Need help building general browser/HD movie watcher

[Mike45450]

I need to replace my dad's horrible old PC, however I don't really keep up to date with the lower end components, so am having trouble finding suitable options.

Basically I have a budget of about £350 (maybe £400, but the lower the better) for an entire system and monitor. The most demanding thing it will need to do is watch HD movies without any problems.

I think I have an old SATA hard drive somewhere, so will reuse that (and thank God what with the current HDD prices!). But I will need everything else (case, PSU, CPU, RAM, motherboard, graphics card, DVD drive and a monitor).

He did mention wanting to upgrade to Windows 7 though, so I don't know if I should bother building one myself, or just get a prebuilt? I'm always very wary of prebuilt, just because of the quality (or lack thereof) of the components used. You can often get entire systems (PC, monitor AND OS) for ~£450, so I'm wondering if I should go for that instead...?

Many thanks!

[razer121]

I would say build it yourself, you can get a good AMD setup that would do HD easily, depends on weather you want intel or amd? or does this not matter?

[aidanjt]

If all you need is a browsing/video playing machine, then any old ION2 based nettop will do. Something like this, for example. Just replace the default Linpus crapfest with Ubuntu, or whatever.

[Mike45450]

Yeah no preference really. As long as it gives the best performance for the required purpose at the cheapest price.

In the past, I've used an AMD, but am currently using a Q6600. At the end of the day, if you compare an Intel and AMD CPU with similar specs, they do the job virtually the same. It's just a matter of if you plan on overclocking, or prefer less power consumption and things like that, which aren't really issues I'm concerned with on this build.

[razer121]

Okay of thats the case than i would go with a amd build, its cheap and im sure a dual core woud be perfect, if you choose to you could grab a cheap one of the bay, motherboards are like 25 quid so u would props have alot left over...