New Desktop PC

[Strider]

I'm off to Uni a week today (arrgh) and I'm after a desktop PC. What I'll be using it for will be gaming, photoshop and whatever else comes with studying Computer Science.

 

I don't mind building one.

 

I have had a look on Ebuyer at pre-made and found this one:

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173367

 

(Also this one: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167290 but I can't see why it's more money for half the hard drive size)

 

It's been ages since i've looked what's good on the hardware front, so I'm wondering if I would be able to build better for the same £££?

 

Cheers

[nightwolf]

I had a very similar system the first few days I started uni, infact it was almost the same except the maker (HP), it died after three days, but in that time it ran like a dream and even with vista not one thing crashed.

 

I'm pretty sure building one wouldn't be all that much cheaper, but then I'm not that well knowledgable about pricing!

[Ten10]

Building one might be cheaper, but I can't really get all figures off the bat.

 

Case 30 quid for a galaxy 3 or even an xblade on ebay

30-40 quid for 4GB ram

500 gig Hard drive for around 50 quid 1TB maybe 70 odd

Core i5 I saw going for £150

HD 4770 graphics card was going for £70 the other day

Then mobo and fan with whatever is left.

£111 for core i5 compatible mobo so we stand at £470, but you might not need cutting edge so you could base it around the core 2 series if you wanted to save money on the motherboard. Not that I've checked the average going price for anything else, just rough estimates.

 

But I quote 360 for the stuff I put an average price on, but no OS, unless you preorder win 7. Tesco have preorder going for 50 quidish.

 

Second one costs more because it has a better case I guess.

Edited September 13, 2009 by Ten10

[McPhee]

With a week to go you're going to be better off buying a pre-built. Learning to build a PC in the space of a week, buying the correct parts, putting it all together etc. is possible but it doesn't leave a lot of time to solve any problems that pop up. Even companies like Dino-PC will struggle to assemble a PC and ship it to you for Friday/Saturday if you ordered it tomorrow (they'll do it, but they'll charge a lot extra for a fast build and then more for fast delivery).

 

Having said that i've heard bad things about these Zoo Storm machines and it's difficult to find decent quality pre-built machines at a fair price so maybe it would be worthwhile trying to cram a build in to a single week?

 

Not knowing what you want the machine for makes things difficult, but you can't really go wrong with the following for a base;

 

AMD Phenom II X3 720 (~£90)

Asus M4A785TD-V EVO (~£70)

4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM (~£65)

1TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 (~£50)

 

All from Scan (and next day delivery is free for AVForums and Hexus.net members). Then get the case, PSU and GPU from eBuyer.

 

512MB ATi 4850 (~£75)

Coolermaster 330 Case/CM eXtreme Power 460W PSU combo (~£60)

 

Prices from those stores fluctuate daily (especially on Scan, see the "Today Only" page) which is why i've just popped ball park figures up.

 

What course is it you're doing and are you looking to game on the PC?

[Strider]

Having said that i've heard bad things about these Zoo Storm machines and it's difficult to find decent quality pre-built machines at a fair price so maybe it would be worthwhile trying to cram a build in to a single week?

 

Ahh :S well if the quality of the Zoo Storm isn't too great then i'd rather build one. I haven't built one myself, but my brother's built a few and they seem to work (well for about a year anyway).

 

What course is it you're doing and are you looking to game on the PC?

 

I'm doing Computing Science at UEA, although i'll probably delve into more specific multimedia modules as time goes on. I don't currently game on my PC (my desktops still a 1.7ghz single core, 512mb ram, 40gb hhd job, so runs WoW on low settings) However I would like the ability to game if i wanted to.

 

Thanks for the help peeps.

[Strider]

I have a question: Would it be better to go for a Quad Core (such as the Q8200 @ 2.33Ghz) or a high end Dual Core?

[Nolan]

Quad, more and moe applications will be utilizing quads.

[Noodleman]

I'm doing Computing Science at UEA, although i'll probably delve into more specific multimedia modules as time goes on. I don't currently game on my PC (my desktops still a 1.7ghz single core, 512mb ram, 40gb hhd job, so runs WoW on low settings) However I would like the ability to game if i wanted to.

 

Unless the course has drastically changed in the last 3 years, you wont need anything uber spec'd to do a Computer Science degree at UEA. I pretty much just used Word and whatever the Java compiler they reccommend, when not on campus in my 3 years there. If you go down the multimedia route they have (had) a pretty good multimedia lab.