Advice on "budgetish" system - about £400 for box to spend

[tfboy]

A friend of mine has asked for my infinate wisdom (sarcasm that is!) on speccing up a suitable system for him.

He has about £600-650 tops all in and says he wants a 17" TFT screen.

So, if I buy XP Home and a cheapish 17inch screen, that leaves me with about 400-450 to spend on the box.

I've specced up parts from Scan:

NF4 Socket 939 board
Opteron 146
1GB RAM (2x 512 PC3200)
XFX GF6600 Standard but passively cooled
250GB SATA drive
DVD burner
floppy, kb, mouse, speaker, etc

However, I'm wondering if going on a full-blown S939 system is going to offer the best bang for buck. In other words, am I sacrificing too much just to get a S939 base system? I'm pretty sure if offers the best upgrade path, but would I be better off with a "higher spec" S754? or should I look at a cheap P4 system?

Anyone know if the Gigabyte GA K8N51GMF-9 with onboard GF6100 is any good?

I've had a quick look around sites such as PCW, and reckon the above spec is better vfm than you'll get at PCW, but any other ready-built systems worth looking at for similar amounts of money?

It's mainly going to be used as a "family" PC, but I'm loathed to just get a box from PCW when it'll probably only come with an ati X300 gpu and work fine until they throw Quake4 or any other recent FPS / graphically intensive 3D app.

[JPreston]

I'm sure I know you from somewhere ...

Anyway I hate to say it but for that sort of money and mainstream use I think Dell will always beat self-build. They've got sooo much purchasing power for that end of the market.

[|{££|"]

change the gfx card pfft...
and wait till jan sales

[tfboy]

Well, sounds like he won't be quaking nor will his daughter

So maybe that gigabyte board is a nice option. Will have a look at parts and rejig price.

Ahh Mr Preston

[BubbySoup]

You never know what people are going to use their PC's for in the future, so leaving them with a decent upgrade path is always a good idea. I would say you have a pretty decent system spec'd there. I would avoid using tech that's on the way out though for the sake of price.

[tfboy]

OK, well I've ditched the GF6600 and gone for the gigabyte mobo that's £50 with built-in graphics,usb2, lan, firewire, etc. Nice S939 too so I've put an Opteron 146 in with the gig of RAM.
16x PCI-e slot there for future graphics upgrade.

Current spec: (prices inc vat)

LN11801 Scan 8033/C4 Black Midi Tower Case with 400W PSU £29.25
LN12214 Gigabyte GA K8N51GMF-9 £51.94
LN12172 AMD Opteron UP 146 2.0GHz 64bit 1Mb Cache S939 Retail with AMD Heat Sink Fan 3Yr £105.12
LN4296 (today only) 2 x 512Mb PC3200 (PC400) DDR Memory (Major) Retail £50.51
LN11509 Pioneer DVR-110D Black 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer DVD Writer £27.91
LN6026 250Gb Hitachi (IBM/HGST) Deskstar 7K250 (7200rpm,8M) - SATA £75.40
LN5291 1.44Mb Sony Black Floppy Disk Drive OEM £4.69
LN5487 Scan 3.5" Black Internal 50 in 1 Card Reader £7.04
LN9465 Microsoft Black Basic Value Pack Keyboard + Optical Mouse USB-PS/2 (Euro Version) £11.74
LN8089 Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP2 OEM Single £61.28
LN8350 17" LG L1715S Charcoal/Grey "Non-Glare" 15pin D-sub 16msec 450:1 1280x1024 £145.69

Total: £570.54 inc VAT (and free delivery of course)

[Workaholic]

Do they really need the card reader as all cameras usually have a USB port. And 2*512MB ram - that won't be needed as they probably can't run high end games, unless of course they're video editing.

Money saved = faster CPU perhaps...

[madkez]

"It's mainly going to be used as a "family" PC, but I'm loathed to just get a box from PCW when it'll probably only come with an ati X300 gpu and work fine until they throw Quake4 or any other recent FPS / graphically intensive 3D app"

looks like this has turned into a PCW box...there's no way it'll run Quake 4

[tfboy]

They do want a card reader, they've explicitly asked for one.

I see your point with the RAM, but my home PC gets upto about 500-600MB used RAM sometimes just running windows when burning CD, having half a dozen firefox windows open and listening to music / watching DVDs at the same time

Surely a 146 is enough for everyday use and is more than capable of running latest 3D games at reasonable resolution (proving a suitable GPU is provided )

madkez, yeah, true, it's turned into the average PCW box but looking at PCW's website, there's either:

PB 1528 AMD ATHLON 64 3200+ & 17" TFT FLAT PANEL MONITOR
# Microsoft Windows XP Media Center
# 2.0GHz, 400MHz FSB, 0.5Mb Cache
# 512Mb DDR RAM
# 160Gb Hard Disk Drive
# Multi-Format Dual Layer DVD-RW Drive
# 128Mb ATI Express X200 Graphics
# 6 USB connections
# Built-in TV Tuner + Remote Control
# Microsoft Windows XP Media Center
# 17" TFT Flat Panel Monitor
Total: £599

or

FUJITSU SCALEO 3601 XP INTEL PENTIUM 4 630 PROCESSOR + 17" FLAT PANEL MONITOR + PRINTER
# Intel Pentium 4 Processor 630
# 3.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2Mb Cache
# 1024Mb DDR RAM
# 250Gb SATA Hard Disk Drive
# Multi-Format Dual Layer DVD Re-Writer
# 256Mb ATI Radeon X550HM Graphics
# 6 USB connections
# Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
# 17" TFT Flat Panel Monitor
# Epson C48 Printer
Total: £699.

Surely the Scan system specced above is much better than the PB1528 and about the same as the Fujitsu (minus the free printer, but hey, the printer's free so not adding anything to the price and printer's only worth about 40 quid anyway). But Fuji box is over £120 more expensive.

So I reckon I'm still better off building myself than buying ready built (as long as I'm ready to support it )