Options for the non tech savvy

isengrim19

Hello everyone, long time lurker here asking for a little advice on my upgrading options.

I'm looking to put together a gaming rig with a budget of about 700 euros. I won't be using anything from my current pc except the hard drive and OS.
The problem is that I dont have the technical wherewithall to put it together myself. (I've switched out ram and hard drives before but thats about as far as i'm willing to go)

So my question is: Am i better off buying a pre built pc from a custom retailer or ordering the parts and having someone put it together for me.

In either case some suggestions on places to go would be greatly appreciated. (i'm in the Dublin area)

Effluo

Forget the prebuilt systems!!!
The manuals that come with pc components are very extensive and really help you along, but if you don't fancy building it yourself then Hardwareversand.de build you whatever you want for 20 euro!
It's just much better value getting it that way....


Well another guy just asked for a gaming rig for E700 and this is what solitaire gave him!

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=62017297&postcount=11

Now there are some funnies with this particular build.
The guy wanted a very large screen a 22". The graphics card then had to suffer slightly, it is still capable however!
You never said anything about a monitor so i'm supposing that you would want one too...

If you decided to get a 19" monitor instead you could possibly get an AM3 mobo which is more upgradable and then ddr3 ram aswell.

Also something to note is that in the build i linked to Solitaire made a mistake with the a power supply(omg what a noob ) you have to change the power supply from the corsair vx450 to the corsair hx450.


If you already have a screen and intend on keeping it for gaming then message back it's resolution. If you already have a monitor your system would improve quite a bit.

Also i'm aware that the build i linked to has a hard-drive included in the price. Please clarify that you don't want a 1Terrabyte hard-drive for E63

Just one more thing, Do you not have a dvd-rw in the comp your stripping from? Why can't you use that?

isengrim19

First off thanks for the quick reply and the advice

To clarify, i have a dvdrw drive which i can reuse, forgot to mention that. My screen is actually the only decent bit of kit i have.. 22'' HD which i run at 1980x1080 resolution. Altho with my current rig i turn that down for playing games.

63 quid for a TB hard drive is quite nice but i already have plenty of disc space, so thats not really necessary.

ScumLord

isengrim19 wrote: »

Hello everyone, long time lurker here asking for a little advice on my upgrading options.

I'm looking to put together a gaming rig with a budget of about 700 euros. I won't be using anything from my current pc except the hard drive and OS.
The problem is that I dont have the technical wherewithall to put it together myself. (I've switched out ram and hard drives before but thats about as far as i'm willing to go)

There's nothing that's much more complicated than that really, putting the pc together is fairly straightforward, it's like a very simple lego set. As long as you buy the right parts you shouldn't have a problem, It's not like you can plug a cpu in a pci slot so I don't see how you could make mistakes.

Getting it up and running can be a pain depending on the OS, when I tried to install XP on my PC it couldn't recognise the SATA hardrives and I had no floppy to install the drivers. I'm not sure about Vista but if you go with Win7 this won't be a problem.

Are your old hard drives IDE or SATA?

You can't pass up the opportunity to say such classics as "it lives!" the first time you turn on your home made pc.

Solitaire

Its important to remember that not everyone on Boards played with Lego in their childhoods. People who did play with Lego as children (and I use that term loosely ) look at Dells and kinda go "They supply them assembled?!?! But where's the fun in that?!"

isengrim19

As it happens i was a huge lego fan back in the day. In fact, rigging up a working helicopter rotor out of an old technic kit is probably my most impressive achievement to date

I just can't afford to spend a big chunk of money on pc parts and not have a guarantee it'll actually work.

So with that in mind, lets rephrase the question a bit.

What would be the best build i could get for 600 quid, including delivery/assembly?

I won't be needing a hard drive, OS, dvdrw drive, monitor or peripherals.

StopNotWorking

Hardwareversand.de build your machine for you for €20

Personally I would wait a few more weeks before you buy anything. ATi will be releasing its new range of GPUs very soon and those will force down the price on their current cards(Meaning you can snag a better bargain and save money for a better cpu/ram/storage etc etc)

Effluo

meh...

There's no gaurantee that the other cards will come down in price with the new range!
The prices of the 48xx series has in fact come down quite a huge amount over the last 6 months alone.

The 4870 6 months ago was around 180 now it can be got for closer to 120.... That's a big difference.

The new ATI card will be priced in regards to performance, just like every other card