Basically my friend has been gaming on his MacBook for the best part of 3 years. He's now ready for something that can handle more games than just League of Legends and stuff like ES: Arena, Doom, Dark Forces etc. He isnt bothered about the whole thing being sketchy as hell, we considered skipping a case and just using a cardboard box for a while, so case & PSU combos are fine
The problem: he only has around £200 for the whole thing.
Obviously we'll be dealing with used parts.
What we don't need:
Hard drives (I have some lying around that he can have)
OS (I think I can convince him to use Debain but if not I'll grab a Win10 key for £13)
So far i've been searching eBay for a Q6600 (or similar Core 2 Quad) bundled with a motherboard. It surprised me how few (decently priced) socket 775 boards there are, plenty of Q6600's but not many 775 boards.
As for local shops I'm near Edinburgh so if anyone knows of any decent used PC shops that might have a good deal on some older hardware that would be nice.
I went with a 7850k and an MSI a68h motherboard and the cheapest 2133 Ram I could find. I'm in the states so I don't know what deals you can get in Edinburg. It works great with an old cheap PSU that most would consider a firehazard. I choose this route after looking at used Penom X6's and X4's. What people want for used is insane. There are great deals on used PSU's, one guy on another forum got an Antec 380 for under 10 bucks. My daughters case was an Antec with the 380 psu and cause it had a scratch it was half price at 45 bucks .
Hope this helps some
Scrapped my last post, this is better
Plus A card that doesn't need external power to keep the existing psu (It has a plug but doesn't need plugged in)
probably the best you could buy.
1 Like
Over here someone is selling a used r9 270 with one broken fan for like £75, do those Hp machines have PSU connectors for external PCI-E power?
Most likely not.. but a perfectly functioning card for $85 vs one with a broken fan for $75 and they both perform the same... i'd rather get something that doesn't need pcie power.
Actually I could do an Austin Evans and buy another PSU to power the GPU and just leave the side panel off and tape the PSU to the case
Wtf why would you do that? you'd spend more money doing that than what I suggested.
I used to own an r9 270 and iirc it out performed the 750ti in most benchmarks
barely. I'm an AMD fan as well but we're trying to get the most bang for your buck and I really don't think going that route would be best.
Fair enough, Ill see if there are any similar deals for that in the UK, the UK Post Office tends to fuck you up with imports
do you have to pay fees? I thought Ebay handled that or some shit.
We shouldnt have to but the UK post office just tries to find way to piss you off
1 Like
I was looking around some more, my god you pay an arm and a leg for post in the UK
1 Like
Hey Dude,
I found a deal for Dell Poweredge T20 ... it's.. approx £170 delivered, and approx £70 cashback.
New hardware: Pentium G3220, Intel NIC (best in terms of online gaming IMHO) 290W psu, 4gb Ram ECC (yes i know its a mini server) and 500gb hdd... I seriously considered this offer for freenas - and I like the small case actually.
All in all, the cashback comes into your account after a month or so, and then you get your graphics card... £100 to play with. I hope this helps.
LINK: http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/dell-poweredge-t20-9186-tower-server-167-94-delivered-serversplus-97-94-after-dell-2401938
Not really what im looking for.
The poweredge products take forever to boot and although its decent for most things I would really prefer a quad core.
Found this board relatively cheap. Cant find out whether it supports core 2 quads.
The post says it supports 184 pin 400MHz dims but on the gigibyte website it says that it supports ddr2.
@SoulFallen Think its worth buying this and picking up a Q6600?