angrynorth

I have a PC that I use just for testing and last night it fried itself

Anyway, I need to replace it. Don't want anything massively powerful, but I would also like it to be quick enough to not need replacing for a long time.

Thinking of something along the lines of:

Athlon 64
DVD/CDRW
Reasonable Graphics card (at least 128)
512mb ram
not arsed at all about sound
decent, expandable mobo
Win 64 Beta / XP Pro
The HD can be tiny as the machine won't need to store anything.
No Keyboard / Monitor / Mouse required.


Anybody want give me an idea of how much I should pay for this, I obviously need it to be as cheapo as possible, not bothered about the case or any of that either.

Ta

lightning101

Hope this helps - all from www.aria.co.uk

can source cheaper from e-buyer but can't get on at the moment

AMD Athlon64 2800 RET : £83
ABIT KV8 motherboard : £58
With OTES™ cooling and exclusive µGuru™ cooling technology, the KV8 takes the best features of the KV8-MAX3, and puts it in an affordable package for the Athlon 64 enthusiast. The KV8 is based on the same VIA K8T800 chipset of its more expensive sibling, and packs cutting edge features including 2 Channel SATA RAID (0/1) and 6 channel audio with a professional digital audio interface supporting S/PDIF In and Out. What's more, Gigabit LAN and ABIT's SoftMenu rounds out an already impressive package.

NEC Dual Layer 2510 8x writer : £38.25


Corsair 512MB XMS3200 DDR SDRAM : £66


120GB Maxtor DiamondMAX+9 133/7200 : £37


ALIEN CUSTOM CASE black : £26
you will need decent Wattage on power for Athlon 64


Asus Radeon 9600 128MB DDR : £42

judgejules

Angry,

For 180 bucks you can get a copy of VMWare Workstation 4 for your main pc. Allows you to create/run as many "virtual" machines as you want. You can put Win98, Win2k, WinXP on seperate installs, as well as your versions of browsers etc. You can create roll back points, and with the click of a button have the install back to your initial testing system.

Tiz pretty nice, just a thought, might be a nicer alternative to another PC?

You can grab a 30 day eval here

Jules

angrynorth

Cheers for that lightning I will look at ebuyer too.

Jules, my main machine is a Mac, so that VMW won't work with it unfortunately. In a similar vein I did think about updating to Virtual PC 7 but in the end I have decided to go for an actual PC box as it has been easier to keep them separate. Thanks for the suggestion though