Hi all, I was hoping I might be able to get a bit of advice. It being Christmas and me being a jammy git, I just received a fair bit of cash from various relatives, and combined with a bit of my own hard-earned (ok, lazily earned ) money I think I have enough to get myself a fairly decent new PC. The part I need advice with is this: should I get myself a custom built computer, or should I just go out to PC world or somewhere equally cheap and cheerful and check out their deals? As far as I can tell the trade off is that with custom computer's you get very little in the way of guarentees, you don't get stuff like operating systems thrown in for free and you have to have a little but of know-how to set it all up properly. With the mass manufactured superstores' PCs on the other hand you get some warranties etc., you get an OS and usually office as part of the deal, and you don't have to have much computer expertise. Unfortunately you also get lumbered with crappy software you don't need (I'm looking at you Dell applications!) that can be very annoying to remove and you don't get the thing tailored to your needs so well. I've also heard the quality of the machines from places like PC World, Comet and other such stores can sometimes be a little poor and they often tend to be outdated very quickly. The final consideration is that although I do know a little about computer stuff, I'm by no means an expert (hence having to get a friend or a website to put together a custom machine if I were to choose that route). Really what I would like is a machine that works fast, has a fairly large amount of storage space, has the ability to play current release games at decent settings and won't be full of annoying software! My budget is about £300-£400
I bought this one due to it's size, it's one of those HP Pavilion things that's tiny. I knew it wouldn't be super-fast and after two years could do with a bit of extra RAM but apart from that I'm happy. It looks OK and is quiet. I think the X-box killed the super home computer
For £300-£400 you're going to struggle to get a PC that plays current PC gaming titles at decent settings. It's really just not a realistic budget. For that price I'd check out your local PC store. Not the big high street names. The smaller stores will custom build your PC for you and set it up. There will of course be a labour charge. Normally £25-£50. Unless you're using Linux you never get the OS for free and even then there are costs involved. A sizeable chunk of the price of a mass produced PC is licence fees for software like Windows and Office. And in most cases it's not office you get. It's it's poor relation MS Works. Now even with a custom built PC from the local PC store you will have a guarantee. Every electrical item sold in the UK must come with a one year warranty as standard. If you buy from Dell that's basically what you get. Although they will collect and return. If you can save yourself the pain of purchasing a monitor, keyboard, mouse and all that stuff then you might just do it. Especially if you use free open source software where possible. For example instead of Microsoft Office, choose OpenOffice.org. If you really need Microsoft Office you can save up and buy it later. The retail version is always better than the bundled software. As for the shelf life of PCs from high street stores. It's nonsense. If you're buying a brand name PC like a Dell or HP your kit will be good for at least 2 to 3 years. Yes new kit comes out all the time. But the whole obsolescence in 6 months stuff is just hype pushed by manufacturers and sales men to generate sales in a saturated market. Just to give you an idea of what to expect for £300-£400 look here. Those a decent machines. But they aren't gaming rigs. You should be able to play games on something like this. This is Dells "entry level" gaming rig. And this is Dells top of the line gaming rig.
Wow. Those are really inflated prices. That top level Dell is way overpriced. The cost of the component parts of that unit comes to around £1100 without OS. That's £1600 charge for supplying. You may get lucky and find a good bargain at a commercial shop but generally the cpu's are budget class with really crappy motherboards (no point having loads of ram, a massive HDD and a super CPU if your MB is a pile of poo.) I had a quick look around a couple of pc sites and for £400 you can build yourself a pc with a dual core intel cpu 2 x 2.66ghz 1333 fsb, A decent MB that can handle above 1333 fsb with plenty of bus bandwidth, A 320gb HDD SATA, a reasonable Graphics card (something around a £100 mark {radeon hd3870/hd4850}) with 512mb vram and all the latest pixel shader tech. and 3gb of ram. It wouldn't be the best gaming system in history but will let you play the latest games at or very close to full detail etc and should let you play happily for a couple of years before you have to start turning down settings. I have a build similar to what i have described here that i built last xmas, It has allowed me to play crysis at top end speeds and more recent games such as alone in the dark/fallout 3/and nfs underground at full res with 4xAA etc. You may even get change out of £400 notes and buy yourself a legal version of XP (I certainly wouldn't spend £'s on vista). In a nutshell, If you buy from dell/pc world whatever you will get an overpriced, sub-standard bloated piece of kit that will slowly kill your soul but you will be able to phone up the helpline and be led around in circles by a clueless YTS teen who don't know his Hard Drive From his RAM, if you get my meaning. If you build your own, you get what you want at a much better price but you will need to be prepared to solve your software issues yourself. I don't mention Hardware breakdown's because in all the years i have built and maintained PC's i have only ever seen 1 fail and that was a HDD failure caused by a mains power surge (not surge proteced DO'H) and that wouldn't be covered under a shop warranty anyway. I hope my ramble has helped somewhat, My advice, build your own It's very satisfying. It's quite ez once your confident, Ask your mate to walk you through it.
