Best Motherboard & Processor for Gaming for Under €100?

Bonesy.

Hi all, building a budget PC for the first time and am wondering what the best Motherboard & Processor is for Gaming for Under €100 (each), preferably from Dabs. Thanks and Happy Christmas!

nesf

Are you willing to overclock? Will you be willing/wanting to upgrade the processor in 12 months or get a few years out of it (i.e. is this build a stepping stone build)? And so on.

Monotype

I think what nesf is hinting at is to get a good quality board that will allow you to overclock, such as this Z68 Gigabyte which has good reviews. Overclockable processors are often €200 by themselves, so you could buy something cheaper for the moment and upgrade later. This will give you high performance in the long run. It would cost a bit more in total but spread over a longer period. There will be new CPUs available by the time you are to upgrade and hopefully you might be able to pick up an unlocked CPU for a bit cheaper by that stage.

If you don't want to upgrade, you could buy a cheaper motherboard and aim for the best i3 dual core that you can find. The quad cores would be still bring you over the €200 although a cheap H61 motherboard and i5-2300 would only total about €220 or so.

nesf

Monotype wrote: »

I think what nesf is hinting at is to get a good quality board that will allow you to overclock, such as this Z68 Gigabyte which has good reviews. Overclockable processors are often €200 by themselves, so you could buy something cheaper for the moment and upgrade later. This will give you high performance in the long run. It would cost a bit more in total but spread over a longer period. There will be new CPUs available by the time you are to upgrade and hopefully you might be able to pick up an unlocked CPU for a bit cheaper by that stage.

If you don't want to upgrade, you could buy a cheaper motherboard and aim for the best i3 dual core that you can find. The quad cores would be still bring you over the €200 although a cheap H61 motherboard and i5-2300 would only total about €220 or so.

Yup, exactly along the lines I'm thinking of. Compromise now for better performance next year etc.

Bonesy.

nesf wrote: »

Are you willing to overclock? Will you be willing/wanting to upgrade the processor in 12 months or get a few years out of it (i.e. is this build a stepping stone build)? And so on.

Yes, and yeh in about 6-12 months but I still want it to play Sims, Minecraft, Portal, Shooter games well for the meantime though.

Monotype

Portal 2 is easily handled by a single core and I don't think that the sims or minecraft is very demanding. If you want to get a bit more performance now, go for an i3 like the i3-2120
or if you want to save, get something like the celeron G530 (dual core) and perhaps contribute towards an SSD. There's cheaper i3s there as well, but some are power efficient models and have lower clock speeds. I don't think the pentiums are good value as they're much dearer than the celerons for only a little more performance, while the i3s have hyperthreading. Just check any model on ark.intel.com as their naming scheme doesn't guarantee any feature.

Bonesy.

AMDs any use?

nesf

Bonesy. wrote: »

AMDs any use?

Some of their chips at this price range are excellent and good overclockers. The problem is that the motherboard doesn't offer a good upgrade path since the latest batch of AM3+ processors from AMD aren't a patch on the Intel Sandy Bridge chips never mind the Ivy Bridge chips coming out early next year.

Again it comes down to a choice between performance now or performance over the longer run. Personally I'd go with the more upgradable board but that's just a personal preference.

Bonesy.

Ah right, well I've came up with this build and I want to make sure it's good for medium gaming and that all the parts work together(If someone is kind enough to check that is :P) and if anyone has anyone reccomendations feel free now I'm gonna try copy out the Dabs list and yes I have used Fluffys script and tried everything before but it never seems to work.. Here goes..
Asus P8Z68-V LX S1155 Intel Z68 DDR3 ATX €92.61

Intel Core i3-550 3.2Ghz Socket 1156 L3 4MB €85.99

Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL9 XMP €39.85

Sony 24x DVD-RW SATA Black Bare Internal Drive €16.45

EVGA GeForce GT 520 810MHz 1GB PCI-Express HDMI €37.80

Antec 900 Nine Hundred Ultimate Gamer Case (Black) €97.57

Corsair 500 Watt CX500 V2 Builder Series 80 Plus Power Supply €51.23

deconduo

Any reason you're ordering from Dabs :P

If you can order from HWVS, I'd go with something more like this:

Item|Price
Total build cost: €369.07 + €30 shipping
Intel Core i3-2120 Box, LGA1155|€107.28
ASRock H61M-HVS (B3), Sockel 1155, mATX|€41.81
Xigmatek Asgard, ATX, ohne Netzteil, schwarz|€31.61
8GB-Kit G.Skill PC3-10667U CL9|€29.57
Samsung SH-222AB bare schwarz SATA|€15.72
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 450W|€40.89
Club 3D Radeon HD 6790 CoolStream, 1024MB GDDR5, PCI-Express|€102.19


Cheaper and a much better gaming build.

nesf

That graphics card is meant for watching high resolution movies and similar, it's pretty crap for gaming and not a whole lot better than Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics that you get with the i3 chip. It'll struggle with a lot of the more modern FPS games. You'd be better off upping your budget there, cutting back on the CPU to a Celeron and picking up an ATI 6850 or a GTX 550 Ti or similar for around the €110 - 130 mark. You could also look at getting a good cheaper case like the Bitfenix Merc Alpha off a different site (Dabs don't do them I think) but that'd save you €60 to put towards a better graphics card.

Edit: deconduo got in before me, ignore me and follow his advice.

old_aussie

Hi,

See if Dabs have the AMD Fusion A8-3850 CPU, should be around £75.00

This CPU has DirectX 11 video capabilities which are much better than the EVGA GeForce GT 520 810MHz 1GB PCI-Express HDMI.

Saving you the cost of the very basic GeForce GT 520 video card.

Bonesy.

deconduo wrote: »

Any reason you're ordering from Dabs :P

If you can order from HWVS, I'd go with something more like this:

Item|Price
Total build cost: €369.07 + €30 shipping
Intel Core i3-2120 Box, LGA1155|€107.28
ASRock H61M-HVS (B3), Sockel 1155, mATX|€41.81
Xigmatek Asgard, ATX, ohne Netzteil, schwarz|€31.61
8GB-Kit G.Skill PC3-10667U CL9|€29.57
Samsung SH-222AB bare schwarz SATA|€15.72
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 450W|€40.89
Club 3D Radeon HD 6790 CoolStream, 1024MB GDDR5, PCI-Express|€102.19


Cheaper and a much better gaming build.

Good build and dunno why I'm going with Dabs really there quite expensive :P Would the DDR5 GFX card be compatible with the DDR3 RAM though?

nesf

Bonesy. wrote: »

Would the DDR5 GFX card be compatible with the DDR3 RAM though?

Yes the two have nothing to do with one another. The memory on the graphics card will not affect the memory on the motherboard.

Bonesy.

nesf wrote: »

Yes the two have nothing to do with one another. The memory on the graphics card will not affect the memory on the motherboard.

Ah lovely New to all this so I'm clueless :P

Markd250

If you decide to go with your own build from dabs, you should be aware that the CPU you picked needs an 1156 socket, while your motherboard is an 1155.

You will get a nasty surprise when you try to put it together, as it won't fit!