Gaming PC - £700 Budget, what should i get?

[Pyroman]

Heya,

 

Looking at getting a gaming PC, had a few different specs thrown my way on Overclockers here: Spec me a Gaming/Photoshop rig budget £700 inc OS - Overclockers UK Forums

 

What do you think? Is there a reason people are speccing AMD over say an i5? It's been aaaaaages since i've looked at performance parts so i'm a bit rusty. Any advice? Looking at playing BF4 / DayZ / anything else that takes my fancy. Also it'll be used for general internet stuff and bits of photoshop / video editing mainly just messing about nothing too serious i'm not that creative! Might also end up throwing cubase on it or similar.

 

Cheers

[featured_spectre]

Arbico B85MG Haswell Custom PC - Editing PCs for Home and Recreational Work - Arbico

 

I've used the company in the past, highly recommend them. That also falls in budget, good spec, and can tweak it a bit to suit your needs.

[3s-gtech]

For gaming duties, build the rig around a solid graphics card - I would look at spending at least £200 of that budget on one. Then an i5 with 8GB+ of RAM, Z87 board, SSD and a decent PSU. Wouldn't spec AMD CPU at that budget, but have no issues recommending them if you want to spend more in other areas. Build your own for best value though.

[Pyroman]

Cheers guys, yeah am gonna build my own i think, i just couldn't work out why people were speccing AMDs at that price bracket rather than an i5, wasn't sure if it was just personal preference on their part or they were better for the multitasking. I thought the i5 4670k was pretty solid

[3s-gtech]

Where AMD are strong is in small, cheap media centre and office machines on FM2 where the APU gives a good price to performance ratio. The FX line is not so easy to recommend, but are decent all rounders and very strong in heavily threaded apps. Overall, Haswell is king. I'm an AMD fanboy too, all my self builds, most laptops and many servers use AMD.

[Arthur]

I would spend a little bit more and get the following parts.

 

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor (£168.94 @ Amazon UK)

Motherboard: Asus Z87M-PLUS Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£98.24 @ Scan.co.uk)

Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£59.99 @ Scan.co.uk)

Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (£74.00 @ Amazon UK)

Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 2GB Video Card (£125.91 @ Amazon UK)

Case: Corsair 350D MicroATX Mid Tower Case (£86.82 @ Scan.co.uk)

Power Supply: SeaSonic G 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£75.06 @ Scan.co.uk)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 - OEM (64-bit) (£70.57 @ Scan.co.uk)

Total: £759.53 (or £744.46 from current cheapest suppliers)

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

[featured_spectre]

The card isn't a great one...also, on MicroATX, cooling will be an issue, as would space

[3s-gtech]

Personally I'd back the CPU down from Arthur's spec and get an R7 or even R9/7**GTX card - the CPU is less critical in most games. Cheaper i5 or even top i3. Otherwise, spot on.

[Arthur]

The card isn't a great one

The reviews are good. Is it because it's not the older OC model?

 

I was going to go for a card like the MSI R7850 Twin Frozr 2GD5/OC but I couldn't find anywhere that sold it other than eBay.

 

@3s-gtech's suggestion is a good one though. Spend less on the CPU and more on the graphics card.

 

on MicroATX, cooling will be an issue

Huh? What has the size of the motherboard got to do with cooling? With a good case plus suitable case & heatsink fans, cooling will be a non-issue. The one thing I would add onto the list is a different HSF because the stock Intel heatsink is not particularly great.

 

My current two year old gaming PC has a mATX Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z/Gen. 3 motherboard and cooling has never been an issue because it's installed in a case with plenty of airflow (Silverstone FT02).

 

The mini-ITX gaming PC I am building at the moment (consisting of an i7-4770k, Noctua NH-C12P, Asus Maximus VI Impact and NCase M1) shouldn't have any cooling issues either despite being incredibly small.

 

By the way, did you notice that the PC you recommended above also has a MicroATX motherboard.

 

as would space

ATX motherboards are unnecessarily large if you are only going to have a single discrete graphics card. mATX is perfectly fine for the OP's purpose.

Edited December 2, 2013 by Arthur

[featured_spectre]

The card isnt great because it over heatsbin games like BF4 or even Skyrim (with mods).

 

If the OP wants to expand and run SLI/Crossfire, cant be done with microatx

 

And lastly. Heat/cooling. MicroATX boards are prone to overheating because of the limited space between parts. You have to think if OP wants a bigger or better card, he would need to consider the CPU fan/heatsink also. It was a mistake I made personally.

 

MicroATX is fantastic if using smaller cards, no doubt, but beefy ones (size wise) like that and you have to consider airflow. There would be a lot of heat concentrated in a small area.

 

Also it didnt show the one I specxed. I changed the board. Lol

[Arthur]

If the OP wants to expand and run SLI/Crossfire, can't be done with microatx

Yes it can (unless you mean SLI/Crossfire with 3 or 4 cards?). The case pictured below is a mATX Bitfenix Prodigy M.

 

http://i.imgur.com/y3SUuXj.jpg

 

MicroATX boards are prone to overheating because of the limited space between parts.

It's never been a problem for me.

 

MicroATX is fantastic if using smaller cards, no doubt, but beefy ones (size wise) like that and you have to consider airflow.

Perhaps Pyroman would be better off with a graphics card with a blower-style fan so that the hot air is exhausted out of the rear of the case.

Edited December 2, 2013 by Arthur
Spelling

[featured_spectre]

Quite the quandry...

[Pyroman]

Thanks :-) Looks like i started a bit of a debate!

[featured_spectre]

Not at all. Good to get various perspectives.

