OT FOAK new gaming computer price and spec reasonable?

I always skip these threads and now I'm starting one. Does the
following spec and price sound reasonable?

Son has finally got his money from the Pru (along with an apology and
some interest) and is shopping for a new PC to play Oblivion on. At
some point he might even do college work on it. He's been looking
around and come up with the following spec from pcspecialist.co.uk -
anyone used them?

CPU
AMD® ATHLON® 64BIT 3500 (Venice) 512kb (Special Offer)

Memory
1024 MB CORSAIR DDR400 PC3200 - LIFETIME WARRANTY!

Motherboard
ASUS A8N-VM: DUAL DDR, SATA II, x16 slot, 2 PCI ETC

USB Options
SIX USB 2.0 PORTS (4 REAR + 2 FRONT)

Hard Drive
SATA II 250 GB HARD DISK @ 7200rpm 8mb cache

Second Hard Drive
NONE

RAID
NONE

DVD ROM/Combi Drive
16X DVD ROM WITH 48X CD ROM

CD/DVD Writer
16x +/- DVD WRITER (8x +/- Dual Lyr) (5x DVD-RAM) (40x CD-RW) (£19)

Graphics Card 1
512MB RADEON X1600 PRO PCI Express + DVI + TV-OUT

Graphics Card 2
NONE

Sound Card
HIGH END ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL SOUND (RECOMMENDED)

Modem
NONE, I WILL BE USING BROADBAND

Network Facilities
10/100 NETWORK CARD FOR BROADBAND - AS STANDARD

Floppy Drive/Card Reader
1.44MB FLOPPY DISK DRIVE

Case
Stylish Silver/Black Sigma case + 2 front USB

Power Supply & Cooling
500W (Peak) Super Quiet Dual Rail PSU with 120mm fan (£25)

It's £490 inc VAT and delivery, he's set himself a budget of £500. Is
it a good deal, is there somewhere else he should be looking?

He wants to order it RIGHT NOW, I suggested asking the FOAK first.

 

If I were him I'd be doubling the PSU budget at the very least. All
PSUs are not created equal, & a cheap one like that could easily take
out the motherboard/CPU/graphics/everything else *when* it fails.

Well respected brands include Tagan & Enermax, with a decent one being
£60 minimum.


--
Krusty
www.MuddyStuff.co.uk
Off-Road Classifieds

'02 MV Senna '03 Tiger 955i '96 Tiger '79 Fantic Hiro 250

 

Thanks I've passed that on to him.

 

Like mine did last week (hence a week of posting from the laptop...) One
little power spike and thank you, Sir, that'll be a new motherboard,
processor and RAM and a weird smell a bit like warm TCP that emanaeed from
the back of the case for a while after it happened........

Dave