For under £750

My brother-in-law needs a new PC as his harddisk has blown, and as his PC is an AMD 1.2Ghz he wants to upgrade.

I’ve been looking at the following:

CPU :AMD 64 6400+ processor (Socket 939)
M/Board: Asus K8V-SE Deluxe motherboard
RAM: 1GB Corsair PC3200 (2x512MB)
HD1: 1 x 120GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 (8MB cache)
HD2: 1 x 40GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 (8MB cache)
Graphics: ??

My brother in law is a big fan of Call of Duty, Soldiers, Flight Sim, Vietcong, the Battlefield series etc. so those games are not that intensive on the system but his 128MB Geforce 4440 needs to be upgraded as well.

I know a few on here have the above spec (minus HD's) and appear to be very happy with it.

Are there any alternatives? Recommendations for graphics cards? Recommendations for cooling? new cases? Power supply?

DVD writers
I know the Pioneer 107 is a good DVD writer and as the 108 has just come out it should drop in price

Thanks for any help guys and girls

Darren

 

CPU AMD 64 3200 Winchester
Asus 8V Mainboard
RAM: 1GB Corsair PC3200 (2x512MB)
HD1: 1 x 120GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 (8MB cache)
HD2: 1 x 40GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 (8MB cache)
May need a new PSU, so get one rated above 420W

As above

But Graphics card, Nvidia 6800 GT

 

Neil,

Thanks for your input. Are you using the same spec as above?

Darren

 

a medium priced anthlon 64 cpu is the "3500 newcastle" its socket 939 so when the FX cpu becomes a little cheaper you can add that one 9800 pros are reasonably priced and i play everything in 1600x1200 res with mine as for hard drives i would go with a 250gig sata drive and they are only £130 dont even think you would spend the £750 unless you went over the top on the case i would always advise to get a big hard drive as modern games take up loads of space you would fill a 120gig drive very quickly , unless you dont have many games that is

 

I would get a raid board and two 120gb and stripe them - far faster for big chunks of games loading.

And you can now overclock to 4ghz on a Pentium 4 with some new coolers and decent pc4500 ram.

 

There isn't much advantage in performance with Socket 939 over Socket 754. Get a Socket 754 DFI LanParty UT nF3 250gb motherboard (the best there is) & an Athlon XP64 3200+ or 3400+ and save some money.
Get a 512mb stick of Crucial Ballistix PC4000 ram for now (add another stick when funds allow) & £130-£150 should get you an ATI Radeon 9800Pro graphics card. You would have to spend at least another £130 on the card to get significantly better performance so they are great value at the moment.
You can pick up a Pioneer DVD-R 108 for £50 now as well.
You can get a quality decent sized SATA hard drive for similar money as well.

Darren

 

No an FX-55 with X800 Pe for me

I recommended the 3200 as it'll overclock to 3500+ speeds on air, (use something like an X120 heatsink) or to 3800 speeds on water. The 3500 is a very good chip, and is a good buy if your budget will stretch. 939 is faster than 754, plus it has the advantage of being able to use dual channel memory and is more future proof. 939 boards are'nt that much more than 754 ones.