Your daily hardware buys

HEY LOOK. The INQUIRER has suddenly developed its own series of buying guides which will hopefully go beyond what other websites offer. Today we'll look at what might be two of UK best's Budget Gamer's PCs with a £499 inc VAT budget and £250 inc VAT respectively. We won't be afraid to tread where others fear to go. Gamers are often not that much fortunate and investing in hardware can be expensive. However, recent times have demonstrated some very abrupt price falls as well as new sources of purchases like refurbished components shop and today's article proves it.

Deals do not include P&P, software or assembly. Items are in stock or in auction at time of writing. If you ever find cheaper prices elsewhere in UK, don't hesitate to contact me. This guide as well as the subsequent ones will be updated regularly

The best deal I could get my hands on in UK was the following.

From Ebuyer, a stylish green casing (KG888-G) with a 400W PSU, front Firewire, USB and audio ports (£18.20), a PC Chips M848ALU motherboard featuring the now famous SIS748 chipset with integrated LAN, 6 USB2.0 ports and onboard sound (£23.40), an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Processor with a Barton core - cheap, no thrill, easily overclocked to XP 3200+ ranges (£50.52) coupled with a Coolermaster CP5-6J31C HSF (£5.81) and some Antec thermal grease (£1.92), a Chic Wireless Office Keyboard and Wireless Optical mouse bundle (£15.74), a Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy ES card (£31.01) and a Creative Labs Inspire 6.1 6700 speaker set (52.79). From blankdiskshop.co.uk, a NEC 8x DVD burner - why go for a DVD/CD-RW combo when a DVD writer is SO much convenient (£ 49.98). From Ebay.co.uk, a Sapphire Athlantis ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphic card (£133) and a 512Mb PC3200 CL2.5 memory module (£48). From MCS.co.uk, an Eizo F764 from MCS at £ 46.94, a superb 21" monitor with Dsub and BNC inputs with a maximym resolution of 1600x1280 @ 72hz and a used floppy disk drive at £2.76, a 120Gb 7200rpm Hard disk Drive at 41.12.

Comments: Dell sells a slightly more powerful computer for more than twice the price. Not that Dell or any other tier-one or two manufacturers is at fault, but the opportunities existing on the net allow someone with some knowledge of how to build a computer to save quite a few quid. At £521.21, the computer I chose is slightly over budget and does not include P&P. We could probably cut corners by removing the Audigy card or going for a Radeon 9700 Pro. But I am sure that most gamers would rather scrap or ask their parents for an additional £50 than cut corners. Now whether we can call such a computer "budget" is another issue. With a 21" monitor, wireless keyboard and mouse, loads of memory and hard disk and a DVD burner, not to mention your Radeon 9800 Pro card and a quasi-XP3200+ ready to fly, it surely can't be a budget PC, ain't it ;-)

If your budget is even more limited than that and you still want to be a gamer, don't despair. You can get

From Ebuyer, a King Case 228 ATX casing with a 300W PSU (£7.97), a PC Chips M811 featuring the old but trusty KT266A chipset, 5 PCI slots, integrated sound and LAN (£17.64). For the processor, we'll go for the new generation AMD Duron 1600 with an updated core and a 266Mhz FSB (£26.78). It is a very overclock friendly CPU apparently having reached 2.55Ghz (roughly an Athlon XP 2500+). We'll keep the Coolermaster HSF (£5.81) and the Thermal grease (£1.92). Add a 256Mb memory module (£25.10) and a Liteon 52x32x52x16 CDRW/Combo (£26.65), a Kingcase Red 3D Optical PS2 Mouse (£3), a cheapo PS2 Keyboard (£2.21), an Asonic 6 Channel Soundcard C-media 8738 Chipset 3D (£4.69) and last but not least, a Creative Labs Inspire 5.1 P580 speaker set featuring 5 Satelites + 1 Subwoofer (£37.03). From MCS.co.uk, keep the 21" Eizo monitor (£46.94) and the floppy disk drive. From Ebay, a Maxtor 7200 rpm 40Gb Hard disk (£25) and the stunning Hercules Prophet III Geforce3 Ti500 (£27).

Comments: For £260.74, roughly half the above, it is quite a feat to be able to get a whole system including a 21" monitor, a 5.1 speaker set, a DVD/CD Writer and a quality card like the Hercules Prophet Geforce 3 Ti500 which is capable of churning out more than 9,000 marks under 3DMark 2001 and our preferred entry level card by far, besting cards like the FX5200 or the 9200SE with ease. This rig is meant to play older generation games like Half Life, Quake 3 and other such golden oldies. After all, many of these games fare much better and bring out more adrenaline than the some of the newer generation.

Tomorrow, we'll do the same exercise for the USA. µ