PC buying

[Chipper]

I'm looking to buy a PC for my boy, partly for general skool stuff but also for gaming. My old tat is steam-powered compared to what the new games seem to need...
I'm not clued up on hardware at all. Apart from wanting a separate graphics card, I've no idea about the choices of chips and so on - is dual core good/bad. Seem to recall a guy at work having problems with software because he had a 64-bit Windows machine.

It'd be Windows by the way. Budget up to 500 notes.

Any hints or names of shops/places to look at would be good. I've no idea what makes are good/bad these days.

 

[mike os]

dual core= waste of time

core 2duo/quad or i3,i5,i7 ... tho some may be out of your budget.


you wont get a real games machine at that kind of money tho.

 

[Chipper]

Cheers. It's more of an all rounder wanted, but able to play some newish games, and I suppose be upgradeable. He can add stuff later if he wants. All the acronyms make my head hurt

 

[drjim]

I got a compaq from Tesco direct for about £350 last November. AMD quad core CPU, integrated graphics but upgradeable. It is faster than my old dual CPU dual core Opteron workstation that I built a few years ago at a cost of 1k. Does everything I need.

You'll have a few quid left over mate.

Jim

 

[gavuk]

mrs has this one seems happy enough with performance ,she plays facebook games only but you can add a grapics card as well.............medion

 

[RedOrZed]

I got a Medion from Tescos a couple of years ago, reduced down from £500 to around 350 or so. came with a blu-ray player, [edit]1TB of HDD, not a bad graphics card, TV in, DVD writer, the whole ******.

It's bloody ace. I'm an IT support wallah for a living & it's a pretty damn good bit of kit. Mostly what you want is the machine with the most amount of disk space for the money you've got. Most of the other bells and whistles come along with it.

You'll play all of the modern games with an OK graphics card - you need space more than anything else.

 

[Chipper]

Thanks all.

 

[Nomolos]

I'm looking to buy a PC for my boy, partly for general skool stuff but also for gaming. My old tat is steam-powered compared to what the new games seem to need...
I'm not clued up on hardware at all. Apart from wanting a separate graphics card, I've no idea about the choices of chips and so on - is dual core good/bad. Seem to recall a guy at work having problems with software because he had a 64-bit Windows machine.

It'd be Windows by the way. Budget up to 500 notes.

Any hints or names of shops/places to look at would be good. I've no idea what makes are good/bad these days.

http://www.dabs.com/products/hp-g51...ws-7-home-premium-64-bit-desktop-pc-73CK.html

http://www.dabs.com/products/xfx-at...creed---cod-modern-warfare-2-games--71Z8.html

Hi there

You’re in a bit of a dilemma; the problem is you want a pc that’s able to do more than one thing i.e. games and sadly games is the biggest strain a pc will need to run for most people outside of a super computer.
Not knowing how old your kids are, I can say with a good certainty if they want to play anything newish then you’re going to want a separate graphics card, anything with on-board graphics will struggle on any new games or anything a few years old, that will lead to disappointment and frustration, for web surfing and emails what you have I would say is fine, it’s the need for games that’s perhaps prompted the idea of an upgrade?

The pc above comes with an integrated NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE chipset fine for what you’re doing now but not particularly good for games the card listed would be a good base for a games oriented pc, not top of the line by any stretch but would play most of the new stuff at reasonable settings and give a good experience with the games and would slot into the pc above PCI express socket, if were talking Thomas the tank kind of games as in kids up to 6/7 then the integrated card should manage to run that kind of thing fine.

If you wanted to post the kind of games the kids are thinking of playing it would help identifying what you need as a minimum, be wary of the likes of PC world who will say yes that can play a game fine, there definition of fine is not what you or I would consider a good thing.

Best of luck

 

[NigelAylesbury]

Have you thought of a second one (pre used) one?
I went here http://www.mcscom.co.uk/ - (no affiliation at all)
I bought a DELL which had an awesome graphics card (for CAD) for 2 monitors, very happy with it. Apparently the case has a mark on it, hence cheaper, but I couldn't see it....

 

[Chipper]

I hadn't but thanks, looks like good warranties from them.