Would these part's work together and are they good value for money...

[Wasteland Chris]

I'm looking at building a new *budget* system from scratch I've put together these parts, are they all compatible together and are they good value for money?

Case: £24.99 Shiny Piano Black/Red Super Slim Micro ATX Mini Tower Case - With 200W PSU 20+4pin 1x SATA - Ebuyer
Motherboard: £52.50 ASUS M3N78-VM GeForce 8200 Socket AM2+ VGA DVI HDMI 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard - Ebuyer
Processor: £29.19 AMD Athlon 64 LE-1640 2.7GHz Energy Efficient Socket AM2 512KB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor - Ebuyer
Processor Fan: £10.10 Xilence XQ AM2 (Athlon 64, Athlon X2 64, Sempron ,Opteron) CPU Cooler - Ebuyer
Blu-Ray Drive: £49.98 Sony BDU-X10S Blu-Ray BD-ROM SATA Black Internal - Retail Box with Cyberlink Software - Ebuyer
2x2GB RAM: £49.98 Kingston 2gb Ddr2 1066mhz/pc2-8500 Hyperx Memory Cl5 - Ebuyer

Already got Hard Drive, so that's un-needed. Would the other's work together OK, what would the onboard graphics be like in that motherboard?

Sorry if this is completely stupid but am a somewhat noob.

Thanks .

 

[EndlessWaves]

If you're going for silly amounts and speed of ram it seems odd to pair it up with the slowest single core processor you can find, perhaps go for one of the power efficient Athlon X2 e models like the 5050e for £52.

The onboard graphics are fine for displaying stuff, but if you're running any applications that take advantage of the processing power of the graphics card it's not going to have much poke.

You also don't need a CPU heatsink and fan, the retail version will come with one.

Blu-ray drives are likely to come down in price to the same sort of cost of DVD drives, so if you don't need it now I'd wait and fit one when you need one.

PSUs for budget systems are always a difficult issue, personally I'd always pay £30 for a good quality 300W PSU.

 

[Wasteland Chris]

Cheers for that, with that Motherboard what Processor would you recommend then?

So It would be better to get a case with no PSU and buy the PSU seperate?

What games for instance would I be able to run with those onboard graphic's?

 

[EndlessWaves]

So It would be better to get a case with no PSU and buy the PSU seperate?

At this sort of price I'd buy them seperately so you know what PSU you're getting - although if you see a good combined deal with a named and good quality PSU then go for it.

What games for instance would I be able to run with those onboard graphic's?

It's going to have some trouble with quite a few games that are less than four years old, see this review for example.

If you want to play a variety of games then it's not really cost effective to buy as cheap a system as this, doubling your budget to £400-500 will get you a system that's at least four times as fast.


As for the motherboard and CPU I can't help, but you if you can find round-ups or group tests of low-end motherboards and processors online then that should help.

p.s. If your current hard drive is fairly old then you might want to buy a new one as the hard drive speed does affect the boot up time and general responsiveness of the computer.

 

[Wasteland Chris]

Basically I will just be wanting to play Football Manager & Civilization 4. What would be the best budget to play these 2 games on?