PC for £200?

[Andeh13]

Hello guys, got a mate whos PC is on the brink of death and he is after another pc (just the tower) for around the £200 mark. He is looking at buying one second hand but im a bit hesitant to go down this route (PC go out fo date so fast..) so i was wondering if anyone could help spec me up a PC for around £200?

He doesnt do any real gaming and its more a general purpose PC more then anything else, but as i havnt looked at parts since i built mine 18+months ago, and i had a budget 3 times as big im not really sure where to start looking!

Any help would be appriciated!

[Cornholio]

What components does he need, everything excluding a monitor/keyboard/mouse ?

[staffsMike]

Corsair 400W ~£40
Suitable case ~£25-£30

Or Antec NSK3480 ~£70

AMD based 740G mobo ~£40
Athlon X2 ~£45
2GB PC6400 ~£20
Cheapy HDD ~£35
Optical ~£15

That's a little over £200 but I imagine there are salvageable parts from the old one?

[Cornholio]

Could save a few quid on the PSU if you opted for this

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/400w-...ed-cooling-fan

Not corsair but can personally recommend it, built loads of customer pc's and used this PSU, very very good build quality. (personally ide say the actual build quality of the unit was better than my corsair hx520w)

[Andeh13]

Should have put what it is up against, the PC is off one of his friends and all that i know is that it contains:

Quad core 2.3ghz AMD processor
4gb DDr2
Radeon HD3100
1Tb HDD.

Do you think he is better off going for that PC, or trying to get a new one for the £200?

thanks again guys, huge help!

[Cornholio]

You would be stupid not to go for that ^, would perform better than a £200 new built system

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Does he have a copy of an OS?? If he does not the build will be around £130 + a copy of XP or Vista!!

Here is what I have come from Ebuyer(with free Supersaver postage):

AMD Athlon 64 Socket AM2 LE-1640 (2.6GHz) Energy Efficient L2 1MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor 141243 312 in stock £29.99

Foxconn A6VMX AMD 690V Socket AM2 onboard VGA 6 channel audio mATX Motherboard 141239 24 in stock £41.09

Kingston 1GB DDR2 533MHz/PC2-4200 Non-ECC CL4 1.8V Unbuffered Dimm 240 pin 064183 99 in stock £10.79

Seagate ST380815AS 80GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 8MB Cache - OEM 129414 227 in stock £26.98 £23.46

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition-SP3- Licence and media - 1 PC - OEM - CD - English 114048 45 due in 1 to 3 days £69.29

Coolermaster Black Elite 330 Case With eXtreme Power 460W PSU with Side Window 146338 82 in stock £49.98

Total:£228.12

You should be able to re-use the optical drive from the old computer!!

If you really want to be cheap you can get the following off Morgan Computers for 70quid:

http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/sho...CategoryID=387

1gb of DDR2 RAM and an XP license will cost you another 80 quid. The total cost will £150!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Should have put what it is up against, the PC is off one of his friends and all that i know is that it contains:

Quad core 2.3ghz AMD processor
4gb DDr2
Radeon HD3100
1Tb HDD.

Do you think he is better off going for that PC, or trying to get a new one for the £200?

thanks again guys, huge help!

He should buy that instead!! The processor and hard disk are probably worth nearly £200 on their own brand new!!

[staffsMike]

Agreed that is the best option if in working order.

[Andeh13]

many thanks guys, just wanted to double check. What do people recon about the Radeon HD 3100? Is that any good? Not a card iv heard of, and it doesnt seem to be on scan's site.

[staffsMike]

That is integrated, same as my 780V also running a quad core

[Andeh13]

ah i see, this stretches my knowledge a bit too far! So its a built in graphics card & mother board then, with a processor attached to the side of it?

[staffsMike]

Yeah it's just a graphics chip on the motherboard rather than a seperate card. You get the display outputs on the motherboard i/o panel

Cpu goes.. where it normally goes lol

[Andeh13]

many thanks mate!

[Pob255]

As mike said, it's onboard graphics, nothing wrong with it for office/internet usage for any resolution.

For gameing or 3d work you'd want to get a seperate graphics card, easy to to do, it will have a pci-e slot as per normal.
Just have to remember to go into the BIOS and set it to use the pci-e first or turn off the onboard graphics and plug the monitor into the card not the IO panel.
But that's only if he want to do any gameing/3d work.