New machine sub £500

[Liszt]

My PC has died. Either mobo or chip not sure which. Built it meself about 4 years ago so due for an upgrade but not kept up with what is happening with hardware(chips and graphics). Usual uses: gaming, a bit of software development, storing tunes etc.
Have a 80gb hard drive to move across as well as a combined dvd/cd-r drive.

Looking for a decent machine, either home build or an off the shelf for sub £500. What would the panel recommend?

Cheers,
L.

[greenlandy]

As you have a lot of the bits already pop over to novatech to see their mobo bundles.

[ginganinga]

The hottest thing is chips and boards are the Core 2 from Intel. They will satify your PC gaming for many moons. I'm getting the E6700 next, when I get the money!

[annodomini2]

Would add a Dual layer DVD-RW as they're about £25.

I'm guessing you're keeping your box? If so you'll probably need to upgrade the PSU as the newer stuff is a lot more power hungry.

And budget for additional cooling HDD fans, extra case fan. As the new stuff tends to run warm.

Budget for the above drive, psu, cooling, graphics card (do you play games much?).

Memory, personally I would budget for a minimum of 1GB of DDR2.

If you want more disk space budget this now.

Whatevers remaining should be your budget for motherboard and processor.

[thepassenger]

greenlandy said:

As you have a lot of the bits already pop over to novatech to see their mobo bundles.

Second vote for Novatech's bits bundles. Often cheapo parts in the low end kit but I've got one of their Semperon sub-300 machines in London, it's fast approaching 1 year uptime.