[Dawg13]

Hi guys, I am a bit of a PC novice so I am looking for advice is this a good deal:

It’s a remanufactured Compaq for about £450

Form Tower PC
Condition Remanufactured, 1 year warranty
Processor Intel® Pentium® 4 - 2.93GHz
533Mhz bus speed
Memory
512MB DDR SDRAM
4 DIMM sockets

Storage devices 160GB Serial ATA
Personal Media Drive NOT INCLUDED
9 in 1 universal memory card reader

CD-ROM / DVD Drive HP DVD Writer (+R/+RW) 8x Double Layer

Connectivity 56K high speed modem
10/100 Ethernet LAN

Cache 1024KB L2 cache
Video memory 128MB dedicated memory
Graphics ATI® RadeonTM X300SE, 128MB RAM (PCI-Express)
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR TV and FM radio tuner

Audio Creative SoundBlaster® Audigy® 2 ZS
Diskette drive Not Supplied
Accessories HP Media Centre Keyboard
HP Media Centre remote control (batteries not included)
HP mouse

Available expansion bays Four drive bays (one Personal Media Drive bay - free)
Expansion slots Three PCI slots, none free
One PCI Express 16x
Back I/O interfaces Four USB 2.0 ports
One IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port
Serial connector
Parallel port
Phone jack- RJ-11
Network connector- RJ-45
VGA monitor port
TV-Out (cable not supplied)

Front facing I/O interfaces Front audio
Front Video-In
One IEEE 1394 Firewire port
9 in 1 universal memory card reader

Pre-installed software Microsoft® Windows® XP Media Centre Edition 2005

Monitor / display Not included
Personal Media Hard Drive Not included



If so cool, if not could some of you guys advise the best system i can get/build for about £350 (I know its cheap).

I am not a big PC gamer, I will mostly use it for music & video downloading as well as some office stuff, the more upgradeable the better as I don’t mind getting a system that works that I can add to as I get more into gamming/bigger applications.

I don’t need a monitor or software but I do want a DVD recorder.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated cheers guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. can we try and make it look good.

[bodhi]

Go get yourself a custom built PC instead of a compaq!!!!

[Dawg13]

Where would be the best place to start looking?

[psd99]

id say dell
dell are good

[Dawg13]

When you say custom i take it you mean build my own. If so where is a good place to start?

I have been looking about and the best looking case i have found so far is the Thermaltake VM3000BNA Tsunami for about £75

I know i was aiming at about £350 total, but i might not include the case in that price.

[Ian]

For £350 you should be able to build yourself a decent system. If you aren't a gamer you can save yourself alot of money by getting a cheaper graphics card.

I'd aim for a 3Ghz CPU and 512 Ram as a minimum, and if you are a using it for music and video, go for a 250GB drive (they are fairly cheap now!).

[Dawg13]

Thanx man!

What would you advise processor wise then?

I know that AMD are cheaper, but how can you compare them to Intel processors. What AMD would be equiv to a 3Gig Pentium 4?

[Ian]

The Athlon 64 3000+ is just under £100 and is a very powerful CPU indeed, the normal Athlon XP 3000+ is about £70 and is roughly equal to a normal Intel P4 3.0Ghz.

I'm not an AMD expert, as I've had Intel machines for quite a while now - but I would suggest AMD if you are working to a budget (they are very good CPUs, no doubt about that!).

[Alf]

Amd are pretty good for gaming and cheaper to boot!

[Me__2001]

if you want to keep the cost down an AMD system is the way to go, a 2800 or 3000 athlon XP is powerful enough for a general PC