£300ish home pc

[RoBe]

One of my mates has asked me to spec up a pc just for internet, email, general use. ie not much gaming
here's what i thought

Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2180 - £52.51
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L - £59.80
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro - £15.26
80GB Maxtor STM380215AS - £25.91
2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800) - £34.24
400W NorthQ Silent King Kong Quiet PSU - £31.20
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32Bit - £59.68 (or should i go with x64?)
xfx 8400gs that i've got lying about - free
=£280

what do you think?

[Salazaar]

Looks fine, maybe change the PSU. I presume he didn't want a monitor or a case in the £300?

[directhex]

if it's just for web use, does 20% of the budget need spending on windows?

just asking...

[godsdog]

=£280

what do you think?

I think you should spend some of that 20 quid surplus on a better PSU. Corsair VX450 @ £44 would be spiffier.

[MSIC]

RoBe, do you need to also add the following?
Case, Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers.
Also, have you considered Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows? I'm not a Linux wierdo, but for the tasks you mention it could be a real option. It's free, and you can easily test it out because it's a LiveCD. Let me know if you want links or more info.
Also the hard drive is pretty small by most standards, and for a 5 - 10% price increase you could get a drive twice the capacity.

[staffsMike]

Id you do need all that stuff which MSIC mentions you might want to consider a dell. Probably a vostro Desktop.

If it's just the base unit I would swap the case + psu to something like that
Antec NSK 4480B Mini Tower Case (Black) - 380W Earth Watts PSU

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I specced this system from Ebuyer:

Kingston 2GB KIT (2X1GB) DDR2 667MHz/PC2-5300 CL5 Non Ecc 1.8V 091124 723 in stock £28.62 £24.35 £28.62 £24.35

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.5GHz Energy Efficient Socket AM2 L2 1MB (2x512KB) Cache Retail Boxed Processor £54.35 £46.25 £54.35 £46.25

LiteOn DH-20A4P-21C 20X DVD±RW/DL/RAM Black Bare Drive - OEM £15.23 £12.96 £15.23 £12.96

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic x32Bit OEM 1PK DVD £52.35 £44.55 £52.35 £44.55

Kensington Black PS2/USB Keyboard £4.89 £4.16 £4.89 £4.16

Logitech S96 Black Optical Mouse - OEM £5.07 £4.31 £5.07 £4.31

Extra Value 80mm Internal Case Fan - 3pin £0.99 £0.84 £0.99 £0.84

Asus V2-M2NC61S AM2 MATX Barebone - With 300W PSU - Nvidia C61S £63.76 £54.26 £63.76 £54.26

Maxtor STM380215AS 80GB SATAII 7200RPM 2MB Cache - OEM £24.49 £20.84

*FREE SHIPPING ON THIS ORDER»
Total:£249.75

[MSIC]

Or as an alternative:

Case, motherboard, PSU: Asus V3-P5945G £73
CPU: Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160(Retail) £43
Memory: 2 x 1 Gig of Corsair VS 667Mhz £27
Hard Drive: 160GB Samsung Spinpoint £32
Optical Drive: LiteOn Dual Layer DVD RW SATA £16

This comes to £192.62

Lots of wiggle room to change components etc, but it'll be a fine, working dual core system. Add the latest Ubuntu and you are flying.
The Asus barebones is an Intel chipset for peace of mind (old, but still fine) and comes with PCI-Express if you want to add a graphics card for gaming.

[RoBe]

thanks guys, i've got a case from an old media pc that i was gonna use. I'll ask and see what he thinks about linux, seeing as he was finding it hard to use win98 on his pc just now i'm not too sure how he'd handle linux but i'll give it a shot

[Thorsson]

Vista - Think about getting an Upgrade rather than OEM, and it's worth checking out EBay.

For these tasks it's worth thinking (Dell Vostro) laptop or even the Asus Ee. If not then microATX with onboard graphics is plenty powerful enough and would allow a smaller and quieter build.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You can get a reasonable notebook for £300:

HP 6720s Laptop Intel Celeron 540 1.86GHz 1 x 1GB, 80GB DVD-RW WLAN, 15.4" WXGA (1280 x 800 resolution), Vista Home Premium (Office 07 Ready *Trial) - Ebuyer

Dell Vostro 1000 Sempron 3600+ 1GB 80GB 4-cell battery DVDRW 1 year warr. Vista - £282.07 delivered - HotUKDeals Forum