I really need a new pc. I'm out of the loop when it comes to the technology race. I'm not after a cutting edge machine I just want the best I can get for about £500 maybe max £600. Don't want new speakers or monitor, just the CPU, GPU, soundcard, ram, HD, DVD-RW multi format.
Someone please tell me what I should be looking at!

• CPU model/speed?
  
• Graphics card
  
• sound card
  
• HD type
  
• RAM size/speed?

Uses: Photoshop, 3ds, MP3's, gaming, internet, email, that's it.
Cheers
Al

It seems the Intel Core Duos are the chips to have now, so maybe:

CPU
Mobo
2gb of RAM sounds good
For graphics I personally would go with something like this until DX10 hardware becomes a bit more mature.
You should get a 200Gb-ish 7200rpm SATA HDD for under £50, and a DVD/RW for £30-ish, so all that would be ... *counts on fingers* ... £570?

Whats the state of play on soundcards these days? On-board Realtek sound good enough for 99% of gaming and MP3 needs or is it worth buying a cheap soundblaster to ease the load?

I spent several evenings looking at all this crap myself a couple of weeks back - I can appreciate it's a boring job to match components. I'm hoping to upgrade before the end of the tax year myself, although I'm planning to spend more, because otherwise they'll just tax it anyway!

One caveat: I think that some socket 775 motherboards based on Intel's newer chipsets can be fussy about what RAM you put in. Make sure you check to see if your chosen mobo has a list of "approved" RAM before you buy both.

Re. audio: I don't really know. I always seem to have a spare SB "Live!" card kicking around the house so I'm in the habit of plugging them in, but I could just as easily live without I think. I use onboard LAN without giving it a second thought, no idea why I always put soundcards in to be honest.

a cheap soundblaster won't do f' all to lighten the load (need an X-Fi for audio hardware acceleration), although getting a cheap Sound Blaster Live! off eBay is a good idea (i got mine for £2!), as it will have a little better sound quality, although with your budget a Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer would fit in nicely

In march (the 22nd?) we get the 8600 series from nVidia, should go for about $200 with 7900-performance

What PSU do you have?

Kev - for a mobo, go for a Gigabyte DS3, about £77, lots of features, pretty decent at overclocking if you ever felt that way inclined and good quality

EDIT - Kev, onboard lan is good enough, and there aren't any better solutions for cheap, unlike soundcards....

Quote from Jakg :

In march (the 22nd?) we get the 8600 series from nVidia, should go for about $200 with 7900-performance

I was looking at the performance of the 8800s and they don't look all that special tbh compared to the last generation of DX9 cards. I was planning to get a 256Mb 7900GS for about £120, and then wait until DX10 hardware gets noticably faster than DX9.

Quote from Jakg :

Kev - for a mobo, go for a Gigabyte DS3, about £77, lots of features, pretty decent at overclocking if you ever felt that way inclined and good quality

I was looking at the Asus P5N32-E for my next box. SLi in case I ever want it, fast bus, 10 USB headers (you can never have too many USB sockets) and a tidy looking layout. I'm not bothered about overclocking but I like to have plenty of options on a mobo.

So it should run better than my old 486 sx25 then?

Quote from al heeley :

So it should run better than my old 486 sx25 then?

That's the first PC I ever had (1994 - Jakqui was still in nappies ), a 486 SX25! It had 4Mb of RAM, and a 210Mb removable hard disk. And in a year of using it I never filled the disk!

Played DOOM alright, DOOM2 was a bit choppy.

for me it was a massive 40mb hard drive, a copy of flightsim 5 and Papyrus Indycar. Awesome!

MY first PC was bought Christmas 1993, and it was a 486 DX50 with 4MB RAM and a 100MB SCSI hard drive that was about a 1 cubic feet in size!

I never filled the drive in nearly 18 months of use, but I did save up £120 to upgrade to 8MB RAM. We had a Soundblaster 2. I don't remember what graphics card we had, but it was a reasonable quality SVGA one (yes, SVGA!!!!)

Quick price comparison for the dual core processors:

E6700 2.66GHz 4MB cache 1066 MHz FSB £322
E6600 2.40GHz 4MB cache 1066 MHz FSB £190
E6400 2.13GHz 2MB cache 1066 MHz FSB £138
E6300 1.86GHz 2MB cache 1066 MHz FSB £113
E6300 1.80GHz 2MB cache 800 MHz FSB £ 96

Bit of a price jump up to the E6700!

i vaguely remember asking my dad if he was crazy when he bought a 100mb drive for our 386
i didnt think we would actually fill it ... ever

Quote from thisnameistaken :

CPU

always go for the 6600 if youre not planning to overclock the hell out of it

Quote :

Mobo

id take a nvidia mobo ... a bit faster an better updating capabilities and they overclock like a charm too

Quote :

2gb of RAM sounds good

thats ddr1

for graphics id either go with a top of the line 79 or a top of the line 88 if youve got the money

Quote from Shotglass :

always go for the 6600 if youre not planning to overclock the hell out of it

I picked the 6400 because of Al's stated budget.

Quote from Shotglass :

thats ddr1

I thought it was cheap! Whoops...

How does the Intel Pentium D 915 / 2.8 GHz processor compare with the likes of the dual core E6300/1.8GHz or E6400/2.1GHz's? Is D915 last month's technology?
Whats up with ddr1? Is that generally a bad thing? Stop your s****ing at the back!

Quote from al heeley :

How does the Intel Pentium D 915 / 2.8 GHz processor compare with the likes of the dual core E6300/1.8GHz or E6400/2.1GHz's? Is D915 last month's technology?

