£600 PC Base Unit...?

[ukaskew]

How does this look? I don't need a monitor, I don't want Vista, I have a spare £500GB HD to slot in and my absolute maximum is £600 to spend...

From http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk

CASE: NZXT Lexa Blackline Performance Mid Tower Steel 420W Case w/Red LED Light
CPU: (Socket AM2) AMD Athlon™64 X2 6000+ Dual-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology
MOTHERBOARD: (Socket AM2)ASUS M2N-E SLI NF500 SLI Chipset DDR2/800 MBoard w/ Dual 16x PCI-Express, USB2.0, &7.1Audio
MEMORY: (Req.DDR2 MainBoard)2GB (2x1GB) PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB 16X PCI Express Video Card
HARD DRIVE: Single Hard Drive (320GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache 7200RPM HDD)
OPTICAL DRIVE: LiteOn LH-20A1H 20X Double Layer DVD+-RW Super Allwrite + Lightscribe Technology (Black Color)
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
OS: Windows XP Home

TOTAL = £607


Can I do better or will that serve me well? It will be used for a bit of gaming (racing games, mainly) and editing pics with Photoshop Elements 6.

 

[Pettsi]

Buying the machine built? Or the parts to build it yourself?

 

[ViolentJ]

Intel fans will bash you for choosing AMD but that looks like a good spec to me. What's the CPU cooling like?

 

[Mike_182]

Not mad on AMD and I have to ask what the point in getting a DX10 card is when you plan on running XP on it...

 

[ViolentJ]

It will still outperform any DX9 only card...

 

[David]

my question would be why you would choose AMD over intel, especially at the moment. Other than that, will do the job nicely. G card, is a goodun.

 

[Gareth]

my question would be why you would choose AMD over intel, especially at the moment. Other than that, will do the job nicely. G card, is a goodun.

agreed, good spec but Intel C2Ds are proven to be better.

 

[McBunny]

very similar to the hp i bought for 250 except my cpu is the 5000 and its got a s**t graphics card lol

 

[ukaskew]

I chose AMD because that's all I've ever used, and I couldn't spec a similar Intel machine for less than about £700 with the same GPU.

If I go with Vista instead do I want 32bit or 64bit? I have no idea what the difference is.

 

[andywright182]

32 bit is more compatable with programs and hardly any make use of 64bit os. Did you find that link from the other thread I posted in? They do look the dogs b0llocks this company.

Im waiting till January as thing the Phenom processors will drop in price quite a bit and may invest in one instead of an intel.

 

[ukaskew]

32 bit is more compatable with programs and hardly any make use of 64bit os. Did you find that link from the other thread I posted in? They do look the dogs b0llocks this company.

Im waiting till January as thing the Phenom processors will drop in price quite a bit and may invest in one instead of an intel.

I'm ordering the second week of January as I have some time off, so will see if anything changes then.

Yes I did get the link from your post thanks, been Googling 'PC Base Unit' and many variations for days and couldn't find anything decent, and then your link pops up! Cheers.

 

[Mike_182]

32 bit is more compatable with programs and hardly any make use of 64bit os. Did you find that link from the other thread I posted in? They do look the dogs b0llocks this company.

Im waiting till January as thing the Phenom processors will drop in price quite a bit and may invest in one instead of an intel.

64 bit only has compatibility problems with drivers that aren't EM64T or AMD64 compliant. Software should be completely unaffected as unless it uses 16-bit then it can emulate 32-bit (WOW64) fine. The biggest change is the lack of support for 16-bit software which, frankly, needs throwing in a bin.

 

[ukaskew]

Cheers for the info.

Just added all the exact same components into my cart on ebuyer and it actually came to the same price before I had even added the PSU to my cart. So to get it built and ready to go for less than I could have bought it myself seems pretty good.