building on a budget. Suggestions needed

NeVeR

Hi,

My friend is in college so not alot of cash for a new PC. She just bought one about 3 or 4 months ago.. Not a very good one. It has vista and only half a gig of ram. No real graphics card,

He is doing Fine Art / Design etc.
This week she was doing video editing the machine nearly died trying to run Premiere Pro.

She also tells me she really wants to do 3D design using Max soon as part of college as well. I know her machine wont take this.

I was looking on Komplett
How does this sound.

PC box
Gigabyte GZ-X1 Black, 4X 5,25",
Silver Power PSU, 600W, 120mm fan
Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R, P35, Socket-775,
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz
Corsair Value S. PC5300 DDR2 2048MB
HIS Radeon HD 2600 PRO 512MB DDR2, HDCP,
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA2
NEC DVD±RW burner AD-7200A, IDE,
Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2b
Acer 19" Wide AL1916Wds

Costs €869

Any suggestions would be great.

TerrorFirmer

What machine did she buy? 512mb with Vista is a killer - chances are the machine is fine, but just needs more memory. Video card isn't really important at all, so don't worry about that. 2gb of memory would cost about 30/35 euro for a basic set in general.

buying an entirely new PC is probably not necessary at all, unless it was a real bargain bin item with old parts that won't support newer tech, though that is doubtful given Vista is on it. Even if it's poor in the most important regards, cpu and ram, you can always change the processor for a better one as well - whether its AM2 or 775, 150 quid overall would get you a fast processor and 2gb of memory.

NeVeR

it's one of those E-system machines.. I dont know where she got it. But she did get it in a shop new... Maybe i'll find out what ram it has and get some more. Hopefully it will speed up.

TerrorFirmer

It's probably got something like an E2140, which in itself is decent but a faster processor would benefit your friend considerably if she's a heavy user, it's primarily the ram that's causing a huge bottleneck in performance. Upgrading that will make it seem like an entirely new machine.

But of course it's all speculation, hard to give any real advice without knowing the current machine, but at least, it won't be that expensive.

RoyalMarine

we have a good thread going on budget builds with very very good components.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055278463

PogMoThoin

Post the full specs of the existing pc till we see how bad it is. What peripherals, keyboard, mouse monitor has she already got.

Or better still the model no.

zilog_jones

Do the E-machines yokes use standard motherboards and BIOSes? If it does and it is a Pentium Dual Core or similar, it should be easy enough to overclock or replace the CPU.

When fixing someone's crappy Iqon PC a while back, I was quite surprised to find a normal off-the-shelf Gigabyte uATX motherboard in it and the standard BIOS. VIA chipset though

TerrorFirmer

Funny you mention that; I recently upgraded a friends Iqon as well and it had a Gigabyte mobo, over clocking options still present and all. Was surprised!

The machine will probably have a locked bios, but the board should be a standard ecs or some such mobo.