I’m trying to build a new PC for my friend who is on a very very tight budget. The main use of the PC is to be hooked up to his 52” 1080i/720p HD TV for Bluray/HD-DVD playback as well as 720p .mkv’s I’ll be cannibalising his old PC for its: > Case > DVD drive > 200gb HDD (probably IDE) > 2.5gb of Ram. I’m unsure if its DDR or DDR2. It was an old PC so the Motherboard and the PSU unit are useless. I want to add the following > CPU E2160 with an aftermarket cooler to OC from 1.8Ghz to 2.2Ghz or possibly 2.5Ghz Or a Pentium 4 3.1ghz OC’d to 3.5 – 3.7ghz Depends on what we can scrounge for free ) > Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Rev2 (Socket 775) PCI-Express/AGP DDR2 Motherboard > Dabs Value 400W PSU Gold 12cm > LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray Reader & HD-DVD ROM Serial ATA Drive – Retail > Radion HD3400 or 3600 depending on what I can source (They have onboard Bluray playback) The guy only has £150 ish to spend so this is really the best I can do. Do you think this spec will be adequate for his needs? Running on Vista 32bit Home Premium?
Motherboard is cheap and low quality, PSU is a deathtrap, case may not be sufficiently cooled for a new processor, old RAM may not be compatible (needs to be DDR2). Vista should be avoided for lower performance PCs, it runs too badly. I suggest using a Gigabyte P31-S3G Board with a Corsair VX 450W - these two will cost at least £80 between them, but are essential to avoid BIG problems (cheap PSUs for instance often catch fire, not something you want).
