[Razer]

My mate is looking to upgrade his powerhouse to a shiny new system. Problem is, it needs to be waaaaaay cheap but new parts.

He's got 2 IDE dvd drives he wants to keep and an IDE HDD. PSU is 400W so that may not be a problem. I'm thinking celeron 775, 667 DDR2 ram, cheap ass mobo with onboard graphics. I've read carbons guide but forgotten the first half when I got to the second half..

Any advice on the most budget system you can get that will run XP and "immense" games such as Call of Duty 1 and Minesweeper would be awesome,

Razer.

[zerocool]

Well to be honest you get what you pay for, getting immense games running on an onboard graphics card isn't going to be reaslistic especially if it is a cheap motherboard to. Ask him if he want's to be spending more cash later on upgrading it for skimping at the beginning. You can bet using onboard graphics you will get alot of lag in gaming.

[Razer]

Sorry, the quotes on immense were to represent sarcasm. Hence using minesweeper and CoD 1 as examples since these games require nigh on bugger all to run.

He doesn't want to play games, maybe the odd flash game once in a while but general internet browsing is quite sufficient.

[Carbon]

Originally Posted by Guide

BUDGET OEM ALTERNATIVE

Decent looking alternative to a Dell for basic tasks.

CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4850e ($35) (FS)
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 ($50)
RAM: G-Skill 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 ($30)
PSU: Seasonic SS-300ET ($39)
Optical: Sony Optiarc 24X ($24) (FS)
HDD: Western Digital 320GB ($55) (FS)
Case: Rosewill R222-P-BK ATX Midtower ($25)

TOTAL: $258

Is this unfeasible?

[Razer]

It's in dollars, sorry. Works out about £200 say. Minus the optical drive would be say £185 or so..

I'll try and get a budget off him asap. Just know it has to be really cheap. About 4 weeks of saving well should get him enough for those odds and ends. The hard drive can be a much smaller one too, he doesn't need loads of space, 120Gb would see him fine if they're cheaper?

I'll link him to this tomorrow, see what he says. Cheers for the advice so far though

[Razer]

Well I got a �200 budget to work with for a PC that.. works haha.

I'll do a mock up and see what I can come up with, can take recommendations off that then. I know Carbons post about the 320Gb hard drive being good has been deleted but I have remembered.

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Ok, Don't know if you saw this earlier, or not, but the server cockup lost it

So here we go:

Misco (.co.uk) sell some really nicely budgeted stuff, even right down to �46 for a mobo/CPU bundle, with onboard graphics.

Throw in cheapo RAM, his old drives and your all done for �60

[Razer]

Yeah, I might look into that but I've mocked up the basics of a new build, excluding optical drives of course and the OS.

It's a Radiant Baron series case with PSU
320WD Sata HDD
2Gb 667 DDR2 RAM
Athlon X2 7750 (Not Black)
Biostar Motherboard. (Really cheap but brother has got one and his PC is rather quick.)
Thinking about a 9600GSO for �38 (384Meg) but that's not essential

�160 for a decent rig that'll see him through college, uni and a good few years of reliable service.

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Sounds good to me.

Well.. for the price anyway

It's amazing how cheap PC's have got, even just a couple of years ago, I bought a worse one than that from Dell (Sorry, I have sinned) for about �750 !

[Razer]

Yeah, my last PC featured an Intel Pentium 4 @3.2GHz, 512Mb DDR, no graphics card, 92Meg onboard graphics, 80Gb Hard drive and a whopping DVD drive for �800!