What PC would u buy if u had a £1000

[Kastuvas]

Ok everybody here’s a challenge, my friend decided to take the plunge and buy a new PC well he never had one in the first place therefore he is completely alien to all this mambo jumbo DDR, MX, GTS, VE, LE, VIVO, SDR, well you get the picture

He has around £1000 to splash, and he’s not a gamer well he say’s he’s not but what dose he know when he never played

He will probably buy a pc from a pc magazine so you cant pick and choose the components you want, but I would like you to ask what core components would you recommend Penium4 or Athlon, which motherboard and monitor ect..

Thank you, for your all suggestions.

[Guru]

1.4GHz T-bird, MSI k7t a (onboard audio), G550, 256 RAM, Fast 30-40GB HD, mid tower case, cheap 19" monitor (LG for example) half deasent speekers, 12x + dvd (or cheap cdrw)! He should be able to get that for 1000£!

[Kastuvas]

Hm dont really like the sound of integrated sound. You really think that cheap 19 inch monitor is better then good 17 inch?

I dont think the pc will come with any of the Matrox cards nVidia has all the market here 95% off all the pc's that come from mail order companies are shiped with some sort of nVidia product mostly with crapy MX

[Guru]

Good hitatchi 17" 2200+ fin MK LG 19" 2400 fin mk you decide! Personaly I would go for the 19" any day!

[TomNuttall]

I agree with Guru. I have been using a 19" monitor for a while now and I would hate to go back to 17"

Rather than get a store PC where, as you say, you don`t get to mix and match components, try

http://web6.scan.co.uk/systemquote/systemquote.asp

And you can pick your components.
They build your PC to your specs. If I ever want any components, I always use them and have never had any problems with them.


Their home web site is WWW.scan.co.uk


Tom

[RichL]

Its not the size that matters

I disagree.
Not only is a decent monitor is probably the one thing in a system that doesnt go out of date before you finish opening the box, but if you stare at a cheapo screen for hours on end you want one with a sharp, accurate display, and a damn good anti-glare coating. Personally I'd spend money on a quality 17" rather than a low budget 19"

I have to use a Compaq S700 at work, and I back onto a window. Even with an aftermarket anti-glare filter fitted its painful to use. My Iiyama 410 at home is not only far sharper and with a more consistent display, its about as reflective as a blackboard.

My biggest gripe about pre-built systems is that they tend to use low quality monitors, as people are impressed with bigger numbers.

[dZeus]

I fully agree with RichL... rather a good 17" than a cheap 19" one.

Avoid brands like Hansol, Belinea and the like at all cost, and get some decent stuff instead. I also would rather get a slower system with a-brand components rather than a faster one with nameless stuff in it. So an Asus mobo with Crucial/Infineon ram, etc, etc. :-))

In the end you will find that stability and compatibility means a lot more than sheer speed.

[Guru]

Then you have not seen th picture quality on the LG 19" (Budget model as you put it)!

[Kastuvas]

I was thinking about what PC should you buy and I made a list of what to look for hope it helps. (Probably will confuse you more then help )

CPU: Get an Athlon between 1.2 and 1.4 Ghz (Make sure it has FSB of 266)

Motherboard: The best motherboard you could get is with Via KT266A chipset, however it was only released this month therefore it is hard to find it because it’s so new. The second best thing would be SiS 735 chipset, the third best thing is AMD761 chipset, the other 2 to watch out is Via KT266 and ALi M1647 these two are the slowest ones.

Make sure you have no less then 5 PCI expansion slots and avoid integrated sound.

RAM: Make sure the PC will come with 256 DDR memory.

Monitor: I don’t have to tell you that monitor is very important. These are recommended:

CTX PR705F
Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 730
Sony CPD-E220E

Avoid budget brands like:

Hansol
Relysis
Belinea
Taxan

Make sure the monitor has Grille Pitch of no more then 0.25mm that’s the pace between pixels the smaller the space the sharper the image. Also Flat screen is a must.

Graphics card: For the games the best card would be GeForce2 GTS Pro or GeForce2 Ultra.

