Quote:
Originally Posted by skippy upwood
(cross-posted from the S&T forum)
I live in the UK and I'm looking to buy a desktop computer, since my current computer (which I bought in 2004) is falling apart.
My monitor and speakers are in a reasonable condition so I don't need to replace them.
My criteria are:
- Must be £500 or less
- Good quality components, esp. a good cooling system - I don't have A/C in my study and its gets dusty at times.
- Reasonable customer service
- Up to date, since I enjoy playing computer games.
Any recommendations (other than self-build and importing from the US) would be very welcome. Obviously its going to be difficult to satisfy all the above criteria with a £500 budget, but I'm trying to get as close as poss.
|
I know that you're not keen to build it yourself, which is fair enough, but I think you would benefit from understanding what it would cost to build it yourself so that you can make an informed decision on what you're paying for. Building a PC is not complicated and a moron could do it, but the real advantage is that you have control over the components you put in there. It's not just about saving money, it's about balancing out the processor/memory and graphics card. That is something that you need to seriously consider even if you opt to buy a pre-made system from a retailer.
£500 is perfectly adequate for buying a relatively powerful gaming machine and I wouldn't recommend that anybody with more sense than money spends any more than that. Spending £500 every 3-4 years yields a much better return in price/performance than spending £1000 every 6-8 years.
Buying a PC is always about choosing what you want the bottleneck in the system to be. Like any machine a PC can only ever perform as well as the weakest component. There's no sense in buying a machine with a powerful CPU and a weak graphics card, or vice versa. I don't want to start an argument here, but contrary to other advice you've been given I wouldn't go within a country mile of Curry's or PC World. I'm not saying that these outlets rip people off, but the components which they use in their systems are not matched together well for your purposes. For instance in their £300-500 systems they always include a standard processor, but they only ever include a sub-standard or integrated graphics card which would leave you with shockingly low FPS (frames per second) in any reasonably respectable game. They then have "Gaming" systems in their stores for which they set the bar far and above what you actually need to play modern games on a PC.
The biggest bottleneck in 90%+ of current computer games is the graphics card. If you were building the PC by yourself, you would expect to spend around £150 on a decent graphics card and £200 on all the other hardware put together. It's for that reason that the PC World and Curry's of this world have such unbalanced systems, because the people who buy computers there generally don't appreciate the colossal importance of the graphics card and only look at the price of the system and the processor speed.
I had a brief look at a variety of online retailers to see what they were offering, but I'm frankly appalled by how many seem to insist on you buying their "gaming" range of PC's (costing £300 more than a basic PC!) to get a machine worthy of playing games on. I can't tell you what to buy, but consider the following. If you were prepared to build it yourself, for £503.30 including VAT and delivery from overclockers.co.uk you could get:
- Intel Core i5 Sandybridge 2300 (The i5 Sandybridge is a complete BEAST of a processor which will be plenty good to last you 4-5 years. It is amongst the fastest processors ever released to consumers.)
- Corsair 4GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM (More than enough for any game and amongst the fastest RAM on the planet.)
- ATI Radeon 5850 Extreme graphics card which will run any game yet released at a fast frame rate on maximum settings.
- Asus P7P67-M Motherboard with integrated HD soundcard
- Coolermaster Elite Case + fans + Coolermaster Elite 500W Power Supply
- Samsung 1TB (1000GB) hard drive
- LG 22X DVD rewriter
The above supposes that you already have a a Windows XP or later CD/DVD from your old PC that you can delete from your old PC and install on your new one. However let me emphasise that the above would be an
expensive gaming PC, it would make total
mincemeat of every game yet released. You could totally max out Battlefield Bad Company 2, or Crysis, or Dirt 3, or Mass Effect 2, or Portal 2, or Civilization 5, or Starcraft 2 or Forged Alliance. Even new games not yet released like Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3 will run comfortably on the above system. (Going by the projected system specs.) That machine would literally eat those games for breakfast. Short of the financially obscene, the above is at the bleeding edge of what a PC can do. If you bought and assembled the above then you'd be the envy of all your friends for years. You don't actually
need that much power to get what you want, the above is future proofed for a good few years. The CPU is powerful enough that games in 2 years still won't come close to matching it although the graphics card would start to age. However it is also upgradeable, if in another 2 years games are being released which challenge the graphics card, that motherboard will let you buy another secondhand Radeon 5850 for £50 on ebay and use both of them at once which can yield up to about another +70% of graphics power. (Something called Crossfire)
But even the above is massively overpowered if all you want to do is play the games which are out at the moment. If you replaced the processor and motherboard with something less powerful you could get away with spending £420, it would still play all of the latest games at maximum settings, but it will grow a bit tired in the next couple of years. Then again, you could use the money saved to buy a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium and it would still cost less than the above. Just replace the Motherboard and Processor from above with:
AMD Phenom 2 Quad Core X840, and
Gigabyte M4A7 motherboard
I realise that you don't want to assemble the PC by yourself, but the reason you should consider the pricing of the above is so that you can appreciate how much of a markup you are prepared to pay for a retailer to do it for you.
There's no point in looking at the major retailers. PC World would charge you close to £1000 for a PC which won't even play games as well as either of the above. Even Dell won't sell you a Core i5 system for less than £650, and even then it comes without a graphics card (worth another £150 for which they charge you £220) which will play the latest games. Even amongst the specialist online retailers the situation isn't much better, they still command a large premium for assembling the components for you. Bear in mind that you still get at least a 1 year warranty on all components which you buy if you make the machine yourself, so all the retailer is doing is acting as a middleman. (Granted this will save you a Saturday afternoon in assembling the PC and if anything goes wrong maybe another hour in working out which component has gone wrong so that you can send it back. However with only 1/10,000 components being defective is that really worth £400-700 to you?)
Which drags us back to your original question. I searched briefly online to see if there actually are
any online retailers who would sell you anything worthy of your money. There are kind of, but there are none who would come close to the value for money of building it yourself. I'm not going to recommend anywhere, because I'm still in shock as to how bad the systems on offer are. What I suggest you do though, is consider the following bits of advice.
1. Processor: Nothing less than an Intel Core2Duo/Core i3 running at 2.8Ghz (at a bare minimum) Alternatively an AMD Phenom 2 running at 3.00Ghz (quad core) Ideally you want a Core i5 processor, they are substantially better.
2. Graphics card: Nothing less than an Nvidia GTX 460 or ATI 6850 (the 5850/5870 for some inane marketing related reason is faster than the 6850.)
3. Memory: Nothing less than 4GB of DDR3 memory
Secondly, if in doubt check the benchmarks of the components in the system you are buying. For graphics cards look at:
Charts, benchmarks 2011 Gaming Graphics Charts, Gamer Index
For CPU's look at:
Charts, benchmarks Desktop CPU Charts 2010, 3DMark Vantage High
Those benchmarks will show you (relatively) how good the components match up against the competition. Remember, a PC is only as powerful as its weakest component. If in doubt, check against the benchmarks on Toms Hardware to see how a particular component fares against the competition. Don't be suckered into buying a crap system, even buying a base PC from Dell and then buying a graphics card and installing it yourself would be better.
Any questions don't hesitate to ask, but I hope the above is helpful!
Eoin
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
