I'm thinking of building this machine, should work out to about £300, what are people's thoughts on it? (incidentally, I don't want to spend significantly more so please don't tell me to buy some 700 quid one )
It looks good to me for a budget pc, what will the pc be used for? Will you be overclocking? The E2180 should overclock to 3ghz+ if you’re interested in that sort of stuff. Some newer games recommend more than a 2ghz dual core these days, but I don’t think you would have any problems playing most games at the moment.
Just general gaming (inc. Crysis) and progamming really, there's only so far you can take a laptop heh. Does it seem like the build is fairly good for future upgrading? The system I build will be slightly different, I'll up the RAM to two sticks of 2GB, put in an ICY Dock (or two) using one as a main drive. Then I'll have three hard drives for XPMCE, Vista and Linux which I can swap out and swap in.
Yes you will be able to upgrade no problem, I presume you are going the same motherboard as listed in that spec, if so that will take any processor from a Pentium D to a Quad Core and up to 8gigs of ram so your set for upgrades in the future. I would have a re think about the processor though, if you want to be playing Crysis in Vista the minimum requirements for the processor is a Dual Core @ 2.2ghz and 2.0ghz in XP so you would just about meet the requirements for XP. You could easily overclock if you want to save money as the next cheapest processor is almost double the price, the Core2Duo E4600 (2.4ghz) is £75 on ebuyer.
I was allways an amd person, and btw if u havent bought yet the new ati cards are way better then nvidia atm. You get alot more for your buck. + if you havent allready i would look at getting a new secreen as things deff wont look as good as they should on a low res.
People always worry if something can be upgraded. Why not just buy what's more powerful in the first place?!
To save money, why go out and buy a pc with 8gb of ram and a quad core processor if you’re not going to do anything to push it to its limits? Hardware gets cheaper over time so if you wait until you actually need a quad core processor and 8gigs of ram chances are it will be a lot cheaper to add more ram and a new processor to your pc. I got one of the cheapest core2duo’s and over clocked it, I could have spent triple the amount on a quadcore processor but the majority of games only make use of two cores so I didn’t see the point.