Hi all, Nice site here! Basically I've had a long run of bad luck with my systems from about the age of 17... My first custom PC I built was when I was 14 and lasted me until 17. By then I was in college and it was really a case of replacing it urgently so I bought some basic mini desktop from Currys by Acer to which I was horribly over-charged and lumped with Vista. Eventually that thing bored me and I replaced it with a new custom built, I picked the components but this time had Arbico build it for me and send it. That lasted about 6months when I had to replace the motherboard. Another 6months on and the RAM failed. The thing had terrible cooling even after buying a new PSU with a fan, plus two noctua fans. I abandoned it and bought a cheap PC from eBay which had a great GPU for the price of 100.00 however the processor and motherboard sucked as did the RAM... As 100.00 Wasn't a lot of money I bought another from eBay just 5 months later. This time I picked something I knew would perform. 4 Gig of DDR3 ram, on-board graphics, 500gb hard-drive and a one of the better Athlons by AMD which runs 3ghz without even being overclocked. This machine, despite how it sounds on paper compared to some systems today is extremely good. The whole system gets no hotter than 30c at any given time. Unlike some others I know I can't actually build a pc for a profit and sell it on sites such as eBay but since I have 2 systems here, with various components I decided to spend 50.00 on each to repair them and then hopefully sell them on eBay as a one-off thing and hopefully come back with at least 100.00 profit (if you see it that way) on each. That will give me the system I'm using currently and about 300.00 to pimp the crap out of it, or I could add a GPU to it, sell it and then build a new pc from scratch with about 450.00. Which is the plan right now. So I'm looking for a stable build for about 400.00 I want to boot Windows 7 64-bit from a SSD and a very small hard-drive for data. (Not big on having these giant 1TB beasts) The motherboard is something I feel is always over-looked so I would want something that offers full support for all of AMDs current processor lines as well future (hoping they get back to their glory days) Unfortunately I doubt 400.00 will be able to get me any great Intel CPU. I used to use gainward graphics cards 5 years ago, but they look to have fell of the face of the earth in terms of quality... So anything that is capable of playing the latest FPS games in at least normal graphics is fine. As for the AMD CPU I'd say Phenom is as recent as I would go. The bulldozers look like absolute .... for the price. PSU - I have a whole bunch but something that would run everything in the build with ease would be nice. Cutting it short, I'm looking for a mid range PC. I have a few ideas on what spec to use, but I'm looking for something that can last at least 3-5 years like in the mid 00s. Also. What the hell happened to component prices... 50.00 for a god damn 250gb hard-drive THE FUDGE!?! Thanks Dan
It's a big... nay, huge ask wanting an SSD and HDD in for a £400 price bracket... How about this? Nothing off-brand (last thing you want is an off-brand PSU) and a Black Edition Processor coupled with the after-market cooler and 120mm exhaust fan should allow for some overclocking, too. Nothing extravogant, but should have room for a little tweaking.
