building your own pc

[Dolly]

if i can get it for around £500 ill be happy, think im going to build it over a few months to spread the costs.

i aint got nout, i gave my pc to my sister i use a laptop.

to begin with ill be hooked up to my tv, not ideal i know.

(ill probably go towards £600 if i can get a small SSD)

[Dolly]

stumbled across this post

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18323289

seems about what i need, and close to what i was eyeing up anyway.

[Jimp]

I recently built a desktop which ended up costing ~€750 in the end. That figure includes a separate SSD, a monitor, speakers, new headset and a gaming mouse. The core components came in closer to €600 which is £520. Evoss posted a great list of components that comes in under £600:
http://www.golfgtiforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=202538.msg1884342#msg1884342
I ended up getting a different graphics card and one or two other things on offer to keep to my budget but the rest is nearly identical. The rest I bought over the course of a month by watching daily deals on some Irish sites and waiting for things to come up on offer.

[AlexMozza]

Best place by a mile is scan.co.uk.
Theyeven do bundels that you then build.

[Ant1981]

I'm building a new i7 system 

[bobbarley]

£500 to £600 will get you a fairly decent PC, it won't get you an awesome one though.  Do you need Windows 7 including, or will you be "obtaining" your own copy from elsewhere?

[Ant1981]

go 64 bit so that you can use 4gb + of ram.

[bobbarley]

Something like this would be good.

The graphics card is very good and will keep you playing games for a fair while.  The processor is also equally as good, best value for money CPU out there.  Motherboard isn'y my first choice, but you'd be best off getting a board that uses the Z68 chipset these days.  Case is also rather budget, but got good reviews.

Ideally you'd be better off spending a little more cash, then you can get a better motherboard and case.  You also need a copy of Windows 7, plus whatever mouse/keyboard you want.

1 x MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti OC Twin FrozR II 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **Supplied with FREE Batman: Arkham City PC game**  £174.98
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM  £161.99
1 x Gigabyte Z68A-D3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard  £72.98
1 x OCZ ZS Series 550W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply  £47.99
1 x Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 32MB Cache - OEM (WD10EARX)  £44.99
1 x Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (BL2KIT51264BA160A)  £39.98
1 x Xigmatek Asgard Midi Tower Case - Black  £29.99
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 CPU Cooler (Socket 939 / AM2 / AM3 / 775 / 1155/ 1156 / 1366)  £19.99
1 x OcUK 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM  £16.99
2 x Coolermaster 120mm Fan - Black  £5.00
Total : £614.88 (includes shipping : FREE).

[Ant1981]

Something like this would be good.

The graphics card is very good and will keep you playing games for a fair while.  The processor is also equally as good, best value for money CPU out there.  Motherboard isn'y my first choice, but you'd be best off getting a board that uses the Z68 chipset these days.  Case is also rather budget, but got good reviews.

Ideally you'd be better off spending a little more cash, then you can get a better motherboard and case.  You also need a copy of Windows 7, plus whatever mouse/keyboard you want.

1 x MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti OC Twin FrozR II 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **Supplied with FREE Batman: Arkham City PC game**  £174.98
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM  £161.99
1 x Gigabyte Z68A-D3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard  £72.98
1 x OCZ ZS Series 550W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply  £47.99
1 x Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 32MB Cache - OEM (WD10EARX)  £44.99
1 x Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (BL2KIT51264BA160A)  £39.98
1 x Xigmatek Asgard Midi Tower Case - Black  £29.99
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 CPU Cooler (Socket 939 / AM2 / AM3 / 775 / 1155/ 1156 / 1366)  £19.99
1 x OcUK 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM  £16.99
2 x Coolermaster 120mm Fan - Black  £5.00
Total : £614.88 (includes shipping : FREE).

Not bad graphics.

Maybe consider the i7 if affordable and a faster hard drive, maybe two in RAID 0.

[bobbarley]

I'd rather have one SSD over a RAID 0 configuration.  If it's a modest budget then no point going for an i7, they're poor value for money compared to the i5-2500k.