There's a comparison between the 6400 and the Pentium XE here that could give you a fair idea. The Core 2 Duos also draw less power (65W compared to I think 90W for the Pentium Ds).

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I picked the 6400 because of Al's stated budget.

whoops missed the bit about his budget

Quote from al heeley :

How does the Intel Pentium D 915 / 2.8 GHz processor compare with the likes of the dual core E6300/1.8GHz or E6400/2.1GHz's? Is D915 last month's technology?

more like last decades
on a more serious note they are properly rubbish and a fork of x86 tech that intel should have never tried imho (actually on that they should have given up x86 compatibility year ago but thats a different topic)

Quote :

Whats up with ddr1? Is that generally a bad thing? Stop your s****ing at the back!

not bad at all just not supported anymore by todays chipsets

Quote from tristancliffe :

MY first PC was bought Christmas 2003, and it was a 486 DX50 with 4MB RAM and a 100MB SCSI hard drive that was about a 1 cubic feet in size!

I never filled the drive in nearly 18 months of use, but I did save up £120 to upgrade to 8MB RAM. We had a Soundblaster 2. I don't remember what graphics card we had, but it was a reasonable quality SVGA one (yes, SVGA!!!!)

You sure about that date Tristan? Since you've been playing LFS since 2003, how did LFS run on that 486 DX50? LOL

Quote from thisnameistaken :

It seems the Intel Core Duos are the chips to have now, so maybe:

CPU
Mobo
2gb of RAM sounds good
For graphics I personally would go with something like this until DX10 hardware becomes a bit more mature.
You should get a 200Gb-ish 7200rpm SATA HDD for under £50, and a DVD/RW for £30-ish, so all that would be ... *counts on fingers* ... £570?

+1 for the above configuration
CPU: the 6400 processor has very good performance and low price
MOBO: a mobo based on the 965 chipset is the best option because traditionally intel CPUs have less combatibility issues with its own chipsets and the 965 is very fast also.
memory: 2gb is almost mandatory if you are planning to upgrade on Vista, otherwise 1 gb is enough. As mentioned before DDR2 is the memory you are looking for.
GPU: the 7900GS ia a great card. If you want to save some money goto the 256MB memory model http://www.dabs.com/productvie ... igationKey=11137,42750000 with no performance drop issues compared to the 512 model
Audio Card: I always use the integrated onboard ones. Don't waste money on a super duper SB, cause the onboard chips work just fine.

Quote from KMSpeed :

MOBO: a mobo based on the 965 chipset is the best option because traditionally intel CPUs have less combatibility issues with its own chipsets and the 965 is very fast also.

I was also reading the other day that nVidia's rival chipset isn't rock-solid yet. As a former early adopter of nForce I would want to avoid going through all that again!

Quote from thisnameistaken :

1994 - Jakqui was still in nappies

the earliest PC i remember had a Socket A 2800 Throughbred, an Asus A7N8X and a 9600XT, felt quite nippy running 2000 actually!

I had a PC earlier with ME and a copy of some Banger Racing game that came with my Matrox graphics card, and had a copy of Combat Flight Simulator - ah, the halcyon days!

Quote from al heeley :

How does the Intel Pentium D 915 / 2.8 GHz processor compare with the likes of the dual core E6300/1.8GHz or E6400/2.1GHz's? Is D915 last month's technology?
Whats up with ddr1? Is that generally a bad thing? Stop your s****ing at the back!

A P4 does half of what a C2D can per Clock, so think og an E6400 as a 4.2 GHz P4, but actually it's even quicker, and uses less power, and makes less heat.

DDR1 works fine, and DDR2 isn't much quicker (faster, but slower timings, but does use less power)

Quote from KMSpeed :

Audio Card: I always use the integrated onboard ones. Don't waste money on a super duper SB, cause the onboard chips work just fine.

with an X-Fi you would get MUCH better quality, or for just a few pounds you could get a little better - imho its worth it, even if just to have a headset for VOIP and speakers for LFS

Quote from Jakg :

with an X-Fi you would get MUCH better quality, or for just a few pounds you could get a little better - imho its worth it, even if just to have a headset for VOIP and speakers for LFS

I really don't see the point in throwing money at a fancy PC audio card when in all likelihood you're going to pipe it through second-rate speakers or headphones. If you're building a computer to record audio then that's a different matter (and you certainly wouldn't be shopping for a Creative card) but for an all-purpose desktop there's no point.

Actually I have a damned good set of speakers for my pc, but I'm gonna stick with the on board realtek chip, i think they're good enough for me. No point playing compressed mp3 files and expecting audiophile quality, as long as the sound is reasonably decent then I am happy. So the £2 soundblaster card gets the thumbs down as does the £XXXX fancy X-fi jobby, just not worth the dosh for the limited benefit, IMO.

Now what about AMD's version of the dual core chips? Worth a look?

In some situations simply moving the processing requirements to an additional card, such as a X-Fi, pays for itself.

AMD's DC chips aren't worth looking atm imho. The core2duo's wipe the floor with them in terms of price / performance.

the only dual core worth a look is the AM2 3600 65 nm, as it overclocks to be an FX-62 quite happily, but apart from that there is just no point not going C2D

Today most on board soundcards are good enough, even if you use decent speakers. I agree with the Core Duo reccomendations, and indeed something like a 7950GT card if it fits the budget.. perhaps an Ati 1950 pro..

I don't see any real racing sims go to dx10 any time.. .err.. ever (well not in a long time anyway..)

Are you prepared to spend a bit of money making the system quiet or does noise not bother you?