farmerwrx

i have about £500 to spend i have spent hours today looking but the choice is mind boggling,thanks in advance

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

We have little chance in helping you unless you can tell us what you actually want.

What do you do with your PC, eg modern games?
Do you need speakers?
Do you want keyboard, mouse etc?

Try and break down specifically what you want from the machine and then post up those requirements

farmerwrx

sorry should have thought of that but i'm not that spammed up on all the technical stuff as you will notice! quad core ,500 gb hdd with room to put my old one in aswell,4 gb ram,soundblaster audio of some sort,1gb graphics ? pc is used for surfing and holding my music collection that i listen to everyday so a good soundcard would be nice and thousands of pictures and my wife uses it for work spread sheets and all that and some old games (tiger woods 2005 and halo) nothing new .all i need is the base unit i have everything else my old base unit packed in this morning so i took it to the local pc repairs and he says it's the motherboard thats kaput and he looked on the net but could not find a new one this is the motherboard number ms-7357. thanks again

brendy76

iTrader: (6)

Seeing that it's an msi standard board (ie not a dell or hp bespoke job) any similar board will do, worst case scenario is a windows reinstall.

farmerwrx

really he told me it was more economical to buy a new pc

LostUser

That motherboard seems to be about 2 years old and is socket 775. So, no you probably couldn't buy that exact motherboard new but in theory you could buy any socket 775 motherboard. Typically for between £40-£100.

But, if you're not that technical then would you really want to buy a motherboard and transfer the cpu, memory, fans etc yourself?

The other problem is, if this bloke hasn't diagnosed the problem properly you can end up replacing the motherboard, finding it still doesn't work, then replacing the power supply, then the cpu, just trying to track down the problem.

If you decide to get a new PC then I'm not sure where to recommend. Your requirements are slightly odd. For surfing, music, spreadsheets and old games you certainly don't need quad core, 4Gb of RAM or a 1Gb graphics card. You'd probably find that even the onboard audio on most new motherboards is good enough for listening to music.

I always build my own machines but for anyone not technical I'd normally recommend they buy from Dell or one of the well known suppliers which supply pre-built systems. I've had a quick look at there are plenty of Core2Duo machines with 4Gb of RAM, 512Mb graphics cards etc for about £500.