New Gaming system on a £900 budget - please help

[Pazza]

I need to build a PC for a gamer - mainly everquest II and the budget is £900 max.

The following is my initial thought:-

Asus A8N-SLI SE Socket 939 Nvidia NF4 SLI ATX - £60.19
Maxtor 6V250F0 250GB 7200rpm SATAII 16mb Cache OEM - £48.86
Microsoft OEM Windows XP Home Edition inc SP2 - £48.93
XFX GF 7900GT 256MB DDR3 DUAL DVI PCI-Express w/HDTV adapter - £183.82
Samsung Samtron ST94V 19" TFT 8ms 600:1 (1280 x 1024) - £144.45
Hiper 580W Type-R Modular PSU - £51.00
NEC ND-4570 16x DVD±RW/RAM Double Layer Internal IDE (Black) - OEM - £22.35
Mitsumi OEM Black Internal Floppy Drive 1.44mb 3.5 Inch - £3.34
Corsair (VS1GBKIT400) 1024MB (2 x 512MB Matched Pair), DDR400 / PC3200, non-ECC, Unbuffered, CL2.5, Lifetime Warranty - £48.20
AMD (Venice) Athlon 64Bit 3200+ Socket 939pin 512k L2cache 90nm - £86.53

This comes to £697.67 and leaves enought to get a case, keyboard, mouse.

Then I thought would the GFX card out perform the CPU - so I then thought to increase the RAM to 2GB, increase the CPU to a AMD Athlon 64 (ADA3700BNBOX) 3700 CPU Skt 939 San Diego Retail (£147.63 inc VAT) and dropping the GFX to something like a “Point Of View 7600GT 256mb DDR3 PCI-E” (£129.98 inc VAT)? ok, it may push it slightly over the £900 but only a fraction.

Any expert help would be most welcome - I need to order in the next 2 days.

[nichomach]

Your 3200 should be OK, and for gaming, your GPU's a lot more important than the CPU. Increasing the RAM to 2GB is probably a good idea, dropping the GPU isn't. You've got a good, well-balanced gaming rig there, and I probably wouldn't mess with that aside from bumping the RAM if I could.

[greektony]

just out of interest, where can you get an xfx 7900gt for as cheap as that? £183.82 = bargain..........Please tell me this price includes VAT

[Pazza]

just out of interest, where can you get an xfx 7900gt for as cheap as that? £183.82 = bargain..........Please tell me this price includes VAT

The price is excluding VAT I'm afraid - but it was from ebuyer, quickfind code: 109939.

[nichomach]

Ah, well, lowestonweb are getting some in on the 9th May at £199 inc VAT and del.

http://www.lowestonweb.com/Products/...7-77D609A60BE4

[piranha]

I'd actually say you should get 2x1gb rather than settling for 2x512mb - especially if for playing everquest2.

[Pazza]

Got 2gb in the end but eBuyer messed up and deliverey everything minus the gfx card and told my mate (whome made the order) the gfx card was sent. There was no packing logs in the box.

After lots of arguing, they eventually beleived him and was going to send another one out - when they got more stock (just happened to run out??). So, he changed to a XFG 6800GT instead and had another argument on getting that out to him with free P&P.

Blimey, here's me putting lots of business to ebuyer and we get problems. Also, they messed my order up which I made earlier this year also - wrong PSU. Is this a general problem with ebuyer or am I just unlucky?

[Dark Horse]

Ebuyer are a bit hit or miss unfortunately...

[Shmee150]

I had a similar problem with MicroDirect not getting a graphics card from them once - it was ticked on the packing list but was very definitely not there. It was about £100 and they refused to accept it wasn't sent so I was £100 out of pocket and have since probably taken away £100 of profit from them in friends/family not being --> their bad Although I've never had a bad experience with eBuyer. I even stupidly bought a PCIe GFX card once for an AGP computer, they replaced it and sent out another one within a week no problems, I just had to pay the £6ish Special Delivery back to them.

ShMeE