Buying a new PC, HELP!

A

afoia

Adventurer
Right for starters ive been a mac user for the last 4 years and have been pretty much out of the know on pc specs.

After looking around various sites and reading forums i've whittled down my selection to 3 "pre-made" computers

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/186623

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-210-OK&groupid=43&catid=1444&subcat= - would need to buy windows with this!

http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/hom...80/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-580&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1 - second or third one along

Now my budget is ~£600 and i'm mainly looking for something graphically powerful. I dont care about the hard drive space as i store alot on externals, but what i would like is a good (future proof) graphics card to play WoW, TF2 and hopefully some more power hungry games on down the line...

If anyone has any other suggestions or links please feel free to let me know.

Cheers.
 
afoia said:
a good (future proof) graphics card to play WoW, TF2 and hopefully some more power hungry games on down the line...
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Any of those machines will eat those two games alive (TF2 ran fine on my 2003 PC), but the stuff around the corner? You pretty much always have to spend in the £1000 range for that, and then some new fangled Direct X feature gets added and you're immediately out of the game.

I take it that price is the main reason you're jumping from the Mac? Bearing in mind bootcamp and Valve's new commitment to Steam on Mac (and Blizzard's longstanding commitment)?

I'd probably go for the overclocker's PC (in fact, my PC is an overclockers machine), but after the shipping and OS, you'll be pushing £800. There is a fourth option of course. Source and buy the components and assemble it all yourself. Overclockers tend to be a bit pricey anyway, so if you look around you can probably get the job done for that £600 of yours. Building PCs is actually quite fun, and you may be able to find a friend to back you up on some of the trickier stuff (the only thing I've never done is swap a processor, which is arguably the only really tricky bit of the process).
 
kupocake said:
afoia said:
a good (future proof) graphics card to play WoW, TF2 and hopefully some more power hungry games on down the line...
Click to expand...
Any of those machines will eat those two games alive (TF2 ran fine on my 2003 PC), but the stuff around the corner? You pretty much always have to spend in the £1000 range for that, and then some new fangled Direct X feature gets added and you're immediately out of the game.

I take it that price is the main reason you're jumping from the Mac? Bearing in mind bootcamp and Valve's new commitment to Steam on Mac (and Blizzard's longstanding commitment)?

I'd probably go for the overclocker's PC (in fact, my PC is an overclockers machine), but after the shipping and OS, you'll be pushing £800. There is a fourth option of course. Source and buy the components and assemble it all yourself. Overclockers tend to be a bit pricey anyway, so if you look around you can probably get the job done for that £600 of yours. Building PCs is actually quite fun, and you may be able to find a friend to back you up on some of the trickier stuff (the only thing I've never done is swap a processor, which is arguably the only really tricky bit of the process).
Click to expand...

I've been running a mac mini for years and never had a large enough wallet to shell out for an imac and i still think there overpriced. Yea i know WoW and TF2 will run on lower spec machines, but i also want to try out some of the current MMOs and possible FFXIV when thats due out.

After a bit of research overclockers seems to have the better graphics card but as you said they sting you with shipping (my brother ordered his pc from there and it came with the front smashed!).

I think the Ebuyer HP machine looks like the best value but the graphics card looks a bit crappy for playing high spec games...
 
Ok. If you are going to be gaming and want something relatively futureproof then get the overclockers build. The others will be alright but for gaming they will become dated and fast.
 
I myself would be willing to sacrifice performance for customised cooling. My current machine, which is several years old, is cooled only by "dustproof" fans, and the power supply is fanless.

Of course, the main fan has still gathered enough dust to produce a fair amount of noise. If I were to build a new machine on an appropriate budget, I'd consider watercooling to avoid this eventuality.
 
afoia said:
After a bit of research overclockers seems to have the better graphics card but as you said they sting you with shipping (my brother ordered his pc from there and it came with the front smashed!).
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I've used overclockers for components quite a lot, although I've never brought a whole PC since I like building myself. If it's damage that you're worried about I can say that I have had faulty components from them but I have never had any problems with return and replacement. Recently a power supply over a year old failed but they still replaced that with no problems.
 
The good thing about that HP you put up from Ebuyer is that its running an i5 CPU (which is pretty much gonna be the best one your gonna get at your price range), the bad thing is the graphics chip on it. If you can stretch a little further you could always add your own grpahics card (5770 or similar) and you will have a nice rig for a while (should be capable of running Crysis...ish).

I recently built myself a new rig with an i5 750 and Radeon 5770 and it runs pretty much anything I throw at it, well worth the little extra investment if you can.
 
Do not buy a pre-built machine. Pre-built machines have a 25-30% markup just because they've already been built. Not to mention they come bundled with a whole load of **** you don't need. At least buy the components and have someone build them for you if you don't know how.
 
Zelgadis said:
Do not buy a pre-built machine. Pre-built machines have a 25-30% markup just because they've already been built. Not to mention they come bundled with a whole load of **** you don't need. At least buy the components and have someone build them for you if you don't know how.
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i would build it myself but i've been out of the loop for a good few years, which means i'll probably end up blowing something up..
 
Izekiel said:
The good thing about that HP you put up from Ebuyer is that its running an i5 CPU (which is pretty much gonna be the best one your gonna get at your price range), the bad thing is the graphics chip on it. If you can stretch a little further you could always add your own grpahics card (5770 or similar) and you will have a nice rig for a while (should be capable of running Crysis...ish).
Click to expand...

I would go with the logic behind this suggestion personally - get the base hardware all set and stick a meaty graphics card in later on, when games are out that will need it. You'll tear up WoW and TF2 fine on any of those machines as they are ;) however the games that haven't yet come out might benefit from cards which haven't yet come out, not to mention shrinking price tags on the latest generation cards if you buy them a little later on.

I did this with my last computer, and I still haven't bothered upgrading the graphics card (I'd originally planned to purchase a better one alongside the rest of the machine). I can now get a better card than the one I originally specced up for significantly less.

I'm not a big fan of the recent generations of AMD CPUs. YMMV.

R
 
Weird thing to add, i tweeted a few days ago about fixing my old laptop and mentioned i was also on the lookout for a new pc. The day after i posted that, Dell sent me a tweet asking what kind of pc i was looking for and when i replied they asked "what kind of games would you be playing on it?"

So far i'm waiting on a response back but i thought it was rather random or an obvious scam.
 
Would you consider buying a Novatech barebones kit, and then adding to that?

I spent £600 on mine (w/o monitor or OS). It's a year and a half old and i'm still running everything on full with no problems.
 
afoia said:
Weird thing to add, i tweeted a few days ago about fixing my old laptop and mentioned i was also on the lookout for a new pc. The day after i posted that, Dell sent me a tweet asking what kind of pc i was looking for and when i replied they asked "what kind of games would you be playing on it?"

So far i'm waiting on a response back but i thought it was rather random or an obvious scam.
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Well if you have to buy a pre-built, get something from ebuyer or Mesh Computers. Dell are terrible.
 
I have bought all my kit from overclockers, brilliant service and never had any problems with there kit, I highly recommend them
 
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