DescentBB

My friend has a pc that he bought online about 5 years ago. Lately he's had problems with it, he thought it was viruses, etc, so he reformated, but now the thing wont turn on...seems like it's the power supply.

So he emails me today and says \"I think I'd like to upgrade\". He has about $700, and I dont know what is usable from his system (likely just the case, maybe the sound card....the video card is at least 2 years old, so it's not much use, the floppy is probably still ok.). At this point I'd think that new components would be the way to go (new hd, new psu, etc).

Any suggestions? He's open to pretty much any idea.

Thanks!

-RM

I recently built a system out of a shuttle XPC barebones and I was pretty happy with the results. Swap a different video card in (compared to the $30 geforce I threw in) and it becomes a complete midrange gaming system for under $700.

It was the slowest C2D they still make, combined with 2 GB of DDR2 I already had, a 500 GB Seagate 7200.12, DVD burner I already had, and a super cheap geforce for video. But it is definitely fast compared to something more than 3 years old.

There might be more you can use; I was pleasantly surprised when I went to upgrade my old P4 machine.

Since that box happened to have SATA and PCI-express (SATA 150 and PCIe v1.0, older but works fine), it turned out it didn't cost me much to convert it into a Blu-Ray / Media box.

He doesnt know much about computers, so I was thinking about a pre-built system...
how does this look?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6883227158


I dont know anything about that video card (NVIDIA GeForce GTS-250 512MB)....

this one looks better, but it got some bad reviews:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6883229086

The GeForce GTS models are slower clocked versions of the GTX models. If you want to do leading edge on a budget, that is a good way to go. Don't get a card made by a cheap manufacturer, e.g. Zogis, Jaton, etc. Instead, get something quality but good like MSI, Biostar, Gigabyte, PNY, or go high quality and get an EVGA, XFX, BFG, or something of the like.

A low-end Core 2 Duo would do fine; I believe the slowest these days is 1.8 GHz, but I could be wrong. For budget RAM, get Corsair ValueSelect (my favorite), Kingston ValueRAM, or Crucial; these are my top recommendations, but any RAM with a lifetime warranty will do.

I personally prefer Western Digital hard drives, myself. I get the WD Caviar RE drives; they're enterprise-grade and have a 5-year warranty; WD drives also tend to run cooler than Seagates. The Caviar RE would likely be a Black drive in the new product line name. Just look for what's enterprise-grade; they aren't much more than a mainstream drive--often just $10 or $20 more, but it's worth it to have better construction and engineering.

Its also worth noting that the Geforce GTX 250 is nothing but a re-badged Geforce 9800 GTX+, and I mean they are exactly the same to the point where you can flash them with the firmware from the other and it will show up in the system as such.

Also Zantor, the slowst Core 2 Duo that you can buy anymore (on Newegg anyway) is the Wolfdale E7400 which operates at 2.8 GHz. But if you are shopping for a Core 2 with gaming in mind, I highly recommend the E8400 which is only about $40 more than the E7400, but comes with double the L2 cache which is very important for the Core 2. The E8500 is as high as I would go in a Core 2 though. The E8600 isn't worth the price anymore when a i7 920 can be had for $10 more (although the motherboard and memory will usually drive up the cost a fair amount more for an i7 system than a Core 2 system so they aren't actually competing with each other).

I made some recommendations to my friend and he told me that now his wife wants a mac (and if they share the computer can afford a bit more). He thinks he can game on one.

I dont know anything about macs, so I told him to make sure and do his research

Thanks for all the input!

RM