Budget Gaming Rig £500/$600

[salacious]

Hey all, i know its not a mac thing but,

My Gfs birthday is in 2 months, i have a £500/$600 budget, i need a good set up so that she can play sims 3 with all the expansion packs on either high or medium settings, sounds silly i know but she loves the game, but her laptops been falling to pieces and while displaying good graphics its incredibly slow, and is getting past its use, so id like to build a gaming set up for her, just the pc unit, no desktops or mice/keyboard.

Please help suggest a set up if you can.

Thanks

 

[miles01110]

500 GBP is more like $800 US.

 

[Acidglaze]

Honestly, if you're looking at running just The Sims 3, you're probably better going with a prebuilt system. I only say that because with no hardware to take from your old system and use in your new system, you'll be looking at a total list of brand new parts to buy including: A case, a power supply (may be bundled with the case), cpu, motherboard, ram, video card, optical drive, and the hard drive. Plus, you'll need to buy an OEM license of windows, which will run you $99.

IMO, you could probably save money with a pre-built system. Unless she picks up Battlefield 3 Find a nice system with a dedicated video card and an i5 sandybridge chip. You can always upgrade components later if you need to.

 

[adrian.oconnor]

I don't know what it takes to run The Sims, but how do these specs sound? Core i3, 8GB RAM, GT430 graphics. That's a system from Ebuyer that costs £400. http://www.ebuyer.com/338538-zoostorm-2nd-gen-core-i3-home-desktop-7873-0405.

You can build an i5 with 8GB RAM, SSD, case, mid-range GFX for £500, but I guess if you were going to do that you'd probably already know what to look for. If that is what you want, Scan is a good place to buy parts, and so is ebuyer.

 

[Medic278]

I would recommend looking at an entry level Sony Vaio, that should suffice your or rather her needs nicely. Here in the states and Vaio E-Series starts at around $549 so that should be well within your budget. I believe the specs are intel core i3 with 4GB of RAM.

 

[velocityg4]

You say just PC units but no desktops, or mice/keyboard but are going to build it. Just to be clear are you trying to build her a desktop computer or buy a laptop? As you can't really build a laptop. Did you mean to say no monitor? Anyways I speced out a custom build desktop. I doubt you'll find an OEM to match this for the price. They won't have an SSD or decent video card and PSU in a budget computer.

The best I could come up with ran slightly over at £513.61.

- Core i3-2120 3.3Ghz (It should say Dual Core I don't know why the main sale line says Quad Core but the detailed specs are correct)
- Sapphire Radeon HD7750 Video Card
- Gigabyte SKT-1155 H61MA-D3V Motherboard
- Crucial CT128M4SSD2BAA 128GB M4 SSD
- Windows 7 Home Premium with Service Pack 1, 64-bit
- COOLER MASTER RS450-ACAAD3-UK GX450 Power Supply (80plus certified)
- Corsair TW3X4G1333C9A XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 Memory
- Cooler Master Elite 430 - Mid tower - ATX
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00761YFPW/ref=ox_sc_act_title_8?ie=UTF8&m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
Note: Since you say it is in two months. By that time some Intel 70 series boards should be available for the price and Ivy Bridge CPU's which are slightly faster and use a lot less energy.

Also nVidia is currently unrolling their 600 series. So there may be a better card for the money say a Radeon HD 7770 or equivalent GeForce 600.

In any case this computer will be quite a nice little rig. It could even play beefier games. If you could afford it a quad core i5 would have a much longer lifespan.

 

[FeaRThiS]

If its not for a couple of months dont buy now wait until the last possible minute pc parts go down in price daily. Check aria scan ebuyer overclockers daily for their special offers if you see a decent offer buy that one part. Pretty sure you could get a decent spec i5 2500k rig built if you use daily deals and other special offers.