To all computer nerds, looking for a good PC

Really?? I've had £30 motherboards and they've not "set themselves on fire" A cheap motherboard isn't a bad thing..

LGA775, assuming board cannot be reused. 1GB RAM is the biggest issue, could try for a RAM upgrade but I assume it's DDR2 at best so it's almost money down the drain. Salvage the HDD, and the DVD drive if you want it, check that they are SATA connections first though.

What connections does your monitor have?

Then buy this lot.


image

It is a very basic PC, but the idea is it sets you up to slowly add to it over time as and when you can/need. Something a laptop certainly won't get you. For future proof, this is the best you can hope to attain for your budget.

You can pretty much forget about PC gaming for the immediate future. Later on however, you can simply drop a GPU in to and it should game reasonably, perhaps a CPU upgrade to accommodate newer titles.

The case is as basic as it gets but quite reasonable.

The SSD is there assuming you can utilise your current HDD as a storage drive and use the SSD as a boot & application drive, if not then dump the SSD and get a 1TB drive.

4GB RAM is fine for your initial uses, only gaming would tax it. Another 4GB+GPU would set you back ~£150.

Finally there is no OS for your budget, either shift your W7 Pro license over or learn to use Linux.

EDIT: Linked the wrong bloody build. PSU change.

OK so you want to look at your emails and the internet, so the first thing you need to do is ignore anyone who says to spend 130 on a graphics card. Also a pretty decent chance that the PSU and case you already have are both fine so that's some money saved, but maybe buy a decent PSU if you're not sure. Basically upgrading is a lot cheaper than building new, so try to give us a better idea of what you have. If you are already using DDR3 RAM then don't get a new motherboard, just buy an extra 8GB of it, make sure your CPU is OK and make sure you have a 64bit OS. That costs like £220 if you can't pirate Windows (which isn't hard).

Assuming you want to play CS:GO or CS and not 1.6, you still don't need a great graphics card unless you are a quality junkie. It is a DX9 game that will run on any OK DX9 GPU, so nVidia GeForce 7900+ should be plenty and can be bought for £50. Radeon X800 series will also probably make it look decent. They are GPUs from 06 because it is an engine from 04, and Valve usually make their games pretty playable on low specs.