B9GLY

What are the best gaming pc's available at the moment on a cheapish budget?? from the likes of pc world, currys, etc etc. see alot of pc's for between £250-500 but dont know which is best value/performance?

lightning101

You will be very lucky to get a 'gaming' PC prebuilt on the high street at that budget. Most have inbuilt graphics or poor entry level cards Geforce 7300 or ATI X1300 etc.

With that budget you could build a dual core machine with ATI x1950 pro card and plenty ram.

e.g.

ATI X1950 Pro - £108 inc vat
Dual Core AMD 4600 - £116
Asus PCI-E Motherboard - £35
Kingston 1GB Ram - £70
Maxtor 320GB 16mb cache SATA 2 HDD - £50
Gaming case with 600w powersupply £49
18x LG superdrive £17

Total: £445

Or with 2gb ram for £510

Tim-Grove

As the guy above said build your own. Much better value for money.

You can get something like this for about a grand and it would cope easily with every game that’s out at the moment. Also the core duo processors are great overclockers my mate has a 6300 and he's overclocked it by 1 GHz


Intel Core 2 DUO E6300 "LGA775 Allendale" 1.86GHz (1066FSB)(£119.84)
Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler(£35.24)
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)(£199.74)
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2(£146.86)
Gigabyte GA_965P_DS3 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard(£82.24)
NEC AD7170S Serial ATA 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)(£22.31)
Samsung SpinPoint T HD321KJ 320GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM(£63.44)
Lian-Li PC-7 PLUS Aluminium Midi-Tower Case - Black(£58.74)
Corsair HX 520W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU(£72.84)
Logitech Cordless Desktop S 510 - Black/Silver(£35.24)
Dell E207WFP 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Black(£205.61)

BigBez

yes good advice already ...build your own it aint hard. buy the parts seperate.

you want at least 1GB DDR ram (2GB if you can stretch it)
at least 128 meg on your graphics card ATI or NVIDIA
the core duo processors are great for games, or if on a budget just a P4 2.8 - 3.2 Ghz will do

at least a 500W psu for these type of parts

dvd re writers are cheap as chips these days

petey

You won't get a proper gaming PC for little money i'm afraid!...

save and buy an Alienware laptop or PC they are the daddies!

Iain Young

Also overpriced and unreliable, (speaking from bitter experience )...

Hepy

I'm thinking about building one myself. The only part that really concerns me is when I go to switch it on, is it likely to blow up and fry the motherboard?

Tim-Grove

have a look at this link if you're a first time builder. some good tip's and hints

Corsair System Build Reports

scoobyverysoon

iTrader: (1)

This is also a very good site for new builders

Build Your Own PC Forums

Beefy

Hmm Ive had my alienware 3.5 years and its been bullet-proof so far (touches wood!).

All I've done is added a GB of RAM and upgraded the GPHX card and it is still capable of playing the latest games at reasonable FPS's. Perhaps you got a bad 'un?

Iain Young

2 bad'uns to be precise. The laptop I had I ended up throwing away after just over a year and a bit. First the power supply stopped working, however Alienware no longer sold that model and so couldn't get me a replacement, (after a lot of searching, I managed to source one from an Amercian web site). A little while later the motherboard went wrong (all usb ports stopped working, and it kept crashing every few minutes). At this point with Alienware being completely unwilling to help in any way whatsoever, I junked the machine.

The desktop, I've ended up completely rebuilding myself (replacing quite a lot of components). The build quality was shockingly bad inside. It had pinched wires, stuff not plugged in properly, cheap components (especially the fans) etc. The Alienware tech support / complaints department was a joke and completely unhelpful. I'll never touch one of their machines again.

Beefy

Blimey that doesnt sound too clever. Mine is obviously quite an old one now, but I cant fault either the components used or the build quality which really is excellent. The cable management is very well done and the fans are all high quality (4 in total - its a tower case).

I've had no need to call tech support in the whole time it was under warranty (which by the sound of it was a good thing!).

I dont think I would have another to be honest as it was expensive and I could and would rather build my own for a lot less money. But in terms of value for money its had plenty of hammering and never let me down so I suppose I cant grumble.

MJW

If you're buying a monitor that only does 1280x1024 resolution, there's little point in getting a top-end graphics card. I run an ATI X800XT PE in mine and it has no problems with the latest games eg. Battlefield 2142 at the monitor's native res.
The more RAM the better though, don't bother buying more than 2.5Gb if you're running Win XP because the OS can't use it.