Budget gaming PC

[edp33]

Will be gaming on a 17" TFT, does this spec look ok ?

Force3D 4830
e5200
Akasa 965BL
Gigabyte EP31 DS3L
Corsair 6400 2x2GB 5-5-5-18
Samsung 22x DVDRW
CoolerMaster RC330
Corsair VX450
120mm Akasa AK-174BK-S Black Case Fan

Comes to £325.31

Would be nice to o/c it to 3ghz or so. I have some hard drives and windows xp from my old pc I will reuse.

[staffsMike]

Looks good but I would get the AMD 7750 X2 and a 780G or 740G mobo

They are usually uATX so could get a nice uATX case like the CM elite 340.

Also if you want a modular PSU, ebuyer are selling OCZ modextreme's for around the VX money in 400 or 500W guise

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

An AMD Athlon X2 7750+ based system would be faster at stock speeds and have better upgrade potential than an E5200 based system . However the E5200 it a better overclocker so it would do fine for your system!!

Apart from that your system spec looks pretty solid. I would also make sure that you check prices at BOTH Ebuyer and Scan. Also make sure that you check Today Only on Scan. I assume that you have free postage at Scan??

[edp33]

yep just ordered from ebuyer/scan/scan today only, memory is amazingly cheap on scan today only £33

did think about the athlon, but wanted to give Intel a try this time, also would like to try the ATI graphics instead of going with Nvidia.

can't wait to try it out, my system is a single core athlon 3200+ and 6600GT at the moment, no usb ports on the front and sounds like an aeroplane taking off everytime it is switched on. Should notice a big difference i hope Been planning on upgrading it for ages just never got round to it !

[Hicks12]

Looks good.

Just to say, dont expect to much as thats what i did when i moved from a amd 3000(barton core FTW) and a 9600XT. I didnt see much improvement from normal day to day but within a week when i got crysis installed(had it on the 9600, got 10fps max ) boy did it fly, steady smooth for crysis(25-35 which good for cyrsis max xD) and now i love it. Just wait till playing games then you will notice difference but most other things i havent noticed a huge difference.

Enjoy your new rig, also try novatech as they are cheap quite alot of the time.

[Ulti]

You should be able to OC it past 3ghz pretty easily. I've heard some good things about that budget Akasa 965 too.

Athlon 7750X2 is better at stock speeds than E5200 but E5200 should win overall when OCed. E5200 is slightly chaper too.

I have an E5200 but my mobo is only a G31 so I can't OC past 3.2ghz :/ But I've heard with a P31 you should expect around 3.6ghz which is pretty nice. Hope those expectations aren't destroyed xD (With my G31 mobo I can't even adjust much lol, can only change RAM speed, FSB and add up to 150mv to Vcore lol) So yeah, you should at least get 3.2ghz unless you get a really bad mobo/chip but that would just be really unlucky.