If you want a gaming computer, you're gonna need a hell uva lot more money than 700 dollars. However, if it's going to be mostly for office work (documents or letters), you won't need much.

If you're getting a pure gaming machine, you'll need (at the least) of 2,000 dollars at the most. Computer's cost a lot of money. Sorry to disappoint you.

 

Give us the specs of your brother's computer.

 

The price she listed was in pounds, hence the '£' in front of the numbers. That equates to about $1300.

I had a quick look around, and the best machine for £700 is:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/035569

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
3GB memory, 750GB hard drive
768MB NVIDIA GeForce 9600GS graphics

Should play games out now, and the rest out this year on a medium settings? What do the rest of you guys reckon? Haven't really been keeping up on the latest GFX hardware lately. It was a lot easier in the old days, the greater the numbers, the better the computer. Now it's all about cores, cache, bandwidth...

EDIT: Sorry for the irritable and patronising first line, but it irritates me when people forget there are other currencies in the world.

 

You'd get the best computer for the money if you were willing to assemble it yourself, but I can see why its not an option for some people, especially since you said you didnt know much about computers.

It would be worth looking into, if you know somebody who'd be willing to do it for you, it really saves a lot of money. I spent about $1200 on a computer that would have cost over $2000 at the time. It's not too hard, it's mostly just sticking stuff in slots, and connecting a few wires.

I haven't really kept up with retail computers, so I can't really help you there, sorry.

 

You should be able to just manage Assasins Creed on max with the PC I listed.

AC has rediculous system requirements anyway.

 

Without going into the whole dollars != pounds stupidity, I bought my current gaming rig, which I've played through Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed on (medium graphics, decent FPS rate), for five hundred Australian, brand new, not including monitor and peripherals. People that say you need thousands of dollars just to play games are elitist arseholes or just plain ignorant.

If you can manage to somehow survive without playing the graphics-heavy content-light games that are shitting up the market these days, you don't need much more than a couple gigahertz and change in a dual-core processor, somewhere in the GeForce 8-series or equivalent for graphics, plus a gig or two of RAM. The Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in hard whenever you get within a year or so of new with computer hardware.

Going even further, if you can entertain yourself perfectly well with games a few years old - which are arguably superior to the everything-is-or-has-a-sequel games made today - you can pick up something second-hand for a pittance that'll do you just fine.

On the other hand, if you feel the need to treat your computer like others would treat a sports car, go on, buy some overpriced monstrosity that'll be on the cutting edge for about two months before becoming merely meh.

 

Or, you could just buy a console that will last you 5+ years.

 

Where's the communication breakdown? I made a few different recommendations based on different variables, interspersed with bitter barbs at the gaming industry.

It's not your money, sure, but that doesn't mean you should rack up the maximum amount just for the hell of it. Buy something decent for a couple-few hundred quid and rack up some browny points with the parental units for not going nuts.

Besides, if your uncle is in the industry and is a champion-level scrounger to boot, why the hell are you talking to us? Get on the phone to him.

 

It's generally what happens when their employees keep stuff that 'fall out of lorries'.

 

Have you had a look at the Cyberpower systems website here
http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/
They do a hole load of different systems for under £700, In there AMD athlon 64 gaming pc section there are five different pc ranging from £395 to £639 and they are within your budget.

 

Gamereplays.org offers monthly advice on gaming computers. It's worth a look as they tell you the price in USD so you'd have to find the price in £. They also tell you how to build your own PCs if that matters.

July 2008 advice.

August 2008.

Worth taking a look if you can find the prices in England.

 

Something like the Intel Dual-Core E2200 (2.2GHz) would be ideal if you want to be able to play games without it being too expensive (It'll do for Assassin's Creed anyhow ). Here its £45, you could probably find a better price by shopping around, I'm afraid I just went to the first computer parts site that had .co.uk when I googled.

As for the graphics card I think you would need at least a GeForce 8600GT which is £34 at the same site, although I would recommend a better model perhaps a 9 series?

Now days most motherboards have built in sound so unless you play a lot of music its not really necessary to buy a sound card.

2GB of RAM really is a must, especially if you plan to run vista.

Heres a good guide on Building A New Computer and his total comes to £410 using the google currency conversion.

Hope this helps

 

There's a lot of shops that let you pick the parts you want off the shelves and they build it for you, usually for a fee. Half the time they install the OS while they're at it.

Oh, and here's a bonus tip:

GET XP.

Fuck Vista. Fuck it to death with a rake.