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Late:
Don't put links in the first post, Late...

Late:
So after much umming and ahhing I've finally gotten round to buying a new pc. I'm on a tight budget, and am too scared to build my own.

Includes OS. Pretty much pre-built.

Cube Slim pre-built desktop £229
Intel i3 Dual Core 3.5Ghz Processor
Kingston 4Gb DDR3 1600Mhz Memory
500Gb SATA3 Hard Drive & Samsung 16x DVD RW
Windows 8.1 with Bing 64 Bit Preinstalled

Have bought an extra 4 gig ram for £26, and a new kb & mouse for £27.

£282 all in.
Budget, newb-friendly, and has reasonable upgrade options.

At some point I'll have to put a graphics card in there, but I'm in no rush. The onboard graphics chip is laughable by today's gaming standards, but it massively outperforms my current pc (current pc benchmark 196, new pc benchmark 538).
I'm toying with the 750 ti (low profile, as the case is very slim) (benchmark 3687) - currently around £110. I'll wait for it to drop in price a bit, or weigh up other options, but like I say - I'm in no rush.

I've got a few external hard drives kicking around (mainly WD MyBooks - I think I have a 1.0Tb, a 1.5TB, and a 2.0TB). Fingers crossed I should be able to crack the case on one of those and bung it into this pc. I don't need all that external storage, so it makes sense to put one in this machine if I can, as a second drive. I'm happy to leave the 500GB drive in there as C: for most programs, and put Steam etc. onto the second drive.

harv:
You'll be better of spending a little extra for an i5 mate. Then I think you'll only need a half decent GPU and you'll have a PC at the minimum spec for Oculus Rift.

It's great using a PC upgrade for the first time, if you're anything like me you won't be able to keep the smile off your face for a while lol ;D

Late:
Don't tell people what they'd be better off buying after they've bought something!  ;D

With PCs it's all too easy to look at every single component and say "you'd be better off paying a little extra and getting..." but they add up to a lot when you do that. I budgeted myself £250-£300 and I'm happy enough with what I got there for £282.
Like I say, the graphics chip is the main weakness, but it's better than what I currently have (and my current pc plays most games I want it to) and is something that's easily remedied in the future.
With the 750 ti in it it should be a pretty capable budget gaming pc - but I don't intend getting many top end games to play on it. I'll still do most of my premium gaming on the One - but it'll be nice to have something that can take advantage of all the cheap steam keys, though, not to mention my vast unplayed steam catalogue (I have nearly 400 steam games on my account, and have played only about 20 of them). :D

Ordered it at about 1am (last night/this morning), with delivery within five working days. Got a dispatch email at lunchtime today saying it's getting delivered tomorrow. Nice!
The kb & mouse come tomorrow, too, but the ram won't be delivered until Monday. (Annoyingly, I got it from Amazon and I have couple of Prime trials I can activate whenever I need them, but I didn't bother because I didn't think the pc was coming until next week.)



You're right, though - I'm going to be grinning like a Cheshire Cat when I get on it. The old machine was second hand when I bought it nearly eight years ago, it's running xp, takes forever to boot up, the ram is maxed out at 3gb, and it's always crashing. This is going to be such a massive improvement! :D

jman:
Yeah its not a bad price to get a pc + extras too mate..

Its definitely the CPU that kept the price down though.. its not the best in the world... but even with the integrated graphics, it'll have no problems playing older games or less graphic intense games... so you shouldn't have to buy a graphics card unless you want to play newly released games or older graphic intense games on it

Personally I'd be ready to bin the OS straight away though.. Windows 8 is a bit pants, you might struggle at first if you haven't used it before  ;D  I'm still using Windows 7, but have played around with Windows 10 recently and its much better than 8.

I've got a small 200GB SSD and a 1TB HD in my pc at home - all the stuff that's important gets bunged on the SSD as its less likely to die on me.  However I've been bunging games on the SSD as obviously an SSD has its advantages with its R/W speed and now its full to the brim lol.

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