Hi and thanks for reading this
I'm fed up with my five year old Dell Dimension 8100 (noisy fan, glitchy and keeps rebooting randomly) and want to replace it with something quieter.
I've never built a computer before, but I've been reading articles, books and websites for the last couple of months and have done a little upgrading before.
I want something cheap, stable and quiet rather than powerful and would like to play a few older games such as Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights and Half-Life 2. To that end I've selected this list:
CASE: Antec p180 £73.07
PSU: Antec Phantom 500w £109.90
Motherboard: Gigabyte K8N SLI £56.88
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice Core 64 bit 512k L2 £86.92
RAM: Corsair Memory VS512MB400 PC3200 512MB CAS2.5 (x2) £58.65
Graphics card: Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT 256MB(128bit)DDR11 PCIE SLI £75.54
Hard disk: Western Digital Caviar 250GB S300 16mb 7200rpm £58.43
Operating System: Windows xp home SP2 OEM + Linux £60.92
TOTAL: £580.31
I already have keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers and an old audigy card PCI card.
I will probably be upgrading again in three years (by which time I figure that the current sockets will have been replaced anyhow), I really need a computer quite soon and can't justify spending much more than this on it. I figured that if I buy a good case and power supply, these would do me for my next computer as well.
Are these components compatible? Are there any parts that perform better for the same cost? Is stable and quiet? And uh... Would it run World of Warcraft decently?
One last question: If I buy the windows xp upgrade disk instead of OEM, would I be able to use the license on another computer I built, if I retired the one I had previously installed the license on?
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. Don't be afraid to tell me I've been a complete idiot for choosing some of the components...or the Dell five years ago.
I'm fed up with my five year old Dell Dimension 8100 (noisy fan, glitchy and keeps rebooting randomly) and want to replace it with something quieter.
I've never built a computer before, but I've been reading articles, books and websites for the last couple of months and have done a little upgrading before.
I want something cheap, stable and quiet rather than powerful and would like to play a few older games such as Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights and Half-Life 2. To that end I've selected this list:
CASE: Antec p180 £73.07
PSU: Antec Phantom 500w £109.90
Motherboard: Gigabyte K8N SLI £56.88
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice Core 64 bit 512k L2 £86.92
RAM: Corsair Memory VS512MB400 PC3200 512MB CAS2.5 (x2) £58.65
Graphics card: Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT 256MB(128bit)DDR11 PCIE SLI £75.54
Hard disk: Western Digital Caviar 250GB S300 16mb 7200rpm £58.43
Operating System: Windows xp home SP2 OEM + Linux £60.92
TOTAL: £580.31
I already have keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers and an old audigy card PCI card.
I will probably be upgrading again in three years (by which time I figure that the current sockets will have been replaced anyhow), I really need a computer quite soon and can't justify spending much more than this on it. I figured that if I buy a good case and power supply, these would do me for my next computer as well.
Are these components compatible? Are there any parts that perform better for the same cost? Is stable and quiet? And uh... Would it run World of Warcraft decently?
One last question: If I buy the windows xp upgrade disk instead of OEM, would I be able to use the license on another computer I built, if I retired the one I had previously installed the license on?
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. Don't be afraid to tell me I've been a complete idiot for choosing some of the components...or the Dell five years ago.