Spec me up scotty

[englishpremier]

I've been asked to build a rig for a friend of mine, but my last build was a socket A platform, so i'm not up to date with everything at the moment.

The budget is between £400-600.

The machine will be used for moderate gaming, Pro Evolution Soccer 4, Football manager 2005, Splinter Cell 2 etc..

The machine will be run at stock and he only needs Base unit, speakers.

I was thinking about the following; (not sure where the cheapest places to buy are)

AMD 3000+ venice, NF4 board, nvidia 6800LE, 1gb ram, 80gb hdd etc..

[Xenctuary]

Go for Scan, decent prices, great customer support and free shipping for HEXUS members. Here's a recent reply of mine with loads of useful links that are relevant to the system you have in mind: Gaming pc for £500, can it be done?

[plesuvius]

Drop the LE because its only the AGP variant that can be modded to a higher card. I looked into that myself.

Probably a 6800 is doable now in that budget. You might as well get 1 reasonably fast large SATA2 hard drive also its quick enough for most uses at that size. MAxtor is good.

Dont bother with expensive memory cause even if he does overclock in the end (which he .. should !) you can use dividers which work a treat on the nforce4

When I upgraded recently i kept my case, PSU, hard drives, DTV card, controller cards, memory, monitor etc. the upgrade came to about 400 quid and I got an x800xl otherwise same as you almost.

[Supershanks]

You've got some good suggestions Hitachi Sata2 drives are a good price
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 160GB 7200RPM SATA II 8MB theres also a 250gb version @£83

Only issue might be how good is his current Power Supply - You need 1 with a decent 12v ampage (18A-24A depending on number of components) to help stability.

luck