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"£1,800 PC - what should I be getting for my money?"

No secret I'm in the market for a new PC. I have neither the skill nor the patience to build one myself, and besides, I want a warranty. So, with this in mind, what should I be looking to get on my budget (mentioned in topic if you missed it)?

I'm looking for a fast, solid gaming machine that won't be redundant in less than 18 months, so please keep that in mind.

Is it worth looking at these dual-core processors? Is the nVidia GeForce 7800 really that much better than the ATI 850XT platinum? And what are the best suppliers of quality PCs in this price range? At the moment, my knowledge is limited to little more than Alienware and Dell (although I'm going off Dell pretty quickly...).

Any help appreciated.

Insane Bartender wrote:
> Any idea what the support is like from Mesh and Overclockers?

It was about 3 years ago, but at the time, I found the Mesh customer support to be pretty poor. It could be completely different nowadays, but I thought I'd just add my view.

Would Alienware not be good way to go for that sort of price, they seem to have a decent enough reputation.

Overclockers are horrible for tech support and you have to pay for your own returns if the item is faulty and it takes them ages to get it back to you. On the other hand they are cheap on the whole and will ship items to you in most cases for the next day.

I built mine around 6 months a go for around £2500 in total through overclockers/overclocker/boltonpc and techheads.co.uk and aside from the above all were pretty tip top.

Athlon 64 FX is a must and for me ATI X850 PE - don\'t bother with dual graphics cards yet unless you want to spen half your time contacting Nvidia to find out why it doesn\'t work with 80% of games.

I'll have to investigate. I certainly want an onsite service, for at least the first year of warranty...

No idea about Mesh but Overclockers have always provided pretty good service in my experience, though I've never bought one of their full systems.

Any idea what the support is like from Mesh and Overclockers?

Athlon™ 64 FX-55 Processor
Microsoft® Windows® XP Home
1024MB DDR400 Memory
2x 256MB GeForce 6800GT
19" TFT Flat Panel Monitor

£1799inc vat

[URL]http://www.meshcomputers.com/updated/matrix_2_5.htm[/URL]

That I don't know.
A slightly slower system from Alienware comes to almost £2100 : \

From Overclockers you can get a 4000+/1GB/X850XT PE system for £1400 which is a pretty decent price. Then you'd just have to buy keyboard/mouse/monitor/speakers and you'd be done.

The 7800GTX is a fair bit faster than an X850 plus it supports Shader Model 3.0 rather than 2.1

but from where?

for £1800 you'd definitely be looking at:

Athlon FX55 (possibly FX57)
2GB CAS2 RAM
250GB SATA HDD
GeForce 7800GTX
8ms 17" TFT Monitor