Page 1 of Need to get a cheap mobo/cpu bundle, suggestions?

Just decided to upgrade our home pc. Was forced to by the fact that it will not boot as there is not enough room on the 4 gig hard drive to start up the computer.

As you can imagine, for a computer with a 4 gig hard drive, its close to 10 years old, with a pII 400mhz.

Just got a 80 gig HDD to use with it cant be detected by the bios, so decided to do what ive been meaning to do for years and get a new mobo and cpu. The problem is I dont have a clue where to start looking for one!

Just after a pretty cheap bundle really, dont need anything special at all its just for the family to use the internet and word processing and stuff, Got my laptop for the heavy photoshopping and 3d modelling!

So, any suggestions?

we really need to know a rough budget, tbh, you will probably need memory as well, but some of the integrated motherboards are excellent for what you want, £25-£30 gets a mobo + grafics + lan + sound etc, you just need to decide if you wanna go intel or amd, thats where the budget comes in. also consider that you case may be an older AT type rather than ATx + you psu will deffo not be upto the job...

Gonna need to replace it and get ddr memory arent I, never thought of that. It is an ATx case too.

Budget wise, not much available at all at the moment, would have waited for a while if the computer was working at all. So really, cheapest is best really as long as its decent enough. Does that mean AMD?

Would prefer not to spend any more than about £80 including some ram really.

This item was edited on Saturday, 11th November 2006, 15:00

you will also need a new power supply
So that`s
Motherboard (which will have to support IDE since you already bought a new harddrive but will probably restrict you to 1 cable with 2 plugs if a budget motherboard due to sata taking over)
CPU + cooling fan (which may come with it if in a retail package)
Memory
PSU (possibly with case to save messing around with removing old one which may or may not be removable)
Hmm how about operating system. Are you using XP as I suspect that alone would take up most of your harddrive after updates. If not then get a new OS as there will be limited driver support for pre XP OS for newer devices.

We are using XP at the moment, which the 4 gig drive just wasnt enough for really!

At the moment im looking at an Asus K8V-VM with just an amd sempron 2800. Should be enough for them. The motherboard seems to be decent and cheap with onboard graphics, dont particularly want ot buy a graphics card too. Looking at about £105 for those plus 256 ram and psu delivered.

I woulld suggest 512Mb of RAM as a minimum, 256Mb is just too little to stop XP swapping to and from the HD. It`ll really slow the machine down!

Was just gonna get the 256mb as a starter to get the system up and running, then get another 512mb when i can afford it.