buying and upgrading

phantom_lord

Atm the moment I have an advent laptop, I use it mainly for playing poker, the thing is I have a large amount of software that I use to play so the load seems pretty hefty, and the laptop just about copes.

I was thinking of going to get a basic dell desktop and adding in 2gb ram + a 4/500gb hd, something like:

D01E15 Dimension E521 wrote:

AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core processor 5600+

Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 (Incl Operating System Re-installation CD) - English

VISTA UPGRADE MCE to Vista Premium Upgrade on:

Collect & Return, 1 Year Service only

Dell™ 20" UltraSharp™ Digital Flat Panel (2007FP) - UK/Irish

512MB DDR2 533MHz Memory

160GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache

16x DVD +/- RW Drive

256MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 Pro graphics card

comes in at €1570, the hd and ram will prob push it up to 2k ish.

Is this standard? Or should I just buy the full package off dell? Or should I build it myself from scratch?

TerrorFirmer

Use Komplett. You don't even have to build it youself, they'll do it for you.

1,500 from Komplett will get you a similar system with more ram, better gpu and bigger Hd space and a decent monitor.

phantom_lord

one thing though is that I already have a dell 20in flat screen and kinda wnat a second one to match it, although I guess I could put up with 2 different monitors if it saves me a couple of hundred yoyos...needs to be 1600x1200 res though.


Thanks for the link, certainly alot cheaper. amd or intel?

awhir

you can just buy the lcd from dell ?

phantom_lord

awhir wrote:

you can just buy the lcd from dell ?

yeah I know, it's just that that put me off buying a pc somewhere else if a lcd was included in the package.

phantom_lord

Corsair Value S. PC5300 DDR2 2048MB
NEC DVD±recorder AD-5170 IDE Black OEM
NorthQ 4775-500BULK, ATX 500W, 120mm
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz Socket
PC with no operating system
Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB SATA2
Norman IC, 1 year license Virus Control
PC box
SoftThinks Installation/Recovery
Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110,
Gigabyte Triton GZ-XX1CA-SNB Black
ABIT IL9 PRO, Intel 945P, Socket-775,
LEADTEK GeForce 6800GT 256MB GDDR3,
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2

1217.44


I was thinking of going for this, is that graphics ok for running 2/3 screens?

8T8

Change the PSU from NorthQ (very poor quality brand) to this Akasa 400W PSU (good quality).

A 6800GT is overkill for poker games which I assume are largely 2D based.

A card like the 7300GS will do the job just fine, note that card has one DVI & one VGA.

If you want dual DVI outputs the cheapest I can see on Komplett is this X1600 Pro.

In order to run 3 or more displays to keep things as straight forward as possible it is best to get two NVIDIA cards or two ATI cards do not mix them however you can get different models e.g a 7300GS plus a 7100GS or an X1600 & an X1300 for multi display purposes.

It also means you need a motherboard with dual PCI-e x16 slots for the two graphics cards so you would need one like this Asus P5B-V.