For the best image Quality the best would be Matrox G400 Max or Matrox G550 they also can drive 2 monitors at once, its something you will use everyday or never at all

ATI (graphics card manufacturer) is Jack of all trades master of nothing it has better image quality then GeForce but quality not as good as Matrox, but it runs much faster in games then Matrox but not as GeForce. Confused? Wait there is still more to come

If you want video editing then ATI All In Wonder 32 DDR is the card to beat. The only thing you cant plug in to this card is your microwave It even allows you to watch TV on your PC it has a feature called time shifting you can pause live TV while you have a cup of tea when you come back you can carry on watching that program where you left and skip the adverts. Also you can plug you video camera and edit the video then burn it on a CD. I could write pages about this card. And if that is not enough its very fast on games.

Other ATI Products:
ATI Radeon VIVO 64Mb DDR (VIVO means video out video in)
ATI Radeon 32 Mb DDR

One more card left that’s The Kyro II it’s a new kid on a block and seems to be a rather good graphics card, it’s as fast as GeForce2 Pro and reasonable image quality.

After all that I would personally take ATI All In Wonder 32 DDR because its not just a graphics card it’s a TV as well, with good video editing features.

Hard drives: Ok on to hard drives now well there isn’t much to say 40Gb
IBM Deskstar GXP60. If you cant get IBM then make sure the drive has 7200 rpm spin speed 2mb cache and 100ATA transfer speed.

Sound card: Well you can’t go wrong with Sound blaster 5.1 or Hercules Muse XL

Speakers: I don’t think there will be a problem because with £1000 price tag all PC’s come with surround sound. However some are better then others.

Creative FPS 1000 are the cheapest while Videologic Digitheatre are on of the best.

DVD and CDRW: DVD’s well the brand doesn’t mater here much the speed is that counts 16 speed is the fastest while 10 speed does the job.

As for the CDRW make sure it has a burn proof technology and has 12 speed or more writing speed.

Huh that's what i wrote for him, what you think?

If you have something to add pleas do.

[Bohrn]

I could go NUTS with a thousand pounds, as it would translate to, like, almost $3000 dollars canadian, and that would buy me a NICE machine. But, I need a new car more than a new computer, so that would be out. Of course you can still send the thousand pounds, it'l be put to good use

[cbman]

If I had a thousand pounds I would buy whatever cost me 999 pounds...

[Kastuvas]

UPDATE!!!!

Just un update on the situation.

My friend just bought the pc here are the specs:

Athlon: 1400
Mobo: Asus A266A
Ram: 256 DDR
Monitor: LG Flatron 17inch
Graphics: Winfast Geforce2 Pro
Hard drive: 40Gb (Fujitsu 2Mb buffer ATA100 7200rpm)
Sound: SB live 5.1
Speakers: DTS2200
DVD x16
CD-RW 16x10x32
Ethernet card

I went to his place to help him to set up the system and here are my first impressions.

The system was purchased from Evesham and everything came firmly packaged in boxes with all the cd’s and manuals in place. The DTS 2200 took quite some time to connect all these wires what spaghetti . Once everything was set to go the pc was switched on, all the windows and drivers where preinstalled the only thing to do was to put pin number for windows. There was no problem with the pc what so ever.

The first thing I did was to run few benchmarks and Quake III was on the list first 1024x768 and everything to the max produced an awesome 100Fps hehe I never seen that guy running so fast. However I was disappointed with the image quality the screen looked much darker and not as vivid as on G400. I switched to desk top and again the quality was far from perfect I set the resolution to 1200x1600 and the picture wasn’t blurry but I don’t know how to explain you could see the pixels and it made it look as if you are looking through the empty honeycomb, seeing that made me even more to appreciate my G400. The monitor unfortunately had slight blurring in the bottom left corner, sign of bad voltage regulation

Well I don’t have to tell you that 3Dmark was flying 3500 points Wow no tweaks just out of the box.

Where the image quality didn’t deliver the sound was top notch I couldn’t believe the quality even when I have high quality hi-fi speakers I was totally blown away with the quality those DTS 2200 with SB5.1 produced. Those who have this combination know what I mean

All in all a great PC. 1.4 T bird is guaranteed to crunch any application for at least next few years. The hard disk is spacious and fast, sound is excellent and well the graphics plays all the games faster then you need

[breezer]

How much did that actually cost?, if it was £1000 I would hope 3yr on-site maintenance was included.

The costs look a little steep to me.

breezer