing i got a little miffed off about was on an old laptop her parents gave her she told me she was going to uninstall some stuff, and i found she just deleted the shortcuts from the start programmes tree, bless first time i guess.
