Ok birthday time

Its the big birthday for me tomorrow and family members have been so kind as to donate some cash to my PC fund . In fact I have enough money to build a cutting edge PC with the latest Intel processors etc, however some of the money was intended for a wee holiday with the wife so....... Cut a long story short I have £300, to put something togethor, now was thinking of skipping the GFX card for now as that will take it way over budget for now, can always pick up something later for that.

What ya think as an idea?

http://img268.imageshack.us/i/screenshotmr.png/

Looks like the HDD is out of stock. What OS are you getting? Budgeted for that and IS software too?

Good prices. From the same shop:

GT 430

or if willing to throw anohter £8 at gfx, GT 440

Compare scores here. (My 9800 GT isn't much better than the 440, and still costs a lot more these days (two years ago it was £130).

Takes you £300 or so.

it was just to get an idea for cost, would shop around of course but prices seems ok on their though! For GFX need something that will play 1080p and play WoW at decent frame rates. Can always upgrade this later on if I get into FPS on the PC again but right now the console will do.

Might just use the onboard till I see a nice bargain in a ATI 5830 or 5850 or similar apparently those are pretty good cards. I know from early posts of mine a while back that the 5770 card is quite good but may struggle a wee bit at 1080P.

Edited by deleted (Mon 06-Jun-11 11:14:24)

You missed the hd5750 for £54:
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/novatech-ati-radeon-...

You don't need the X4. Just get the X2 555 and a board capable of unlocking the cores.

well placed my order this morning, scrounged a 500gb HD, plan to reuse my DVD drive (ide) and also reusing my case

https://www.aria.co.uk/WishList/LFNjULIyOADsCBrePXt6...

Thats what I ordered, seemed very cheap compared to everywhere else, just need to obtain my upgrade Win7 64bit Pro from software4students for £40 and jobs a goodun.

I've got the same proc cooler. Make sure your case has fan holes on top, as they only fit vertically on am3. Honestly, I don't rate it much. The fan makes a low frequency hum even with the rubber mounting, and it doesn't move enough air. My 555 was going past 65 degrees on black ops, so I had to fit a 12" fan to suck the air through from the top. It works, but it's so noisy it just defeats the whole purpose.

Shame you didn't go for the bequiet too. I have that and it's rock solid.

Its built just trying to sort out my boot dvd, btw the cooler had to be modified Was catching on my RAM slot in the mobo. Was thinking send it back and just use the stock one but thought what the hell may as well just trim it. Have to say on idle the PC is whisper quiet now.

Aria are pretty competitive now, I am going to build a budget machine for a friend under £200 if I can and Aria seems to be the best so far for it.

May want to go under £200, but I still want to get pretty decent stuff, I will not cut down price on power supply, so none of those £10-£20 500watt things.


As for the cooler, I got a Akasa Venom Nano, cooling a quad core 3Ghz phenom, which is slightly over clocked and it does the job fine.
Fitted no problem, but I had to make sure that it was facing the right way, so air went though the heat sink and then can escape via a fan on the back of the case.

Good specs, still not sure about Gigabyte boards, I had two and both gave out pretty quickly, but a mate of mine who is a gamer, loves them, the first PC I built for him had a gigabyte board and is over 5 years old and still going. the last machine I buiult for him, is also Gigabyte based and seems to be working fine


Not sure what Mushkin memory is like, it seems to be getting popular

Glad your machine is working ok and you got it built

Well CPu is heating up a bit (under load), think with the cooler shannigans I was having the thermal compound is not doing the job so going to run off to PC shop tomorrow and get something. Had the CPU clocked at 3.8ghz no bother but heated up kinda quick even at default clock speeds under load its running hot so think there is an issue their.