New Desktop choice

[Mark Harvey]

I am not a computer wiz and am just looking for some basic advice without all the sales pitches I get from the respected manufacturers. My needs are small but I'd like to have an appropiate cpu. I use the computer4 for a little WORD, a little Excel, Outlook a very small amount of Power Point, A small amount of a photo program and some PC games. In particular, my passtime is using Flight Simulator, which I enjoy but my current system if lacking. The program hesitates and sometimes goes into "stupid mode". What is recommended (Brand may help) as to Ram size, HD, processor. etc. Is it worth going to intel i7 or is that overkill? Any unbias information is appreciated.

 

[iEvo]

I am not a computer wiz and am just looking for some basic advice without all the sales pitches I get from the respected manufacturers. My needs are small but I'd like to have an appropiate cpu. I use the computer4 for a little WORD, a little Excel, Outlook a very small amount of Power Point, A small amount of a photo program and some PC games. In particular, my passtime is using Flight Simulator, which I enjoy but my current system if lacking. The program hesitates and sometimes goes into "stupid mode". What is recommended (Brand may help) as to Ram size, HD, processor. etc. Is it worth going to intel i7 or is that overkill? Any unbias information is appreciated.

If you're just doing basic things on your computer, then it doesn't need to be anything special.

Tell me your budget and then I'll name some good parts.

Also, you said "Is it worth going for an i7 or is that overkill"? I see a lot of people saying this. It doesn't mean just because it's an i7 that it's amazing. The only thing that's the difference between i7's and i5's is that i7's have hyperthreading and some of them have a few extra features enabled, that's all.

 

[Acura7ee]

If you're going to be using word, excel, etc. and not playing high end games like BF3 that need a lot of power to play, then you'd probably be better to go with the AMD X6 as it will be better for the things you're going to be doing. If you would like to play games like BF3 you'd probably have to go for the i5-2500k which is probably the best processor for gaming on the market just now. Anyways, if you're just going to be playing low end games that don't require very powerful hardware and doing the other things you mentioned then like I said go for the AMD X6 processor. For your graphics card, you'd probably be better to go for the AMD Radeon 6850, it's not the most powerful of cards but it should do the job. For your HDD you'd probably be better to go for about a 1TB 7200RPM. I'll let you work out the rest yourself.