[mac_shinobi]

Would a PS4 with a keyboard + mouse be a reasonable suggestion lol ??

[tmcd35]

Is it too late to throw my 2c in?

 

The first question is - are you replacing an existing system and if so what can be savaged from that? Makes a lot of difference to what you can/can't do with £700. Most build specs I see either forget components or assume taking from a pre-existing machine like a DVD-Rom drive or an OS.

 

I think AMD are worth a look at this price point. Personally I'd be tempted by an i3 over an AMD. Not sure i5 would be worth the extra expense - that money would be better off towards RAM and Graphics. AMD are very interesting when you look at multithreading, were as the i3 would out strip AMD on single threads. Certainly you can get a qood 3Ghz+ Quad Core from AMD for a fraction of the Intel price.

 

Another question is the quality of components. Do you get any old PSU or an 80+ gold? Asus motherboard or MSI? Crucial vs Hypertec? You get my drift. When you start building quality £700 is less than it first seems. Sure you can build an all singing all dancing i5 rig for £700, but when the machine constantly BSOD's and crash's due to carp compenents...

 

For my money I'd be tempted by either an i3-3220 or an AMD FX-6300 married with around 16Gb Ram, AMD 7950 GPU and 1Tb SSHD. I think that should be doable for the money and would give a good performing set up.

 

I suppose not far from Arthurs Spec above. As I say, trading CPU perormance for RAM and GPU performace.

Edited December 3, 2013 by tmcd35

[sonofsanta]

I'd build around this 280X @ £250 (including Battlefield 4): Sapphire Radeon R9 280X Dual-X OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Card with BattleField 4 PC Game Included [11221-00-20G]

 

If you want to go higher than that, the 290 is as high as you need to go - better cards than the 290 are a lot more money for what little boost you gain. Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with BattleField 4 PC Game Included [21227-00-40G]

 

AMD is perfectly capable for gaming, particularly if Mantle takes off (an AMD API designed to be more efficient than DirectX, so reducing CPU bottlenecking; early days but it's in a few upcoming games, including BF4). It also saves you a lot of money over an i5, not just on the CPU but on the motherboard.

 

Samsung 840 EVO, as @Arthur suggests, they're the best price/performance balance and Samsung have always been very reliable as SSDs. 240GB if you can, they're better performance than the 120GB (more chips in parallel, the 120GB only uses half the available paths on the controller). Not many games benefit from SSD installation to any noticeable extent IME, so don't worry about having to get one big enough for your Steam library - stick a second HDD in and use that, Steam lets you install to multiple devices these days.

 

Work out a PSU rating @ eXtreme Power Supply Calculator, you don't need as much as GPU manufacturer's suggest, I doubt you'll want more than 500/550W in a PSU for a single GPU system. Get a decent brand name PSU - Antec or Corsair are the usual recommendations. Don't scrimp here, if cheap RAM goes you buy new RAM, if a cheap PSU goes you could be buying an entire new system.

 

Pick a case of your choice. Go with something sensible, you'll end up regretting anything slightly weird as they become a pain to work with (trust me on this). Pick a motherboard that suits your chip and don't go overboard, so much is on the CPU now that there's not much to differentiate motherboards unless you're mad into overclocking.

 

8GB RAM is the right amount. Optical drive of your choice. Think that's it.

[SHimmer45]

its interesting what options are available, for me an i5 sits in the sweet spot for cost/performance.

 

[slight thread hijack]

im in a similar quandry as it looks like my old AM3 system has bitten the dust (board/CPU ) so have been looking myself at options for a cheap replacement.

as ive already got 8GB RAM an HD6870 and a good PSU and case, an FM2 system does look appealing for the extra cores for the cash over a i3/i5 as they are very cheap for a 4core cpu.Thing is if i get an A10 based apu that kinda makes the HD6870 redundant? (amds specs are a little iffy as they have changed the terminology)

FM2 athlon's might be an option with the HD6870 also.

Anyone actually used used and of the A10 model apu's?

For reference the main thing the box be used for is SC2 WoW and some mucking about with VM's

[/slight thread hijack]

[3s-gtech]

I have built a couple of FM2 machines, and I'm looking to make another for my parents. Price/performance is very good. Bear in mind that Kaveri is out soon - this will be AMD's newest architecture and is supposed to feature a number of improvements. You can build something on an FM2+ board now with a Richland APU to give an upgrade path. The Athlon is a good choice in that case, as it's much cheaper for similar performance if you're not using the APU. Your 6870 will blow any APU away, including Iris Pro, so don't worry too much about that.

[SHimmer45]

@3s-gtech that pretty much some's up my thinking after looking at some extra numbers, a good FM2 board with a 4 core athlon sounds the way to go.

out of interest which FM2 boards have you used.

ive always been an Asus fan but having a couple of failures has dented the brand for me (the ASROCK FM2 look interesting)

[chazzy2501]

I'm a few months out of touch but I was looking at a 660TI and an i5 4670k

[sonofsanta]

An A10 APU is 384 unified shaders, 24 texture mapping units, 8 render output units at 844MHz (A10-6800K)

A 6870 GPU is 1120 unified shaders, 56 texture mapping units, 32 render output units at 900MHz (source)

 

A 6870 is an order of magnitude better than even the top AMD APU.

[SHimmer45]

Ditched the idea of an APU so just rummaging around various sites looking for a mobo must not get distracted by the pretty colours of the gigabyte G1.....

[sonofsanta]

Of relevance: Ars Technica System Guide: November 2013 | Ars Technica & TR's fall 2013 system guide - The Tech Report - Page 2

[L3OUGH]

Just buy a PS4! ;D