Gaming PC Advice

[Furious Styles]

Hey all, I'm in the market for a gaming PC. I don't have a massive budget, around £1000, and have been on a couple of websites that offer what could be a good PC for about that price. Do any of you have any suggestions as to places to look?

I don't want to build one myself, as I am technically useless, so don't recommend places to buy parts. I've already been on pcspecialist.co.uk, cyberpowersystem.co.uk and a few others.

Also, here's the PC I customised on cyberpowersystem.co.uk. It costs £1089, VAT and delivery included.

Spoiler: Is this a decent deal?

CAS: CoolerMaster Elite 310 Mid Tower Gaming Case with see-thru side panel
CD: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE. (BLACK COLOR)
CPU: Intel® Core? i5 2400 Quad Core 3.1GHz 6MB cache LGA1155 + HD Graphics [-21]
CS_FAN: Default Case Fan
FAN: Asetek 510LC / Xtremegear Liquid Cooling system w/ 120mm Radiator (Asetek CPU Water Cooling ***Overclockable XXX***)
FREEBIE_OS1: Free Microsoft® Office® 2010 STARTER EDITION
HDD: 1TB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16M Cache Hard Drive (Single Hard Drive)
KEYBOARD: (Keyboard & Mouse Combo) Logitech Cordless Desktop® Wave? Keyboard & Mouse [+45]
MEMORY: 8GB (4x2GB) PC10666 DDR3/1333mhz Dual Channel Memory [+42] (Kingston Hyper X Blu Series w/Heat Spreader ***Overclockable XXX*** [+8])
MONITOR: 22" TFT Active Matrix LCD Display [+84] (LG E2240S-PN 22" 5MS 1920x1080 LED WIDE Monitor, D-Sub. [+21])
MOTHERBOARD: Asus P8P67-M P67 DDR3 Intel LGA1155 DDR3 ATX Mainboard w/ 7.1 HD Audio, GbLAN, SATAIII USB3.0 ***Overclockable XXX*** (B3 Stepping)
NETWORK: ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT -- As standard on all PCs
OS: Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium [+74] (64-bit Edition)
POWERSUPPLY: 700 Watts Power Supplies [+23] Cyberpower 700watt Gaming Power Supply
SOFT1: Microsoft® Office® 2010 Home and Student (Word, Excel, Powerpoint + OneNote) [+74]
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
USB: Built-in USB 2.0 Ports
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX460 1GB 16X PCI Express [+69] (Major Brand Power by NVIDIA)
WARRANTY: STANDARD WARRANTY: 3-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY PLUS LIFE-TIME TECHNICAL SUPPORT
_PRICE: (+898)

So yeah, any suggestions will be welcome. I've never really bought a good PC before so I don't know what's what.

 

[Furious Styles]

Here's another one I found on dabs.com

http://www.dabs.com/products/zoostorm-core-i7-870-8gb-1tb-dvdrw-w7pr-7BF3.html?refs=462930000-426870000

To reiterate, I could really use your advice. I don't want to waste £1000 on something bad.

 

[Furious Styles]

Well marvelous

Thank you for the help

 

[Valagetti]

Buy it!

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Here's another one I found on dabs.com

http://www.dabs.com/products/zoostorm-core-i7-870-8gb-1tb-dvdrw-w7pr-7BF3.html?refs=462930000-426870000

To reiterate, I could really use your advice. I don't want to waste £1000 on something bad.

If I were forced to buy one of the two rather than build my own I wiould Personally buy the one from Dabs. That's just me. It doesn't come with a monitor but eBuyer currently have some nice ones for sale [http://www.ebuyer.com/product/194604]. Though if you can wait they're having a big sale tomorro morning starting at 11am so you might be able to get a better monitor for the same price.

Of course this is just me...

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

I don't know the baseline prices for computers in the UK, so I wouldn't know, but the specs look alright.

 

[The_Decoy]

I used chillblast ( http://www.chillblast.com/home.php ) to get mine a few years ago. Pretty decent prices and it's a good rig. I've got a "Chillblast Fusion Hornet" or similar.

 

[Danzaivar]

Computer looks great. I made one for £600 which wasn't nearly as powerful about 3 years ago and it still plays basically any game I've tried on it at max settings. So yours should be fine.

But anyway, referring to £1000 as 'not a massive budget' made me lol

 

[Layz92]

It is roughly 2 dollars to a pound, and I payed $1600 or so on my PC and it is a little bit faster than your first posted set-up (more powerful CPU, more RAM). I don't know what hardware prices are like in England but that seems a little steep. My $1600 pricetag included a Razor Deathadder mouse and a new monitor so really just for my tower it cost me closer to $1500ish. Second one to me seems a better buy (in price and components). If you know a friend with PC experience I would say buy your own parts and get them to build it for you and show you how.

Edit: I would also say don't bother with Microsoft Office if you can help it. You can get Open Office for free if you need to do word processing.

