Well my parents have decided to give my brother (the lucky bastard) a new computer for his birthday. Originally it was to be a netbook then he discovered he wouldn'ty be able to run his Warhammer games (I am ashamed of him) on a netbook so that idea went.

Then it was a full blown laptop. So my dad went down to the local PC World to do a bit of spec-hunting with me on the other end of the phone. All they had for under £500 were old Pedntium D's with chocolatety GMA graphics. So that idea went also.

So I suggested (while in the French Alps) that I build him a desktop. My brother seemed happy with this so off I go and compile a quick build on my favourite computer components supplier's website. Here's what I have so far.

Motherboard:
Asrock K10N78 (Socket AM2+) DDR2 PCI-Express Motherboard   £45.18

CPU:
AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 240 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) Processor - Retail   £44.64

Memory:
Arianet 2GB (1x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Single Channel Memory Module   £46.99

Graphics:
XFX ATI Radeon HD 4650 XXX 512MB DDR2 PCI-Express Graphics Card   £35.24

HDD:
Samsung HD502HJ F3 500GB 3.5" SATA II Hard Drive - OEM   £39.94

DVD Drive:
Sony 24x Internal DVDRW SATA Black oem   £15.78

PSU:
OCZ StealthXStream 500W Silent SLI/Crossfire Ready ATX2.2 Power Supply   £44.64

CPU Cooler:
Coolermaster Hyper TX3 (Socket 754/939/940/AM2/AM3/775/1156) CPU Cooler   £15.26

Case:
Arianet 1009 Black Midi ATX Case no PSU   £13.31

TOTAL: £300.98


As you can see it's not exatcly top of the line. It doenst need to be bleeding edge technology quick. It'll be running fairly basic games on Wangdows XP. I've thrown in an aftermarket CPU cooler as I plan on overclocking the CPU a little. Just maybe bump it up from 2.8 to 3GHz.

The whole thing really needs to be fit-and-forget as I'll be going off to Uni in September. It needs to be very stable hence the cooler and a branded PSU. I have a couple of case fans lying around that I can cable-tie in as I've run out of fan screws.

Anyone got any suggested changes that I could make? Especially in the Graphics department as I know next to nothing about graphics cards. I've heard good things about the 4000 series but that's about it.

Any changes need to be within budget. At the moment my budget is £300 but with the ability to stretch a small amount If I can convince my brother to put some of his own money into it. Also I'd like to keep all comonent ordered from Aria as it just makes things easier. If I have to I could maybe get some parts from eBay (such as RAM. Overpriced on Aria if you ask me.)