haha, my dad likes to think he's technologically advanced for a 70 year old...! Ah cheers, saves me about a tenner! Thinking 120gb ssd could be enough storage for them, and if it's not... an external hard drive for christmas...!
Before buying them a pc, consider what they use it for, and consider a windows surface RT, virus free, simple to use, device for web access, apps and email. They can download games from Microsoft store without making you have to re install their OS every second day, cause they wanted to download free games that are scam ware. Or what they downloaded was bloated with 5 IE toolbars in the install process.
Or if they're willing to throw away the entire windows ecosystem and WIMP + Keyboard environment then look at an Apple or Android solution. Apple has many many thousands of great tablet apps, Android relies on scaling up phone apps to fill in the gaps of it's small but growing tablet app collection while Microsoft... Is just getting started. IMHO if you want a tablet and want the best tablet eco system then go with Apple. If you've done your research and know you'll be happy on Android then save a few £ and go with Android. If you're an early adopter and want to see what windows RT is all about then by all means buy the first generation device on the market. Don't get me wrong. Microsoft WILL SUCCEED in the tablet space. Although I'm tied into Apple myself it'll be great having a third major player in the sector and I think MS will do well if they can keep their focus. It's just very early days to start recommending it to newbies.
Yes that ssd looks okay The Intel stock cooler is as crap as its always been if you did go for that coolermaster case you'd have to use something low profile anyway so it would suffice for an i3
A £95 CPU is unnecessarily expensive for a web surfing PC. Check out the Celeron G5xx and Pentium G6xx series. You also get twice the performance of an Atom for the same price. If you don't need SATA 6Gbit/s, an H61 motherboard will suffice. If you'd prefer to have SATA 6Gbit/s, take a look at B75 boards. Just get the cheapest board you can find that has all the features you need. As for Micro-ATX versus Mini-ITX, it's up to your preference. ITX is a tad more expensive, but also a bit smaller in size. Get an SSD. It will make a huge difference and is also much more future proof. I recently built a web surfing machine for my parents with a Celeron G550, ASRock B75 Pro3-M, 4GB 1333MHz RAM, and a 64GB OCZ Agility 3, and it's really fast for the price!
Ahh this has got more complicated again. 2 sides to this really: 1) i eed a decent enough PC for a range of easy jobs, that is cost effective 2) i want to build a decent computer, that looks and feeld cool...selfish maybe, but i don't care!
If they're using it for the same sort of things my folks do (ie web browsing, occasional word processing, and looking at photos), then I'd think about getting a little Atom based PC like this. We have quite a few of them out in the field at my job, and I've had no problems with them so far, and they have a surprising amount of grunt, even full screen 1080 flash videos are ok. All you need to add is a stick or two of RAM, and a 2.5" HDD, or ideally an SSD. Plus you could add a CDROM if you thought they might need one. It's £215 for the Shuttle £15 for 4Gb RAM £65 for a 120Gb SSD or £43 for a 500Gb HDD £15 for a DVD-R drive. £330 all in, and it's completely fanless. That's my vote anyway.
The system I built for my parents cost them 280€ (probably around £200 in the UK) and it has twice the CPU performance of an Atom system. It isn't that small though and not fanless.
I'm following this thread with great interest as I'm looking to build a mini ITX PC for my parents. I am very interested in the spec above, posted by Shirty (thanks mate). My only concern is that the CPU doesn't appear to have a GPU built into it, neither does the motherboard. Am I missing something? I don't want to add a discrete video card, I would rather run one off the CPU / mobo.
When I checked on scan I could see the sandybridge mention a GPU, but the Ivybridge i3 didn't. Is that just an omission by Scan? Or are my eyes failing me, lol. Sent from my BlackBerry 9300 using Tapatalk
Yes, it's just a Scan omission. From the horse's mouth: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/65503/3rd-Generation-Intel-Core-i3-Processors/desktop
Thats the bit that concerned me about getting a cheaper CPU like the Celeron G555, would i need a seperate card? or would the onboard on the MSI B75IA-E33 mobo suffice...? Think i'll just splash out, i'll be using it when i go home and visit, gives less oportunity for my mum to get pissed at speeds... plus it's a more more interesting....
No worries bud. I should just point out that I'm by no means an expert, it's just that the last two machines I have built for my folks have been a Shuttle and then an FT03 so I'm interested in small and quiet. I also know nothing about AMD these days (bring back the glory days of the Athlon XP) so I can't recommend what I don't know about. As far as I know, the CPU I chose offers HD2500 graphics which the mobo selected can output, making it a reasonable value proposition if no discrete GPU is required. The mobo itself doesn't have an onboard GPU. Then you could add a decent GPU for gaming down the line, although I'd recommend a rear-exhausting model in a case that small. The G555 does feature it's own GPU which the mobo can output, but it'd become stressed if you started gaming on it. Hell, if you've got the funds build something you can all enjoy!
Can't see that one on Scan, is there one on there you'd recomend? Want to get everything from one place if i can! was thinking this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/450w-zalman-psu-zm450-gs-quiet-fan-atx-v23 is Akasa still mediocre...?
down to my final decision, the processor, down to 2 options: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...-290ghz-3mb-smart-cache-gpu-850mhz-65w-retail http://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...bridge-dual-core-33ghz-3mb-smart-cache-retail Trying to work out if saving £35 is worth it.
I would spend the £35 pounds now - it will age better and if your folks are anything like mine then they will have the PC for the next 10 years.
