Page 1 of PC/Retailer Recommendations

Just after some recommendations for decent onlince PC sellers with good customer service/deals.

Mum is after a new PC, only wants a base unit. Used maily for online MMO`s (lotr/wow) so wants an decent spec at a decent price. She was looking at Scan (spec she sent over was still using an E5200 which I thought was quite old).

Here`s what she was looking at:

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ConfigureSystem.asp?SystemID=979

Any pointers would be appreciated (and taken onboard as I can feel an upgrade coming on...)


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i`ve allways liked scan, usually good prices, as for the spec of the machine,  everythings ok, but a couple of recomendations..

the CPU,  is good enough, but if you upgrade the GFX it might cause a bottleneck., on the + side, if you alter the clock multiplier on bios from 200 upto 220 it`s safely bump it upto 3ghz, rather than the stock 2.5ghz (i use the same cpu)

the psu..  @ 400watt`s your right on the borderline for problems, iirc the GTX250 needs 2x12v PCI-e rails, i use a 550watt easy cool & split one of the molex plugs into one of the PCI-e sockets, & i`m running a much older 8800gt, & i reckon i`m cutting it close..

the GFX,  the GTX250 isn`t a "great" card, a budget version of the GTX260/280/285, if there is an option, go for the ATI 4890,  (old 8800gt amp edition will get similar benchmarks to the GTX250, & you can pick up a good 8800gt for £50 second hand)

also, given this is running the E5200,  it`ll be socket 775, which has now been phased out in favour of the "i" socket boards,  so future upgrades will be increasingly dificult,  mostly in respects of updating the cpu & memory, newer boards run DDR3 rather than DDR2,  prices for both memory types are fairly equal at the moment, but historicaly, as DDR2 starts to become scarce, the prices will start jumping up,  sounds bizare, but it`s what happens.

it`ll do everything you want, & it`ll last quite a while without upgrade, but for that money i do think you can do better (imo)   the above system will benchamark around the same as my pc, which i built for around £200, (not including the hard drive & dvd drive, everything else was new & bought from scan except the 8800GT which i got second hand on ebay)

hope this helps.

EDIT= one more thing ;)  if you go for the 32bit version of Win7,  iirc, the system will only "see" 3gig of the memory, not the whole 4 gig..  dunno if they fixed that, or if it`s an inherant limitation of 32bit os..

This item was edited on Friday, 26th February 2010, 12:01

Cheers mate, I`ve passed on the info.


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I`ve found Novatech pretty good, they have opened a shop not far from us.

They sell the usual makes but also do a few ready assembled PC`s made up of componets they sell, or you can buy the components and build it yourself.

The last 15 or so PC`s I have been asked for I`ve built myself, it`s much easier than you expect it to be and I find it really enjoyable, deciding what to buy and then spending a few hours putting it all together as neatly as possible instead of having it just bunged it.

All the best

Gerald.



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just noticed they allready overclock the E5200 for you, & they do it @ 3.75ghz !!!!!!  thats a huge overclock :)  which has impressed me tbh :)  still surprised at the low wattage psu they are supplying,  although it is a good quality one (as are all the components they listed with the machine)

I bought my PC from Mesh a few years ago, their Customer Services was good when a hard drive went just within a year. They do base units as well as PCs with monitors etc.

I had bad Customer Services experience from Scan (at the time several ppl laughed at me for using Scam ;) ) but that was years ago, only time I had to return something to them, they were dreadful, didn`t use them for years, but have since. Also whenever anyone mentions any company you`ll always find at least one person with bad experience.

Novatech are great. I`ve bought various bits and bobs from there but not a full PC. Father in law recently built a PC with stuff he bought there, there`s one local to us, and he picked it up no prob. He also bought my sister in law a complete pc from there, when he got it home he took it apart and said they did a good job of it :)

i think the only thing he said was a problem was that Windows came on a restore partition, so if the hard drive suddenly died, you could be screwed. I think you have to pay extra for a restore disc!

But that`s a good thing about Novatech, you can buy a PC with no OS, or choose which MS OS you want.

This item was edited on Friday, 26th February 2010, 17:58