Edit Mk.2: Another good thing about selecting your own hardware is you can check the individual parts with a site like Whirlpool Forums and check to see if they have heating problems, shoddy drivers etc etc before you even get them. If you buy as a pack you can get things you don't want.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

It is roughly 2 dollars to a pound, and I payed $1600 or so on my PC and it is a little bit faster than your first posted set-up (more powerful CPU, more RAM). I don't know what hardware prices are like in England but that seems a little steep. My $1600 pricetag included a Razor Deathadder mouse and a new monitor so really just for my tower it cost me closer to $1500ish. Second one to me seems a better buy (in price and components). If you know a friend with PC experience I would say buy your own parts and get them to build it for you and show you how.

Parts over here seem a little pricier. I could save a load if I bought everything from Newegg or Tiger Direct, it's just shipping that would ramp the price up for me.

 

[Furious Styles]

I used chillblast ( http://www.chillblast.com/home.php ) to get mine a few years ago. Pretty decent prices and it's a good rig. I've got a "Chillblast Fusion Hornet" or similar.

I'm looking at a fusion beachhead right now and its looking pretty sweet. I'm liking the amount of stuff they throw in with it

 

[Furious Styles]

Computer looks great. I made one for £600 which wasn't nearly as powerful about 3 years ago and it still plays basically any game I've tried on it at max settings. So yours should be fine.

But anyway, referring to £1000 as 'not a massive budget' made me lol

Yeah, sorry about that. i have a habit of overestimating how much money other people have because, with the money I saved up while working last year, and my government bursaries for university, I rarely have less than £1500 in the bank!

Its a sweet life being a student

 

[x0ny]

What's wrong with the monitor you're using now? If there's nothing wrong with it (ie: you find the size/resolution/brightness/contrast to be satisfactory) then don't buy a new monitor. Same question goes to your mouse and keyboard, and if it's a gaming pc why buy cordless?

My PC cost the same as yours but I got an i7 processor, TWO of your graphics cards(gigabyte brand0, 850W Corsair power supply. You're paying more for the warranty, labour and the overclocking. I assume you're paying for the overclocking since so many of your parts allow overclocking and you said you're technically useless.

Other places to check out are Scan.co.uk

EDIT: you should have a look around ebuyer for cheaper and better graphics cards, GTX460's DO NOT drop in price as much as other cards, so perhaps you can consider buying your card elsewhere. I think I saw a 5830 for 83 quid on ebuyer.

 

[pejhmon]

if you live in london, walk down Tottenham court road. There's a bunch of computer shops there and they are all subject to bartering.

What's you've got there looks decent, though. The longer the warranty is always a good thing

 

[pejhmon]

It is roughly 2 dollars to a pound

Lol what year are you living in? It's been around 1.6 to the pound for the last 2-3 years . I miss the days where it actually was 2$=£1, that's when america was cheap ...

 

[Furious Styles]

What's wrong with the monitor you're using now? If there's nothing wrong with it (ie: you find the size/resolution/brightness/contrast to be satisfactory) then don't buy a new monitor. Same question goes to your mouse and keyboard, and if it's a gaming pc why buy cordless?

My PC cost the same as yours but I got an i7 processor, TWO of your graphics cards(gigabyte brand0, 850W Corsair power supply. You're paying more for the warranty, labour and the overclocking. I assume you're paying for the overclocking since so many of your parts allow overclocking and you said you're technically useless.

Other places to check out are Scan.co.uk

EDIT: you should have a look around ebuyer for cheaper and better graphics cards, GTX460's DO NOT drop in price as much as other cards, so perhaps you can consider buying your card elsewhere. I think I saw a 5830 for 83 quid on ebuyer.

I have a laptop now, so I can't carry a monitor or any peripherals over. I wen cordless because the next cheapest combo was really crappy, it actually had the word "value" in the title. I suppose it can't be that bad, though. Where'd you get yours from? It sounds too good to be true! I did find some like that on dinopc.com, but the company got some terrible reviews so I decided to stay away from them.

I'll check scan.co.uk out

 

[Layz92]

It is roughly 2 dollars to a pound

Lol what year are you living in? It's been around 1.6 to the pound for the last 2-3 years . I miss the days where it actually was 2$=£1, that's when america was cheap ...

I'm Australian but we are pretty close on parity right now so it shouldn't make that huge a difference. I tend to remember 2 because it is a nice round number without checking the stock market.

 

[Danzaivar]

Computer looks great. I made one for £600 which wasn't nearly as powerful about 3 years ago and it still plays basically any game I've tried on it at max settings. So yours should be fine.

But anyway, referring to £1000 as 'not a massive budget' made me lol

Yeah, sorry about that. i have a habit of overestimating how much money other people have because, with the money I saved up while working last year, and my government bursaries for university, I rarely have less than £1500 in the bank!

Its a sweet life being a student

Yeah, student here, didn't take a year off working. Last loan payment the other week was the first time out of my overdraft in 3 and a half years. Damn you