This a good deal?

[Ry009]

Posted on whirlpool and got no feedback.

Major n00b here too. Just curious to see if this is a good deal for what it is.

Linky

300 bucks.

APUS AM2 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Dual Core BUDGET PC

AMD AM2 Dual Core 4200 Budget PC System II - AMD AM2 Dual Core 4200+, 1GB DDR2 667 RAM, 500GB SATAII Hard Drive, 20x DVD-RW, ASUS/Gigabyte Mainboard, 5.1Channel Audio

* PC World Awarded* System Manufacturer - Apus Computer
* AMD AM2 Dual Core 4200, 2.2GHz
* 1GB DDR2 667Mhz RAM
* 500GB SATAII Hard Disk Drive
* 20x Dual Layer DVD-RW burner
* ASUS/Gigabyte Mainboard
* 5.1Channel Audio

 

[roguless54]

Seems a good buy for a starter system, quite cheap.

I personally dont know a whole lot about AMD systems but it is a dual core at 2.2ghz so should be decent. The 4200 is an older series now however i think.

They specify it doesnt come with any operating system at all, so be sure to have one ready to install, otherwise the machine will be useless to you.

Also if your planning on gaming, this system wont do it, no graphic card, so you'll have to later spend a bit more money to get a decent graphics card and hope that they give you a decent motherboard with at least one pci-e x16 slot for it.

Also probably want to upgrade the ram to 2gb if your gona game as well, but that ram is quite cheap now.

 

[Ry009]

Cheers mate, much appreciated.

So without being too much of a tightarse, whats the minimum ill be looking at spending to get it up to be usable for gaming/photoshop work?

 

[roguless54]

Well first things first, your gona need an operating system to chuck into it.

Personally I would get XP, however the only way to get XP these days is pretty much illegally as such. Otherwise Vista starts at about $200, but to be honest i really dont think its worth it. (Note with XP installed you wont be able to play games using DirectX 10 graphics, only DX9)

Then your going to probably want to put another 1GB of ram into it, to bring it up to a minimum of 2GB for gaming and photoshop use, that kinda RAM should only cost about $50 roughly from most decent computer stores.

For the graphics card, considering the overall cost of your system I think you can get some pretty decent cards for around $150 - $200 that should do the trick, you can spend more if you wish, but I think its unneccesary.

So around $200 -$250 in total or if you buy Vista then double that. Plus your inital $300 of cause which totals somewhere around $500 - $550 all up, maybe even less if you shop well.