Thanks for the advice, everyone!
Newegg.co.uk looks…uhm…not very good, and zipzoomfly have neither a UK site nor ship outside the states. Can anyone recommend a site based in the UK?
Thanks for the advice, everyone!
Newegg.co.uk looks…uhm…not very good, and zipzoomfly have neither a UK site nor ship outside the states. Can anyone recommend a site based in the UK?
Come again. I built my computer less than 18 months ago and it damn sure had jumpers. It is a nice motherboard too. There are CMOS reset jumpers, CPU speed setting jumpers and a few more. The hard drive has them too. I think you are mistaken in saying they aren’t very typical.
I haven’t seen CPU jumpers since I had a slot A athlon.
I vote for build your own computer.
I bought an Alienware a couple of years ago and now that I JUST built my own computer(very easy) I wish I could go back in time and smack myself around a bit. The jumpers issue should not be unless you are going for a more advanced setup in some way. Like others have said, its pretty easy… just screwing the mobo down, putting the CPU and RAM in the right way and plugging like 10-12 cords in. Not hard AT ALL.
Micro direct in Manchester are not bad, and for an extra £50 they’ll put the bits together for you before shipping. They built the machine I’m typing this on. http://www.microdirect.co.uk
Dabs are also pretty competitive by UK standards, and they’ve been around since forever: http://www.dabs.com
If you do decide to build your own rig (and I recommend it):
Go AMD not Intel. Cheaper, cooler, more efficient, better gaming performance.
Single core vs dual core is a hard choice. Right now not many games take advantage of dual-core processors, but that’s changing, and nothing beats dual core when it comes to encoding video/audio and multi-tasking.
RAM is more important than HD speed, and your video card is more important than anything else when it comes to gaming performance. My advice is go with an SLI/crossfire motherboard and buy the BEST video card you can afford. In a year get yourself a second card (at a much lower price) and you should still be able to compete with next generation cards for a lower upgrade price. The only monkey wrench in this plan is the expected release of windows vista and DirectX 10 cards.