£500 supercomputer

[Mongrel]

Afternoon
I would like to build my own £500 desktop base unit. (That is assuming self-building is the cheapest way forwards)
My aim is decent gaming performance. 3D graphics is important, but I play a lot of strategy games like Civ4, Championship manager, which are less graphics hungry but heavy on the processor all the same. I'm getting quite excited about Spore, and I want a machine which can handle that smoothly.

Where do people in the know go to buy their components?

If anyone could suggest a good spec for £500 that would be greatly appreciated. I wish there was an independent website which listed every piece of hardware along with trustworthy review, but I can't find one...I am basically looking to get the maximum performance out of every pound I spend...

Many thanks in advance.

 

[crazylegs]

Double posting will not get you an answer any quicker.....someone will be along soon to help you out and give advice....please be patient....

 

[Mongrel]

busted...

 

[Mongrel]

Since I'm in the intro bit anyway, I'm a 26 year old Press Officer living in North London, working for a children's charity until I get rich.

 

[Anon_F]

self built pc

Since I'm in the intro bit anyway, I'm a 26 year old Press Officer living in North London, working for a children's charity until I get rich.

Right OK here we go, to be honest for £500 you could get a decent pre-built pc.
However as you want to build one yourself i suggest may be to start with a bare-bones bundle:
Case & PSU, Motherboard, CPU & HSF and RAM
Try here www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/barebones.html
And then build the pc round this, get a motherboard with on board sound but with an AGP slot.
Any help you require just ask

 

[Mongrel]

Sweet. This Novatech site looks exactly like what I need. Was a bit worried about fitting power supply and stuff - bare bones the way forward.
Cheers Feckit

 

[Anon_F]

I have broken motherboards before when fitting them in to cases before
Novatech will test it before you getting so all will work!
All you need to add is:
Hard Drive, DVD Drive(DVD ROM/DVD-RW) Graphics Card & Floppy Drive.
Oh and of course an Operating System!!


Oh & can a Mod move this thread to the relevant place

 

[Mongrel]

This should do for starters:
Barebone Bundle AMD X2 4200 Dual Core 1GB Hynix 400Mhz Dual Channel ddr ASUS nForce 4 Ultra Motherboard
Only £300! that's brilliant.
With this DVD combo thingers are only £20....
Hard drive £40.. (I'm not that fussed about a massive load of storage - can always get more later
Floppy £10..
Leaves £130ish for graphics card. I'm noticing there's 256mb cards ranging from £30 up to hundreds... Any recommendations?

 

[Anon_F]

I'm not a gamer so not great on gamming cards.
See what others suggest over the next 24 hours

 

[floppybootstomp]

Antec NSK4400 Mini Tower Case - 380W SmartPower PSU
Asus A8N-SLi SE nForce4 SLi PCI-Express Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego (Socket 939) (Retail, with cooler)
Corsair 1GB DDR Value Select PC3200 CAS3.0 Kit (2x512MB)
Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache
Pioneer DVR-111DBK 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter - (Black)
Samsung SH-D162 DVD-ROM (Black)
BFG GeForce 7600 GT OC 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)

That lot comes to £504.00 including shipping from Overclockers UK.

The case is a personal choice, you could pay more, you could pay less but I think that case is good value for money without skimping on quality.

Here’s a link to the case, it’s the third one down:
Link

Another gig of Ram add about £70.00

A floppy drive add £7.00

A floppy drive/card reader add about £15.00

You could buy a cheaper motherboard.

You could do away with the DVD-ROM drive.

You could buy a smaller or larger hard disk.

Don’t be nervous about building your own system, it’s really quite simple and you have lots of help available at this Forum.

Anyway, the above is just a suggestion, that would be a very respectable setup. I had to compromise on the graphics card a little in view of the budget but it will still cope with all games.

Bear in mind this is a socket 939 system and will soon be superceded by Socket AM2 CPU’s but 939 systems are still good for some time yet and are actually really good value for money at the moment.

 

[Anon_F]

As James May would say from Topgear, Oh cock!
For that price i may buy one for my sister

 

[Mongrel]

Nice one - thanks very much