Right guys, my lil old amd x2 is getting a bit creaky, and I've finally managed to bribe the missus into letting me get a new one.

So, whats better, build one from scratch or buy one and chuck in the upgradable parts?

Cost is a moot point, £1000 or less is the target, but not too bothered, would want a quad core, so a 64bit OS is needed to.

Any ideas guys? oh yeah, not buying for a few months yet, so if there is stuff coming out soon which I should look at include that stuff too.

Cheers guys

Build one from scratch imo if you are confident enough, or have knowledgeable help. You will get such a better PC for the same money.

Built the last but one comp, and upgraded most of this one, just prices are so silly on ebay now that that looks like a cool way for getting one...

600, im soooo jealous, back when i was a complete noob i spent 800 for a piece of crap and my m8 spent 1/2 the money and a much better machine. all cos he built it himself.

yo probably know more than me but ill give you my take just the same, make sure you know what works well together, just because two parts are awsiom on there own doesn't mean that they'll perform the same together, get stuff thats been tested, esp mobo and cpu's

I hate to hijack the thread but the lady wants a laptop herself, but she can't go much over 400 quid. It doesn't have to be uber leet, but needs to handle games comfortably. Any suggestions?

Minty, That'd be great - thats the sort of spec I'd be looking to get as I can take the x-fi card from this one. Tho would have to see what the 9800 upgrade would cost...

Bolt, laptops are right buggers to buy and get good, best way of looking is post up the specs you want the laptop to have, and then look for that.

FYI - new intel cpu's are out at the end of this month. Google Intel Core i7 for info.

Totally new cpu socket, DDR3 only and triple channel instead of dual channel (meaning you need 3 sticks of ram), obviously new motherboards too.

Any hardware you buy now will be out of date by the end of the month, so its not even worth looking now. Wait until xmas, or just after if you can stretch that far to see what the january price cuts bring.

Mmmm nice- are those the ones packing 12mb cache? Tasty.

And I'd go with a build if you're confident. I was building my own rigs till my most recent, and it's the only one still giving me trouble.
Good components make for an easier build too and may have individual warrantees. But listen to the PiLs... he is pro at hardware.

Also the scarily code-named 'Bulldozer' core was meant to be revealed by AMD as a comeback before 2009, what happened to that?

Bolt what sort of games does she need to run?

Nothing too hardcore. The most demanding game she has is TF2. She wants the sims 3 and other than that it's mainly spec friendly games like spore, sims 2 and rollercoaster tycoon 3.

We've been digging around, but there's nothing at her price point that comes with more than intergrated intel or low power crap like geforce 6100s and radeon 9500s

The mrs runs the sims 2 on her laptop with a gf6100 - have to use 800 x 600 but it runs...

TBH at that price point you want to be looking second hand or end of line. Ebay is your friend.

Khola, the new i7 architecture has 4 (or more) cores, each with 256k of dedicated level 2 cache and then a shared 8mb Level 3 cache. Net result means on perfectly coded multicore apps it runs quicker. However, on the older games with partial multicore support (tf2, world in conflict etc etc) theyre actually slower than an equivalently clocked yorkfield/kentsfield cpu (q6600 / q9xxx).

I think this may be a generation I skip tbh, nothing I do will benefit from these new cpus as they are performing now, infact i'd probably get slower performance.

See here for test results.