PC advice

[Doc]

Advice needed please - only have £500 budget, unable to build PC, I've two PC's for your consideration/opinions:-

Sorry don't know how to do "Clicky Thing!!"


HP Pavilion P6-2280EA Desktop PC, Intel Core i5, 3GHz, 6GB RAM, 1TB

or

Scan V15 i5, 8gb ram, 500gb HD

Both are i5 processors Scan is i5 3450 and HP is i5 2320

Question is which is best?

Thanks in advance

 

[arad85]

The Scan one is slightly more powerful and has more memory (and it is organised better too). It also looks to be built with a better motherboard and PSU

 

[Steelmagnet]

£500 is plenty of money to spend, and as long as you're not wanting to play the latest and greatest games you should end up with a very decent machine for your money.

At that price point there's little question that an i5 based machine is the way to go, and you should expect 8 Gigs of RAM for sure. I'd also expect a 1Tb hard drive, Windows 7 Premium and a reasonable sized monitor.

Take a look at www.chillblast.com - a very well regarded company.

This PC at exactly £500 is well specified for the price and comes with a decent monitor:

http://www.chillblast.com/pconf.php?productid=18103

They have a lot of choices of course, and you could pick up a machine for less.

It's also fair to say that if you just want something for a bit of web surfing, office tasks and some lightweight photo processing then you could achieve the whole lot for under £150.

Indeed, something like this on eBay would be fine for many many people:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PC-Comple..._DesktopPCs&hash=item3cc97e9e16#ht_500wt_1414

(I should know, I've bought a couple of machines from them recently)

 

[arad85]

If I were buying the Chillblast, I'd upgrade the heatsink to their recommended one, motherboard to the Z68 one (their recommended and would allow you to upgrade the memory at a later date and overclock the processor if you wanted) and up the power supply to either one of the Corsairs or BeQuiet.

I wouldn't buy the ebay one if you wanted to do any sensible image processing.

 

[Doc]

Many thanks for the replies

Steve - will look at your chillblast recommendation

Andy - thanks for advice on upgrade to above chillblast and would these upgrades make it a better option than the Scan V15? - if I delete the monitor it works out at £528

 

[arad85]

Andy - thanks for advice on upgrade to above chillblast and would these upgrades make it a better option than the Scan V15? - if I delete the monitor it works out at £528

Yes, most definitely. You might even like to try some overclocking (which would be possible with the board/CPU in that bundle (it's easy but they'd do it for £25 to 4.2G which would give you a 10% performance boost....)

 

[Steelmagnet]

I wouldn't buy the ebay one if you wanted to do any sensible image processing.

Yes I did imply that but the point I wanted to make is that you don't have to spend £500 to get a perfectly serviceable pc. I know this is a photography forum but the original post didn't cover likely use.

 

[stupidlammer]

The Scan V15 has more horsepower, but I would not expect any significant difference in day to day use. HP's 1TB of storage may come in handy especially if you have lots of photos.