I've been asked to put together a budget gaming PC for a family member, as a birthday present due in a month or two. The recipient currently has a low end 2.4 GHz Celeron box with 1GB of RAM and an old GeForce 4 MX graphics card. He plays games like Age of Empires 3, Wesnoth, etc. but would be interested in more modern stuff like Call of Duty: World at War.
The budget is £250-£300 with emphesis on the lower end. I'm thinking along the lines of:
Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 or AMD X2 7750 (much cheaper)
2-4GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 8-series card like a 8800GT
Motherboard
PSU
I'd re-use the optical drives and hard disk from his current machine. At a first glance I think the budget is going to be tricky to meet. I don't really play PC games these days so don't know where not to skimp. Any ideas?
As you suspect the budget will be tricky to meet.
Actually impossible without buying secondhand.
Problem No1 is going to be re using the old opticals and the HD's.
Modern boards only have one IDE header, some have none.
I would budget for a new SATA HD.
Re use the old opticals on the IDE header.
Check out Ebay for a end of line business PC with a good spec P4 in it and then spend the majority of the money on a good AGP GFX card/
You may even find one that will take a PCI express card.
These full units are going for £100 leaves you enough money for a good spec GFX card.
An ATI 4850 would be a good budget VC to buy.
Noticed on OCUK that the XFX 4850 is under £100 inc VAT.
Cheers for the tips guys. Especially since I had forgotten about newer boards having less IDE support. I'll look into ebay/secondhand and see what I can do on the specified budget. I'm sure I'll get something respectable together.
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=18228
A tad over budget, but you get half off on a new Dell system...
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote