by RandomTask » Mon Jan 26, 2009 19:27:26
My typical PC budget is more like £1500-2000, so here is one nearer the top end of your price range.
I would look along the lines of:
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 £230
MOBO: Asus P6T Deluxe V2 £250
GFX: BFG GF GTX 260 896MB OC MAXCORE £230
RAM: 3GB OCZ PC3-12800 1600Mhz £115 (I originally had 6Gb here but it turned out abit too pricy)
HDD: 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 £75
PSU: OCZ 700W ModXStream Pro £80
Sound: Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer £60
£1040
Thats assuming your going to reuse the case, dvd drive etc as these are pretty pointless upgrading until they die.
I realise you mentioned you would rather not build it yourself but to be honest you get alot more value for money if you do.
That set up there is the third best CPU you can get, 2nd best GFX card, medium spec ram, with a motherboard that will comfortably take the best CPU around just now as well as 24GB (lol) of 2000Mhz DDR3 ram.
I havn't really looked at reviews for most of that, but the specs are all good/match up etc.
The PSU would need to be better if you were going to consider SLI/xFire (the motherboard can do either if you prefer ATI over nVidia, also supports 3way SLI and Quad GPU's)
You could get slower ram as well and save some money, but personally if I did anything with the ram it would be getting more/faster.
You could also get a cheaper motherboard but again I typically get one of the best motherboards. Normally I just look at the most expensive CPU there is at the time and get a motherboard which would run that, with the expectation that I'll upgrade to that CPU within a yr/two when its halved/quartered in price.
I just picked a random 1TB drive, again you would probably want to look at it in abit more detail and perhaps get a quieter one if you plan to use it mainly for movies etc as one of my main design criteria for my new pc is going to be getting it as quiet as possible as it really fucks me off at the moment.
Also I'd recommend trying to sell your old PC, as it normally comfortably pays for at least one new component of the new PC, if not 2 or 3 giving you an extra £200/300/400 to play with.
