Advice for novice looking for PC

muffler

Hi guys, as the thread title suggests Im looking for some help and advice here. I know very little about PC's but after a recent wrangle with Dell I am getting a refund and I want to buy something decent for around €600 - €650 if its possible.

The PC is for my 2 young lads (10 & 14). The most recent games they have would be Medieval 2 total war, Titan Quest, Prey, Age of Empires etc. So I need something with enough RAM and graphics that will cope with the above games and capable of being upgraded in the future.

As I dont know much about these things I would need a PC that would be ready to plug and play so to speak. Dell would be ideal for this part but Im not sure of what their graphics cards are capable of or if they can be upgraded. Im not even sure if I would deal with them again or not but then again if the right system was there it would be foolish not to consider it.

Any help or advice/recommendations would be more than welcome. Thanks in advance.

AlmightyCushion

For that money your best bet would be dell. As long as the graphics weren't integrated then you would be able to upgrade the graphics. Although by the sounds of it they seem to have done something that pissed you off and you don't want to deal with them. What age of empires is they are playing?

muffler

AlmightyCushion wrote:

For that money your best bet would be dell. As long as the graphics weren't integrated then you would be able to upgrade the graphics. Although by the sounds of it they seem to have done something that pissed you off and you don't want to deal with them. What age of empires is they are playing?

The Dell saga was all about a sales guy who told me that the C521 which they had on offer for a while now was more than capable of playing every game on the market and it could also be upgraded. As it turned out he was wrong on both counts. After a lot of calls and emails they have now collected it (unopened) and I will get a full refund.

The boys have all 3 age of empires games but the third one appears to be their favourite.

As I said I wouldnt be totally against buying from Dell again if it got me what I wanted and at the right money. Any recommendations on specific Dell models?

AlmightyCushion

muffler wrote:

The Dell saga was all about a sales guy who told me that the C521 which they had on offer for a while now was more than capable of playing every game on the market and it could also be upgraded. As it turned out he was wrong on both counts. After a lot of calls and emails they have now collected it (unopened) and I will get a full refund.

The boys have all 3 age of empires games but the third one appears to be their favourite.

As I said I wouldnt be totally against buying from Dell again if it got me what I wanted and at the right money. Any recommendations on specific Dell models?

Anything to make a sale I guess. You should have put a list of specs up here and ask what everyone thinks. You would have gotten a more factual response. Anywho dell have some great offers on their outlet store found here. I just took a quick look and found this. The graphics card is by no means spectacular but it will play age of empires 3 but I doubt it would be able to play it with everything maxed out. Also I can't see anything about a monitor.

muffler

Yeah I should have posted here about the now returned PC but as I had 2 other PC's from Dell in the past I wrongly assumed that they would be honest about what they are selling.

Anyway the link you give does show a decent PC (I think - not very well up on these things) but no monitor as you said. The graphics card isnt great possibly as I seen reference to this in another thread.

AlmightyCushion

The graphics card should handle age of empires 3 though.

sdanseo

After a quick look on Dell I found this.
When customised you're looking at €701 for

Intel® Viiv™ Core™ 2 Duo E4300 Processor (1.8GHz,800MHz,2MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium - English
Dell™ 19" Silver Wide Flat Panel (SE198WFP) - UK/Irish
1024MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x512]
250GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache
256 MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 PCI Express graphics card
16x DVD +/- RW Drive
Dell™ Entry Quietkey USB Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY)
Dell 2 Button USB Scroll Optical Mouse - Black

You can sacrafice graphics which brings it down by €70 to ~€629 but it leaves you with very mediocre graphics that will struggle, probably even with older games.

AlmightyCushion

sdonn_1 wrote:

After a quick look on Dell I found this.
When customised you're looking at €725 for


You can sacrafice graphics which brings it down by €70 to ~€655 but it leaves you with very mediocre graphics that will struggle, probably even with older games.

I doubt aoe 3 would run on that without any slowdown.

sdanseo

Edited...copied and pasted from the wrong window :rolleyes:

AlmightyCushion

I just found this monitor on dell. It's a 17" and is €200 so that leaves you with €450 for the computer. I found this on the outlet which is around €450 so that should sort it for ya. If you were willing to get a second hand monitor or a crt you could cut that price down a bit and maybe get one wit a bigger hard drive.

