New system for my brother

[NYNY2244]

My brother wants a new computer and says he has a 700 dollar budget. Of what he told me, this is just for the computer itself and not for monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers/etc.

He said he'd like to be able to play games on it (didn't specify which), watch movies, and basic stuff like web browse/im.

What I'm debating here is whether it'd be better to build this system for him or to go with a oem like Dell. He's going away to college this fall so if the computer does happen to mess up, I'm not going to be around to fix it for him, whereas if he had the Dell system, he can always get tech support from them and will have their warranty.

I did a quick run through newegg to see what I could get with 700 dollars and this is what I came up with.

Antec Solution SLK3000-B Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail

BIOSTAR TFORCE 550 Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 550 MCP ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

GIGABYTE GV-NX76T256D-RH GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Silent Pipe II, Lead Free Video Card - Retail

FSP Group (Fortron Source) AX450-PN, 12cm FAN, version 2.0, 2 SATA, PCI Express, 450W Power Supply - Retail

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Orleans 2.4GHz Socket AM2 Processor Model ADA3800CWBOX - Retail

CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model VS1GBKIT533D2 - Retail

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

NEC 18X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write Black E-IDE / ATAPI Model 7170A-0B - OEM

Total comes to about 710 shipped. Any suggestions?

 

[thuganomics]

You can save a few bucks by changing the hard drive, to me, 250gb is too much already.

Also, if you can, try to get a E6300 for the CPU instead, its going to be ALOT faster than the AMD 3800.

**Oh and, the ram, PC4200 is not so good anymore, for about $30 more, you can get rams that are alot faster.

 

[NYNY2244]

Well, I guess it depends on the user in this situation. I myself fill up my 160 gig all the time and would probably do the same with the 320 gig.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Dell comes with a legal copy if Windows XP to keep the software police at bay

 

[Operandi]

Looks pretty good for $700. Excellent choice on the RAM, and graphics card.

I'm not sure about Biostar from a quality perspective. MSI is typically pretty good, and this ULi based board is just over $60.

450 watts is really much more then you need so you can save a bit by going with this 400 watt FSP.

If you can fit it into the budget I would try to squeeze in a better case such as the Lian Li PC-7B.

 

[blackrod]

blackrod thinks that getting a deal on a dell would be the way to go. to blackrod a budget like that seems to indicate that gaming is not a priority.

 

[Roguestar]

Roguestar thinks that people typing their posts in the third person is bloomin' annoying.

Also, a Core 2 Duo is not quite within your budget at the moment. Stick with the X2 3800+ and an AM2 motherboard.

 

[NYNY2244]

I was looking through bestbuy and came across this

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp...cmcat103700050050&id=pcmprd62600050008

Minus the video card, it's comparable to what I have up there and comes with a LCD monitor.

My brother said he wanted to try out WoW mostly. How well would it work with that onboard video?