ok im bored on lunch so here goes
Just as a benchmark, the last pc that I built was a
P4 2.6 (*or maybe 7) with Hyperthreading O/C to 3.2ghz (140)
450watt power (35 quid ish)
radeon 9700 pro (150quid)
180GB IBM Deskstar XP drive (100 quid)
1GB DDR PC3200 (100 quid)
Gigabyte Motherboard , something XP it is (70 quid)
AOpen CD Rom 52x burner (40 quid)
2nd hand Monitor (20quid )
Total cost 655 with vat.
All products sourced from
www.computerorbit.co.uk - ebay and a local store for IDE cables etc.
and it performs extreemly well in benchmarks and applications.
Id have to say that I dont agree that its cheaper to buy than build.
You can go one step further by buying second hand parts from ebay, like your processor (intel anyway) cos they are guaranteed for 5 years with the manufacturer anyway. I have bought 1 dead processor before p4 1.7 and they replaced it with a 2.6 (or maybe 7) at no extra charge!!! (the old massive p4 chips are no longer made).
RE: Power supply 350 is fine, but if you plan to overclock a 450 is really the boy, but it will cost u an extra 30 quid.
Radeon 9500 is also a good card, but I dont think the life on it for the cutting edge games will be anymore than 1 year. Try a 9700 pro (a real one) second hand for around 120 ish, should last at least 20 months.
finally I can recommend Gigabyte boards, as they are DIRT cheap with good pound for pound performance.
Finally on this, I upgraded from Geforce3ti 40gb disk 526 RDRAM P41.7
and as of the moment, I have to honestly say that the difference in performance with games was probably not worth the upgrade. Im convinced that the majority of games are buggy as hell atm, cos Vietcong, Halo etc still run unreliably. Max Payne 2 runs like a dream though.
I can burn cds at the same time as playing games though, which is impressive I suppose. but ultimately pointless