new build £500 help

[e|mo]

Hi,

Im looking to put together a new system, i havent put a new system together in about 4/5 years so am very much out of the loop in regards to hardware.

Im looking to put a new system together minus a monitor as i have recently bought a PVA panel 24" tft biggrin.gif (1920x1200 res btw)

This pc is going to be in my dorm room so needs to be fairly quiet, especially as I sometimes like to leave it on over night downloading new linux distributions or ripping a dvd etc.

The main uses of the pc are
- casual surfing and office use
- ripping dvds
- Playing some games like (cs:source but doesnt need to be at native res as i rarely game due to having a xbox360)
- Watching 1080p .mkv files etc
- some small coding ( Fortran 90 for my physics degree)

Hardware wise I am looking for case, motherboard, cpu, 1tb Harddrive, 2gb RAM (maybe more?) Graphics card, dvd burner (maybe blu ray if there is enough room in budget), Wireless card (only need G)

Also going to need decent wireless keyboard and mouse plus all connectivity cables but these can just be left as a gap in budget as i dont need specifics)

I am willing to overclock but obviously noise is an issue for me so am unsure on this point. I had my old system overclocked so have some experience.

Looking for 1tb as i have a large dvd collection that I am in the process of ripping to HDD, Am unsure wether it would be better to also get a small (80gb ish?) drive for my boot disk and then have my main data on a seperate disk, as i have a tendancy to change Operating systems quite regularly lol

Main OS will be Vista (dont need to buy) and ubuntu (or other distribution that takes my fancy lol)

My budget is £500 tops and would like to use ebuyer where possible

EDIT: also listen to quite alot of music and have a setup of 5.1 speaker so need onboard 5.1 smile.gif

What would you guys do?
thank you

[staffsMike]

I would do this.

Antec NSK3480 + 380W Earthwatts ~£53
Intel Based G33 (Asus Probably) ~£60
2GB PC6400 ~£30
Intel E5200 pentium Dual core ~£55 + Xigmatec S2183 (scan) ~£18
I'd Probably get 2x Western Digital 640GB AAKS ~£90, rather than a 1TB.
Partition 150GB of one of them for OS then you have around a 1TB for data

LG HD-DVD/Blu Ray ~£65
Maybe or or two 92mm fans (for the front) ~£10
Maybe change the 120mm fans ~£10 (yate loons/nexus/scythe slipstream)

So graphics card..
There is about £130 left (without the added fans) so you are in the region of HD4850's and Nvidia 9800GTX's which will actually run modern games at your native res.

If you don't need all of that power then maybe a HD4670 for ATi for about £60, should get you one with a nice quiet cooler.

That is a uATX system which is nice and small for your dorm and in that spec should run superbly quietly, SPCR forums often have a lot of NSk3480 based systems for this very reason

If you wanted to get a cheaper graphics card ( pretty much anything will run CS:S these days) you could go for somthing like a Coolermaster CM-690/ Antec Solo and a corsair 450W VX PSU if you wanted a decent full ATX setup while keeping things quiet.