Buying Desktop for Son

[smunier]

Hello, Looking to buy a PC for my 9 year son. Owns to 2-Star Wars PC games and mostly plays games on his Wii and DS. Do I go with Intel or AMD? If intel/AMD what processor? I expect pc only lasts for 5 years and my son will move up to a laptop. I don't want to spend alot of money.

 

[batuchka]

In order for us to better help ya:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/261222-31-build-advice

 

[ScrewySqrl]

fill out this for more details:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/261222-31-build-advice

how old is your son, and what sort of things will be be doing? How much money are you spending?

 

[smunier]

fill out this for more details:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/261222-31-build-advice

how old is your son, and what sort of things will be be doing? How much money are you spending?

My son is 9 years old. He owns 2 pc games and he will go for hours on the PC. He surfs the web... I would like to spend about $500.00.

I found this at HP:

Value, performance, features

* Get reliable performance from the AMD Phenom II 955 Quad-Core Processor (3.2GHz)***
* Multitask with the 8GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM
* Enhance viewing with the ATI Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics with AMD Vision Premium
* Store data on the 1.5TB 5400 rpm SATA hard drive

I found this at Dell:

Processors: Intel® Core™ i5-650 processor(4MB Cache, 3.20GHz)
Memory: 6GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz- 3 DIMMs
Video Card:ATI Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3
Hard Drive:1TB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache

 

[batuchka]

$500 then u in luck and use

Toms Dec 2010 $500 USD SBM
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-athlon-ii-x3,2811.html

as a guide ^^

 

[ScrewySqrl]

I'll agree with Batchuka: with other price drops (The memory is $40 instead of $65, for instance), then buy the 380W PSU separately with a Xigmatek Asgard II case (total $75, same as the special they got in Dec), you could step up to the lower wattage, more powerful HD6850. should be good as is for 3 years, maybe 5 with a GPU upgrade down the line.

Also: Building it together could make a fun father-son project.