Reasonable specs/price?

dmigsy

Hi guys,

I haven't been using PC's or upgrading them since I bought a new graphics card for Half-Life 2 many years ago. So I'm totally out of touch with what's what in term of PC builds. I'm going to buy a new PC after many years of having only a laptop. In my ingnorance I've been on Dell and put together what i think looks like a reasonable build.

It would be great if you guys could pick holes in it - what's good & what's bad or suggest alternatives. One proviso though - I don't think I'd have the time to build a system myself.

My usage will be fairly basic but I'd like the option to play current games at as a resonable high level of detail. I don't need bleeding edge though - I do most of my gaming on PS3 & Xbox these days.

Here's the specs of the system I'm thinking about :

PROCESSOR StudioXPS 8100 - Intel Core i5 Processor 650 (3.20GHz, 4MB) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit- English edit
MEMORY 8192MB (4x2GB) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel Memory edit
HARD DRIVE 2TB Dual Hard Drive Raid 0 "Stripe" (2x1TB - 7200rpm) edit
GRAPHICS CARD 1GB ATI Radeon™ HD 5770 Graphics Card edit
OPTICAL DRIVE DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD) with Roxio Easy CD and DVD Burn software edit
KEYBOARD Dell Multimedia USB Keyboard Dual Tone - UK/Irish edit
WIRELESS SOLUTION Dell 1525 Wireless PCIe Network Card 802.11n edit
SOUND SOFTWARE Integrated HDA 7.1 Dolby Digital Audio edit

Total price : €1104. My budget won't strech much further than this.

Do your worst! Thanks

Liber8or

dmigsy wrote: »

MEMORY 8192MB (4x2GB) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel Memory edit

8Gb? I think that would be your first item to amend. 8Gb is too much and unnecessary. 4gb would be more than enough.

Also, is 2TB also required? Perhaps you should pick up just 1TB and see how long that lasts. Should you need more, get the 2nd drive at a later date, as the price will have also gone down.

Hope this helps!

EDIT - Just saw you are going to Dell. Stop. Seriously. €1104 for all that is ridiculous. You say you don't have the time to build, but you would save yourself a fortune buying the parts individually. Then, over time, build the PC up from the ground. It really doesn't take long. I am currently building my own PC (taking my time with cable management, etc) and it is only taken me a couple of hours. It is a lot easier than you think... Don't go to Dell; for evidence just check on www.komplett.ie and www.overclockers.co.uk for price comparisons of the individual parts. Don't forget, you get warranty's for each part, such as GFX card. So, do not fret about the PC going down.

Liber8or

Also, not so sure about this, but I remember a time when you could not swap parts or upgrade peripherals within the PC as it requires DELL manufactured hardware. As I said, I believe this was enforced before, not sure if it still is. This removes any chance of you manually changing things yourself, and you will always have to go through DELL if you want to upgrade that particular PC...

EDIT:

Taking Komplett for example

I totalled up 700 euro for
-Processor
-Motherboard
-Memory
-Graphics Card
-HDD
-DVD Writer

Missing parts; case, psu and mouse/keyboard.

So, if we assume those parts cost 150 euro. Total - 850, Saving - 250 euro. And the brands I picked were ASUS, Corsair and a slightly better CPU than the one you listed above. Finally, Komplett are not always the cheapest too...

Hope this helps!

deceit

Just buy it from hardwareversand, pay them the 30 euro to put it together and you get the best of both worlds, a cheap and much better computer with all decent parts, whereas in dells you dont know what most of the parts they use will be. If you decide to go this route, people on here would be more than happy to help you choose a pc from there.