General Discussions

So for quite awhile I have been growing increasingly tired of using my laptop day-in, day-out. It's the loudest computer in existence, struggles to run games like AOE1 and has worse specs than this guy. Link

After getting all miscellaneous purchases I needed out of the way last week and receiving a tasty bonus from work - I finally have some money to invest on parts to build a very healthy gaming rig. However my issue lies with where I should cash in my hard earned money for parts, and I know there are a few people amongst you who build or have built custom made computers from the comfort of your own home.

So where do the all-knowing sages of you think I should shop for my parts? Where offers the best price? Who's most trusted? Who offers the best deals?

[Edited by Vonfuzzball, 5/9/2010 9:00:01 AM]

What OP do you plan on running. What you get kind of depends on what OP you want to run on that computer.

OP means original poster?

Uhm, I don't have any real experience with the electronics market in England, but your best bet would be AmazonUK, or if they ship to the UK, NewEgg.

At the moment its a toss up between two online stores.

Ebuyer.com and overclockers.co.uk

One has cheaper memory prices, some cheaper motherboard prices.

Depending on how much cash you will have and what you want.

You could easily build a AMD 6 core CPU, Pretty Decent Motherboard , 4GB DDR3 1333, and a Geforce 470 for about £600. Assuming you have everything else like Case, Hard drives and Optical Drives, PSU and of course a monitor.

If you dont you could easily add on another £250-300 again depending on what type of drives you go for. (And a cheap case of course).


OP should have been OS, as in operating system.

[Edited by DABhand, 5/9/2010 2:08:51 PM]

Then the OS doesn't really have an effect on what you buy, apart from memory for 64-bit sys.

Well if he is planning on building something like a mac then he would need different parts than he would for a PC running windows.

Eh, I doubt he intended on using a Mac OS. It would probably be harder to build, and you wouldn't be able to play as many games on it (developers don't often port their games to the Mac). I'm guessing it would be more expensive as well. It's worth noting, however, that a Mac can run Windows.

Mac's can use a PC emulator to play games these days, its not a huge issue. OS X is really more Intel friendly though, although you can get homebrew OS X's that will work with AMD chips/CPU.

Anyway I found a nice site, scan.co.uk they are selling 470's and 480's for cheaper, they have 470's for under £300.

Not bad