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"Building a PC on a budget"

(A fairly big budget)

Now, I'm not going to be doing this till around November, but I will be doing it. I thought I'd get some opinions from you guys.

Here are the constraints:

1) Budget £1000-2000 (give or take a few hundred)
2) Base unit plus graphics and sound only. In other words: Motherboard, processor(s), PSU, cooling, graphics card(s), RAM, case, sound card, and speakers. I *think* that's it...
So no monitor(s), Keyboard/mouse, optical drives etc are needed.
3) Designed for gaming.


So, your thoughts? Enough for a dual pci-express gfx card system? ATI or NVidia? Perhaps a dual core processor? What would you build on that sort of budget?

1000 - 2000 is a hell of a range.

HDD - 2 / 4/ 8 Raptors (1000 RPM)
Graphics have to be Nvidia 7800... Nothing else rivals it.

haha "budget". How much do you think PCs cost!

for £2000 you should be looking at an AMD FX55 CPU, 2GB of high speed RAM and an Nvidia 7800GTX. As for HDD, go for whatever capacity you can justify but make it 7200rpm. Sound Card wise I'd go for an audigy but unless you've got surround sound onboard sound does the job just fine these days.

"(give or take a few hundred)"

I may want to kill you.

In that case, save yourself £340 and get a single 7800GTX. At low resolutions SLI is CPU limited and will only produce about 4-5fps more than a single card.

For monitors, I currently have 2x 19" TFT's, resolution is therefore 1280x1024. I don't think they need upgrading for the time being :)

You could get an FX55/2GB RAM/SLI 7800GTX system for about £1800
What resolution does your monitor support? If it's anything less than 1600x1200 SLI is utterly, utterly pointless.

You can buy me for that, and I'll do all your homework for you!

You call that a budget?

When I see posts like this, I usually expect a post about someone wanting a machine for < £300.

I doubt you will have to worry with the amount of money you have there, you will get a pretty decent machine in that range.

EDIT: Been out of touch with the PC market recently, so I can't help much.

(A fairly big budget)

Now, I'm not going to be doing this till around November, but I will be doing it. I thought I'd get some opinions from you guys.

Here are the constraints:

1) Budget £1000-2000 (give or take a few hundred)
2) Base unit plus graphics and sound only. In other words: Motherboard, processor(s), PSU, cooling, graphics card(s), RAM, case, sound card, and speakers. I *think* that's it...
So no monitor(s), Keyboard/mouse, optical drives etc are needed.
3) Designed for gaming.


So, your thoughts? Enough for a dual pci-express gfx card system? ATI or NVidia? Perhaps a dual core processor? What would you build on that sort of budget?