Need help with building my own PC

[obsession]

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice please. I wanted to build my own PC, I have a budget of £812 and I really don’t want to exceed that amount.

Anyways should I buy the fastest processor that I can afford (say about 50% of my budget) and buy lower specification components to fit round it, because a fast processor is going to give you a fast machine and to be honest most people can get by with 32Mb of RAM.?

What should I do?

Zane

[syphus]

32 MB of RAM?! Getting by on 256 MB of RAM is a matter of patience for most people; Windows XP will consume roughly that after booting up.

Generally, when designing a PC, you should thing first about the processor architecture most fit for the purpose. A gamer looks toward AMD Athlon 64 and FX; productive users consider Pentium 4 and Pentium D; and for the best of both worlds AMD Athlon 64 X2 or Pentium Extreme Edition.

Once you've decided on architecture, you should think first about your motherboard. As the back-bone of the system, a motherboard makes or breaks the stability, longevity and lifespan (duration of its usefulness). With smart buying, you can invest in a good motherboard now, and upgrade your processor later when needs be. This should be budgeted for first.

Allocate funds for between 512MB and 1GB of the appropriate memory, other relevant necessities (including, where relevant, things such as case, hard disk drives, optical drives, graphics card etc.) and then allocate the remainder on the processor.

You can do fine tuning afterwards. For example, if it's a gaming system and you selected an relatively expensive graphics like a Radeon X1800 XT or GeForce 7800 GTX and you're left with a Athlon 64 2800+, you might want to even it out, to say a Radeon X800 XL/GeForce 6800 GS and Athlon 64 3500+, or whatever works.