Looking for a new desktop - Need Advice/Recommendations

[Parky-RFC]

Hi guys.

I'm in the process of looking for a new PC. My 6 year old Dell Dimension 4600 seems to be tiring and is frustrating the life out of me with the constant lagg. The processor just doesn't have enough power to perform how I would like it to.

My budget is around £1,000. I will be using this PC for gaming, general internet browsing and I will be using my Hauppauge HD PVR to record. Therefore I will be watching lots of HD videos. At the moment my current PC struggles to play 480p videos on Youtube while I've got a few extra tabs open! So I'm assuming I will need a high level processor to watch these HD videos extremely smoothly.

Ideally I would love to be able to be playing the likes of Football Manger, minimize it and still have multiple firefox tabs open, watching videos ect without too much fuss. I just want a machine which will be powerful enough to perform smoothly under multiple tasks.

Now are there any brands I should be avoiding such as HP or Dell? I must say though my current Dell hasn't let me down, it's just got old and slow for today's modern ways.

I've been told before I'd be better buying all the parts separately and building it up myself, problem is I wouldn't no where to start and I'm not sure how much it would cost to get someone else to do it!

Does anyone have good PC websites, for good deals, or a site where I can manually select each part I want my PC to contain?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, cheers.

 

[bluemac]

I would recommend Lambdatek's PC Designer to get a good idea of cost and such. Might help you get some ideas on which components you can afford, if nothing else.

DinoPC are a company I have used in the past to build and supply custom PCs. They're quite cheap, and they used to have various extended warranties available. I'd recommend them over buying a branded PC any day. Any day.

 

[Parky-RFC]

I would recommend Lambdatek's PC Designer to get a good idea of cost and such. Might help you get some ideas on which components you can afford, if nothing else.

DinoPC are a company I have used in the past to build and supply custom PCs. They're quite cheap, and they used to have various extended warranties available. I'd recommend them over buying a branded PC any day. Any day.

Thanks for that mate, looks good.

Any more advice or recommendations are welcome cheers.

 

[Waynehead]

I just sold my friend my old gen 2 xps. That dinosaur is running a 3 ghz p4 and after a fresh install of xp it is running surprisingly well. I was able to have utorrent, windows media player, starcraft, and firefox running multiple pages and no sweat at all. Makes me alittle sad I got rid of it. Anywho, if you have anykind of external storage and you havent reinstalled windows in a coons age like me, try it. You would be surprised how bad windows registry and other things can slow down your computer. ****, I have a slot a athlon 800mhz with a 16mb tnt card (hold the ROFL) that I run emualtors on and it is hooked up to my 46" Lcd running 1080 and does everything I ask it to do. Plays movies old games. Before I cleaned it up, reformated the hard drive and installed windows on it you couldnt calculate simple math with it. Just food for thought. At the very least after you get your new cpu you could keep it as a backup and it would run significantly better

 

[Waynehead]

woops ,exploited deleted. Sorry bout that, used to a different forum.