I've pretty well decided to upgrade my present 3yo Sony Vaio laptop to a desktop PC. Will probably give the Vaio to the missus as her computer is a bit rubbish and being a student it will come in useful being a laptop. So, I'm looking at a budget of about £1000-£1300 (inc VAT) for something which can run the latest crop of games and will also be easily upgraded in the future. The new Sony Vaio desktops look *lush* but at the expense of poor upgrade potential, is that right enough? Time for the questions:
I fancy a TFT screen in favour of a conventional CRT, are they worth the extra?
Graphics card wise, what's the best performance/cost card out there? The Radeon 8500 or some sort of nVidia chipset?
Any mega good deals about?

 

Miles myself and the FWK will sort a deal out on Monday if you ask then

 

I'd look for an AMD Athlon, Abit mainboard, with Geoforce4 (or 3) graphics, at least 256DDR Ram, 40gb Hdd, and a decent sound card.
Hey, thats my system

I built mine myself using the cheapest suppliers of all the bits I needed at the time, trouble is your going to end up with a good system and a crap monitor if you go for a TFT. You need to spend some more pennies IMO and get a decent one, that system for a grand with TFT is pushing it, more like £1300 with a decent TFT.

Have a look at www.meshcomputers.co.uk , they seem ok and have onsite warranty.

John

 

Ive just spent nearly well over £600 on Motherboard CPU RAM and case! so it can be pricey , is that + monitor aswell??

Si