Well I already have the monitor, keyboard, an external DVD R/W and speakers etc so yes it would literally just be the PC itself that I need to buy. With that in mind I had a look on pc-specialist.co.uk and put together what seemed to be an alright looking gaming PC for £350 without an OS or £450 with XP pro. Although I'd prefer Office I can probably get by with open source equivalents, I only really use Word on a regular basis, excel and the rest are only used rarely. I'm not sure if this will be very clear but here's a screenie of the spec for the PC i could get for £450 on pc-specialist: http://s5.photobucket.com/albums/y154/comrade_jack/?action=view¤t=newpcspec.jpg
People buy that? Might be worth checking out the sales. I believe they're practically giving some stuff away this year.
Hmmm, the stuff you're saying seems to be pretty much opposite to what AikiWolfie was telling me, which is a tad confusing! I should probably clarify a little, when I said I was after something that could play new games at decent settings I didn't really mean top of the line games like crysis at highest detail levels. In terms of new releases the one I'm looking forward to most is currently Diablo III which I understand won't actually be that crazy in terms of minimum specs. My current PC is rubbish though and only has some lame onboard integrated graphics card that came as standard 4 years ago, so I would like something that's gonna stand the test of time a little better than that did. Thanks for the tips everybody!
I've also just come across this on dabs - http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=5DKD&CategorySelectedId=11011&InMerch=1 - is this worth a look? I did notice it's refurbished so the warranty is much less than a new one would be, but it seems like a pretty good deal...
No it's not. You're over simplifying the build process a large manufacturer goes through. It's not the same as building a PC with parts from your local discount web site. Companies like Dell sell to millions of customers every year. Some of those customers buy in thousands of units at a time. OEMs are required by law in most countries to provide some sort of basic warranty package as standard. That means Dell has to hedge its bets and cover it costs. To reduce the the potential for problems Dell performs not so little tasks like compatibility testing. Which costs money in equipment and man hours. It's boring time consuming tedious work. But the big companies have to do it or risk running into substantially more problems and high system return rates. If you have the know how and can be bothered to build your own PC, I say go for it. Right now prices will be tumbling. But to be honest the quality of PCs from the likes of Dell for most people aren't any worse than the quality of self build systems. I said that once. Then I had a rash of failures. Was not a good time. Got any links to the sites you're using. I'm also building a new PC
Absolutely they have overheads that need to be addressed but £1600 per unit sold is a little greedy to say the least, and having been on the end of the phone to the 'HELP' line i know how frustratingly pointless the task is. I have even been told that my computer is completely trashed and un-fixable when the actual problem was a psu that hadn't got enough power to run the system. Still they do provide a degree of security regarding faulty parts. The sites i looked at earlier are novatech and ebuyer. I have used both in the past several times and have been pleased with their service.
The spec is ok but not for the price. You will be diddling yourself. And a caution to the wise, The PSU in the specs probably wont have the required power your system will need. It may not have enough juice on the required rails, it may be worth double checking the requirements of the graphics card and the output of the PSU before you buy, if you buy.
Yes it is an ok deal but the components are getting a bit tired already. You have a couple of options available. In a previous post you mentioned that you don't really want to play the latest games in full glory, remember that the games you want to play in two years time might need more powerful system to run them even at low specs, so it may be worth future proofing yourself at least a little.
Thanks for the tip, I'm slightly leaning towards the PC I mentioned earlier on dabs ( http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=5DKD&CategorySelectedId=11011&InMerch=1 ) but from the looks of things the graphics card is a little bit pants. I don't know much about this sort of thing, will that PC support a better graphics card if I were to get one later? I'd be saving myself almost £150 if I were to get that one over the custom one from PC-Specialist so I'd have a bit of cash to spend on a half decent card. Or if I were to start doing that would I end up having to replace half the parts in the damn thing to make it work properly! *edit* I think you half-answered this as I was writing it
If it were I then i would just have a word with your mate and build one from scratch, I can point you in the direction of good places to buy and help you get the most for your cash. I see little point in buying a decent graphics to plug into a mediocre at best system. That system in all honestly would have been a good buy two years ago. The only saving grace is the CPU which is still a half decent chip. The graphics are beyond pants. For the extra bit of time and money you could build a really healthy system that will not need to be upgraded for at least two years probably four years if you are not a power gamer. As you only get a 30 day warranty that removes the only advantage of a shop purchase.
Well that depends on how you look at things. Even the most basic technicians these days demand inflation busting wages. Companies like Dell are the ones that fund the R&D that allow the generic off the shelf parts you build your cheap gaming rig from. So on balance, it balances out. Dell gets it's profit margin and you get your cheap home built PC. Thanks for the sites btw
