HI,
I am looking to replace my aging machine, Athlon 64, with a new build. I wan tot be able to play the latest games (driving esp) on it as well as using it for some work ( MS Office/SQL etc). I have a budget of around £600. Looking in various mags/websites it is all getting a little confusing as to what to spec...
I have keyboard, mouse and a monitor that will hopefully be ok.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

thanks in advance
Rich

Can you post what you currently have?

It may well be that things like Case, PSU, Hard disks and Optical drives can be salvaged from the old machine...

Are you willing to build it yourself?
Do you need an operating system included in that price?
What monitor do you have; what's the resolution?
What's the most graphically challenging game you want to play?
What's more important; raw speed or lots of storage for films etc?

£600 will buy you a very respectable box, but I'll let the hardware nuts do the recommendations.

Welcome to x404

Hmm box only for £600 (including software I assume)

Prices all taken from www.scan.co.uk as easy to quickly navigate:-

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3LR, Intel P45 Express - £74
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 - £94
CPU cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2 - £18
Ram: 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 - £87
Hard Drive: 500GB Samsung HD502HJ Spinpoint F3 - £38
Graphics: 1GB Asus HD5770 - £121

PSU: 520W Coolermaster Real Power M520 Modular PSU - £56
Case: Coolermaster Elite 334 Black Midi Tower - £29

O/s: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM - £79

Total £596.

I looked at a system built around the Intel i5 750 which would be a fair bit quicker but your budget would have to be around £700 mark to do that as cpu around £140 and ram £120

My current system as follows..

Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (build 2600)
Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
2.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: RS/RX482SB400
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 08/12/2005
Drives Memory Modules c,d
1407.36 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
808.13 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

PHILIPS DVDR1628P1 [CD-ROM drive] (Doesn't read properly)
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

BUFFALO External HDD USB Device [Hard drive] (1000.20 GB) -- drive 1
EPSON Stylus Storage USB Device [Hard drive] -- drive 3
HDT72252 5DLAT80 USB Device [Hard drive] (250.06 GB) -- drive 2
WDC WD1600BB-00GUC0 [Hard drive] (160.04 GB) -- drive 0, s/n WD-WCAL96534143, rev 08.02D08, SMART Status: Healthy 960 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'A0' has 512 MB
Slot 'A1' has 512 MB
Local Drive Volumes

c: (NTFS on drive 0) 157.41 GB
f: (FAT32 on drive 2) 249.99 GB
g: (FAT32 on drive 1) 999.96 GB

ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Series [Display adapter]
Philips 170C [Monitor] (17.1"vis, s/n BZ 439175, August 2005)

I would prefer not to build myself, but have access to someone who can.

i dont think he will need a hdd lol, hes already got nearly 1.5 tb

Yeah but two of them are external.

New high-capacity SATA drive FTW.

HI,
could do with a reasonable amount of internal storage. Not too sure of the monitor but I guess I can get a new one after the box if needed.

Is there anywhere that rates the latest crop of processors in order of 'power'? It used to be fairly simple amd or intel but now it is soooo.. confusing..

Could try www.cpubenchmark.net

Processor list is here http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

thanks , that is some good info

If you dont want t build it yourself then someon like PC Specalist http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ have generally good reviews and will do box only solutions

Something like this should do if you want ready built.
As it was reviewed in October you should be able to get something similar but with a better graphic card now.

i did not notice the external bit