Edit: Just found out that computer doesn't include vat and delivery. :mad: It's €550 with delivery and vat but like I said above you could get a second hand monitor to bring the price down.

dazftw

Why not try some prebuilt pcs on komplett.ie?

They come to about 700 without a monitor, but there pretty decent like!

muffler

Sorry guys, I posted a reply this morning but its disappeared. I seen queries on feedback about vanishing posts but this is the first time its happened to me.

Anyway. The system that AlmightyCushion linked to above is the same as the one I sent back to Dell (I think). I was reliably informed that the card was not great as it would possibly only play some of the modern games at a low resolution. It couldnt be upgraded either and Dell admitted that - may have had something to do with the processor?? The card is also halh height which apparently cuts down on the options an any event.

Im trying to stick to a max budget of say €700 incl. the monitor. I think in summary what I need is a system with good graphics card but capable of being upgraded if necessary, decent RAM, good sized hard drive, DVD RW drive etc. My main problem is that I dont know much about PC's and graphics card.

Im probably expecting too much for the budget but as long as I knew that something I would buy now wouldn't be redundant in 12 - 24 months time.

Something pre-built/assembled by Dell or Komplett would be ideal but its a matter of knowing what to get.

PeakOutput

muffler wrote:

Im probably expecting too much for the budget but as long as I knew that something I would buy now wouldn't be redundant in 12 - 24 months time.

it wont be redundant exactly but even spending twice what you want (buying pre built) it will be behind the times in 10/12months and out of date in 18/24 months...its just how these things work

However

if you spend the 700 on just the computer with no monitor it will be a huge upgrade from what you are getting for 700 with a flat screen monitor. also the components that komplett would use would generally be very upgradeable whereas dells are not really at all

extra-ordinary_

PeakOutput wrote:

also the components that komplett would use would generally be very upgradeable whereas dells are not really at all

What he said.:)

Blazer

Checkout the bargain alerts forum on the dell website.
You can get a good system with a good monitor for around €700.
I ordered an E521 with a 24" LCD for €1050 which was unbelievable value as to buy the lcd on it's own is €880.
System came configured with an AMD X2 4400, 2 gigs ram, 320gig hard drive and dvd writer..graphics card was a crappy 7300 which are crap for gaming but I threw in a 6800 which worked perfect. With a 19" widescreen lcd this was €450 which is a price that can't be beaten.
Dell change their offers every wed at 12pm so keep an eye on their site and boards for the best offers..
With the money you save you can buy a decent video card and use it in that system. If you've any queries about a particular system give us a pm and I'll checkout the specs for you.

muffler

Just going through the dell site and have a question in relation to a graphics card.

256MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 Pro PCI Express graphics card. Is this a reasonable card and can it be replaced with something better at a later date?

muffler

Heres a snap of the full spec if anyone wishes to comment

Edit; I'll try that again

muffler

Here it is. I think the card may only be half height though

Blazer

It's basically the current bog standard entry card.Not great for any modern games.
It's the half-height one as the C521 only takes 1/2 height cards.
You'd be better off going for the E520/E521 as these are full height cards and will accept a good range of video cards.

muffler

Mathew Reilly wrote:

It's basically the current bog standard entry card.Not great for any modern games.
It's the half-height one as the C521 only takes 1/2 height cards.
You'd be better off going for the E520/E521 as these are full height cards and will accept a good range of video cards.

Cant seem to find the E520/521 on the dell site

Edit: Just been on to Dell. the E520 and E521 have been replaced with the Inspiron models no.'s 530 and 531. I asked about the graphics card and was told that they cant be upgraded. Amazing

irlrobins

You're not building or upgrading so moving

SeanW

Your budget makes it very difficult to make a recommendation.

You are not going to get any kind of halfway decent gaming machine for €550 all in. Full stop.

Best suggestion is to have a look here, and see what you can come up with.

I tend to believe that Dell is better for businesses than home users because Dells are generally not customisable in any serious way. With a custom (like Komplett) build, you can always add or replace just about any single component in the next few years at least.

muffler

I can run to about €700 max with this. The Komplett models while good are a bit more expensive than the Dell lot but then again I cant get anything suitable from Dell.

The other thing I notice is that with the Komplett site when I selected even the cheapest model and added in the monitor and mouse, keyboard etc it starts off at 660 odd euro and then ends up closer to 900