New PC buying help!

[Rackhir]

Looks good, although it means buying a monitor which we don't need. Also, is the GeForce 6200 any good? It's gonna be used for games.
Currys - they have some other stuff.

The 6200 is completely inadiquate for games. You will not be at all happy trying to use it for that. It's intended to be

a) Cheap
b) Adiquate for buisness (spreadsheets, web browsing, wp, etc...)

It is the card in question in Piratecat's video card thread, which prompted him to try and get a new one since it performed so horribly compared to the one in his several years older system.

Graphics card comparison charts. The Radeon x1300 at the very bottom of the chart is roughly comparable, though better and newer than the 6200.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html

 

[Michael Morris]

I can't really help till I know pounds to dollars - is it still 2.1 dollars to the pound? If so you should be able to get quite a bit of system.

 

[drothgery]

I can't really help till I know pounds to dollars - is it still 2.1 dollars to the pound? If so you should be able to get quite a bit of system.

According to xe.com , it's 1.9, so his £600 is a little over $1100 (or 890 Euros, if he wanted to pick some thing up from the continent).

 

[Morrus]

I can't really help till I know pounds to dollars - is it still 2.1 dollars to the pound? If so you should be able to get quite a bit of system.

Yep, assume about $1,100. It's not a strict budget, but she can't afford to go over it much - she's stretching a bit to do that.

So that's $550 in Dixons/Currys vouchers and $550 real money. I just found out today that the company who owns Dixons and Currys also owns PC World. We won't know exactly where we can spend the vouchers till we get them, but if PC World is included, that expands out options a little.

 

[Michael Morris]

Well, get a PCI Express capacle motherboard -- A good prebuilt system with one should run around $700. AGP is being phased out - and a GeForce 6800 OC card for AGP with 256 mb runs for $179, while the same card for PCI-E runs $199 with 512 mb (yep, TWICE the memory). You aren't going to find a PCI Express prebuilt system with a processor on it too slow to run NWN2

 

[Cergorach]

The refurbished EMACHINE 6260 at pcworld with the Athlon 64 looks pretty decent for 350 pounds, i googled it but it apperently has a crappy powersupply (when changed to something better will give you a very decent machine). It comes with integrated graphics, wich is crap for NWN2, but NWN2 is still two month off (atleast), so you could wat those two months, save your money for a better video card (in two months the next gen vid cards will be out making the current generation cheaper). Only problem is that i don't know if the machine has a vid capable PCI-e slot...

 

[Rackhir]

The refurbished EMACHINE 6260 at pcworld with the Athlon 64 looks pretty decent for 350 pounds, i googled it but it apperently has a crappy powersupply (when changed to something better will give you a very decent machine). It comes with integrated graphics, wich is crap for NWN2, but NWN2 is still two month off (atleast), so you could wat those two months, save your money for a better video card (in two months the next gen vid cards will be out making the current generation cheaper). Only problem is that i don't know if the machine has a vid capable PCI-e slot...

Prebuilt machines with graphics built into the motherboard are notorious for causing problems when trying to upgrade the graphics. Because of differences in how the two function PCIe based machines may be better about this than AGP based machines were, but it's not something I'd care to stake my life on.

 

[Mycanid]

Just touching base again Admiral.

Any results or decisions since I last looked in on this thread?

 

[Morrus]

Yep! We went to PC World, and - bizzarely, since it's allegedly a computer store! - they didn't have an awful lot of systems there. But we came away with spending just over half our budget on a Duo Core 2.8Ghz with 2Mb RAM, 250Gb HD, DVD rewriter, XP Media Center. The graphics card isn't amazing, but we still have budget left (it's a 512Mb GeForce 7300).

 

[Mycanid]

Hooray for you! I am glad the whole thing worked itself out. Yes ... the 7300 is not real great ... but if you have some cash left over....