The Budget Desktop PC
A lot of people don't currently have a lot of money to spend on gaming PC's or extreme computers that will do anything in seconds so there is a massive market out there for budget desktop computers at the moment.
I class a budget computer as one that costs anywhere between £180-£250 ($285-$400) When you are buying a budget computer the main thing to look for is to make sure that it has an operating system included. Often on cheap computers they will leave out the operating system which then becomes and additional cost that you weren't prepared to pay for.
A modern budget computer will usually come with either a single or dual core CPU and around 2-4Gb RAM. The hard drive will generally be around 500Gb and there will often not be a graphcics card included. Here are a couple of examples of budget computers that would do for most simple tasks such as internet browsing and office work (England) and (USA)
The computer from eBuyer has a Dual core Intel CPU that is fairly out of date now but at this price that can be expected. The Newegg computer has a very good Quad core AMD CPU and 4Gb of RAM. It will easily be fast enough for any office and internet work that you throw at it.
Both computers have Windows 7 pre-installed so you can get them working straight out of the box so long as you have a screen to go with them.
The Mid Range Desktop PC
This is where things usually start to get a bit more complicated. At a price range of £250-£550 ($400-$900) many companies start to add in things like graphics cards and SSD drives. This can often complicate the choice quite a bit.
In this price range you should be expecting to get at least a quad core CPU and a 1Gb graphics card. I would also personally expect at least 8Gb of RAM and a 1Tb hard drive. I have found a couple of current examples of mid range PC's to show you what sort of computer you should be expecting to get for your money. (England) and (USA) The English computer there features a quad core CPU and 8Gb of RAM. It also has an Nvidia GT 520 graphics card which is very good at this price. As for the Newegg computer that has a Quad core Intel CPU, 8Gb of DDR3 RAM and a HD6670 which is a very good card to find in a computer at this price range. It also comes in quite a funky looking case which will apeal to most gamers.
Overall computers at this range will usually be very good at simple office tasks and internet browsing along with HD video decoding and possibly some light-medium gaming. Not bad for £250-£550 ($400-$900)
The High End Desktop PC
This next category is where performance really starts to become more about competing with the next person rather than just having it for the fact that it is nicer to use. I would class £550-£1000 ($900-$1600) as the performance PC section of the market. In this section of the market you can expect to get at least a quad core CPU minimum. Around 8-16Gb of RAM and a high end gaming graphics card. You can also expect to get a good copy of Windows 7 instead of the basic home edition one. I have found a couple of examples of computers that you can get in this price range.
(England) and (USA) Both of those example computers come with the latest range of Intel CPU's. The Ebuyer computer has a high speed Core i5 CPU and the Newegg computer has the newest Core i7 CPU. Both of the computers have 8Gb of DDR3 RAM which is the fastest type you can currently buy and both of them have high end graphics cards in the form of an Nvidida GTX 560 and GTX 570. Both of these cards are lightning fast and will easily be enough to power through most current games.
I am going to include these two websites as well in this post as these have helped me no end when building computers and recommending computers to people that I know.
I have often found that when buying PC's the person selling them will say something such as "Dual Core 3Ghz CPU" now that really isn't that helpful as an older 3Ghz dual core will be much much slower than a modern Dual core 3Ghz CPU. I have also found that many people will sell a computer as a gaming computer even with a low end graphics card that has 1Gb of video RAM. A card such as the HD5450 1Gb Edition will be quite a bit slower than say a 5670 with only 512Mb of graphics RAM. The two websites above will help you compare the CPU's and Video cards in different computers and will show you which one has truly more performance. I will show an example of this now;
- HD 5450 1Gb - 304 Points
- HD 5550 512Mb - 612 Points
As you can see getting conned into buying a 1Gb model graphics card just for the RAM can leave you with a massive performance drop. Here is an example of some 3.0Ghz CPU's
- Intel Core i3 2.6Ghz - 3509
- Intel Core 2 Duo 3Ghz - 1730
As you can see, Both of these are dual core CPU's yet the lower clocked Intel core i3 has a much better performance score. This can be down to a number of things such as the amount of L1, L2, and L3 cache the CPU has and also the general architecture of the CPU die itself.
Overall there are many ways that companies and individuals can scam you when selling a computer and I hope that this guide has helped people to see where you can be caught out and what to expect when buying a computer. If you have any questions just post a comment on this post.
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