I want to assemble a new pc. The problem is: I'm on a budget. I need to set priorities.

Where should I put the money?
Motherboard?
Processor? athlon/sempron
Graphics Card? nvidia/ati shared/256/512
memory? 512/1024

LFS will be the thoughest thing for the pc to handle. I don't mind playing on relatively low resolutions but I want to have a smooth and stable working machine.

What's the overall budget? You can build PCs from under £300 without too much hassle, which is peanuts really. What else is it to be used for? What parts can you use from your existing system?

About 450 euro's. I'm not gonna build it myself but have it assembled at a (reasonably priced) store. The only part that I could nominate for reuse are the cd/dvd drives. Everything I use now sucks ass.

Athlon xp 2000 (socket A)
265MB pc1600 (200mhz) Not compatible with memory sold today
64MB gforce

It keeps restarting or freezing on me.

I can have a system for about 300 euro's that will accept LFS. Where's the money best spent for that little extra performance?

Hi Joris,

Do you need a monitor or hard drive? If not then I would recommend upgrading what you have. What is your motherboard model?

Cheers!

Motherboard is unusable. Gigabyte GA-7DXE.
Socket A (no potential for upgrading)
pc1600 memory (Not for sale anymore)

So upgrading is a no-go

That's fine, but cannot HDD and monitor be salvaged? Keyboard and mouse? Obv. it's your call but if you're looking to save money chances are you monitor is already reasonable and unless your short on HDD space you won't need a new drive, but you can always run both anyway.

Here is a system I put together very fast for you. All the prices are in Canadian dollars so I converted the total to EUROs. This setup is just an outline of what you can afford for 400 euros or less. I dont know if your retailer has these components if not you can look at different setups or ask me and I wll be glad to help. With this system setup you will be able to run LFS with all beels and wistles and with AA and AF to the max.

Motherboard: MSI K9N NEO-F, ATX, Nforce 550, AM2, DDR2, PCI-E16 $90
CPU: Amd Athlon 64 3800+ Processor Socket AM2 Orleans 2.4GHZ $123
RAM: Crucial Rendition 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2-667 $115
Video Card: EVGA E-GEFORCE 7600 GT PCI-E 256MB $155

Total: 330 EURO no taxes

You can still get a HDD and/or a cheap LCD monitor.

Cheers!

I put a poll in this topic. Its not that I question wether I could get a decent pc for the money. I'ts more about getting that little extra bang for buck.

This really depends what you're after. I had a similar argument with my brother about this recently

If you're suffering from low frame rates, go for a better CPU and/or gfx card.
If your load times are really slow, go for RAM.

I doubled my memory and noticed practically no difference in frame rate in most games (although they do let me turn on more detail!). But I upgraded from a 1.5 to a 1.6GHz CPU and a newer budget gfx card and saw a boost of about 40 FPS.

My brother runs WinXP on 256MB RAM (muppet, he won't be told) but because he runs a 2.5GHz CPU his frame rates are higher than mine. But of course it takes him about 3 days to load stuff

Don't forget the power supply. Usually the new gfx cards take more power and the old power might not be powerful enough. Some cases come with a power and might be a good choice sometimes.