Gaming Build for around €400ish

Squaredude

Looking to build a cheapish gaming pc as my old pc just gave up the ghost.
1. What is your budget? €400 give or take

2. What will be the main purpose of the computer?Gaming (GTA,minecraft nothing too serious),Photoshop

3. Do you need a copy of Windows?No

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer?DVD Drive (Liteon IHAS 124 b)

5. Do you need a monitor? No

5b. If no, what resolution is your current monitor and do you plan to upgrade in the near future? [1024*768.] [No] may use it with my HD tv

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? Wireless Card

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? Maybe

8. How can you pay? Bank Transfer/Credit Card/Laser

9. When are you purchasing? Shortly

10. If you need help building it, where are you based?Kerry

Monotype

Which GTA?

Squaredude

gta IV

Monotype

Well that is reasonably serious gaming. The demands of that game are actually heavier than you might think... poor coding?

I assume that DVD is SATA?

That's a fairly toughish budget.
Here's what I think:

Item|Price
WD Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 3 6Gb/s|€61.79
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 450W|€40.99
BitFenix Merc Beta|€32.17
4GB-Kit G-Skill PC3-10667U CL9|€19.89
Powercolor HD6870 1024MB Dual-DVI/HD1M2I5|€137.82
ASRock B75M, Sockel 1155, mATX|€60.07
Intel Celeron G530 Box, LGA1155|€37.27
TP-Link TL-WN781N, 150Mbps, PCIe x1|€10.20
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€419.19

-Case has unknown delivery date, so you may want to change that if you're ordering soon. There's an alpha version with more fan holes but go for the beta unless you plan to fill them.
-Graphics card is a reasonably good midrange one, but you could go for a 7750 if you really need to save funds, but it wouldn't be as good.
-Board is reasonably upgradable. It can't overclock but it has a recent chipset with 3 SATA 6Gbps and 4 USB 3 ports so it's not too bad.
-Celeron 530 is a dual core running at 2.4GHz. Not a bad CPU; that 2.4GHz is quite powerful and one of the best value around.

Squaredude

Cheers for that.Yeah dvd is sata.I could stretch the budget to 550-600 just might have to wait a bit longer to buy it.Would that difference in budget make much of a difference?

Monotype

Yeah, you could get a better CPU at the very least. Or even an SSD... actually is there any chance that you can carry the hard drive from your last system?
If you wanted to have the computer ASAP, you could always get that and replace the CPU down the road.
If you were in the region of €600, I'd do my best to get an overclockable CPU and motherboard it. This would offer enough CPU power for a long time to come.

Item|Price
WD Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 3 6Gb/s|€61.79
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 450W|€40.99
BitFenix Merc Beta|€32.17
4GB-Kit G-Skill PC3-10667U CL9|€19.89
Powercolor HD6870 1024MB Dual-DVI/HD1M2I5|€137.82
TP-Link TL-WN781N, 150Mbps, PCIe x1|€10.20
ASRock Z77 Pro4-M, Sockel 1155, mATX|€83.40
Intel Core i5-3570K Box, LGA1155|€212.12
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€617.37

System could probably be a little better balanced - most people would go for 8GB of RAM, not because they need it but it's quite cheap. To bring down the cost a little, a 2500K cpu instead for €30 cheaper and much the same capabilities.

Squaredude

HDD from old system is IDE but is on its last legs,it may have suffered a bit of damage when my old PC went belly up this morning.I actually just remembered that I have two 500gb sata hdds that I pulled from two old sky boxes they're only 5400rpm though.Would they do as stand in hdds until I decide to upgrade to better ones?I could push to €600.Cheers for all the help,thought I knew a bit about PC's, turns out putting together a gaming pc is a whole different ball game.

Monotype

If you had a hard drive, even if it's a bit slowish, you could get an SSD. The samsung 830 64GB is around €63 or something and the 128GB is €99. Putting Windows on this would make a huge difference to the overall snappiness in a system. You could keep your main programs on it. 64GB is plenty for getting by really, but 128GB is a more comfortable size if you have lots of programs, but both are a little small for today's storage needs, hence needing the extra hard drive for other data.

Squaredude

So if I swap out the 500gb you've listed above and replace it with an ssd and use that along with my sata hdd it'll keep me going till I decide to upgrade to a larger ssd.Would I need anything more with this build with regards to assembling it like thermal paste or anything like that,I've never built a pc from scratch I assume its fairly straight forward.

Monotype

No, everything you need is there, although you will probably need the plug to PSU from another computer as this one would be the two pin German type.

Here's a good SSD
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/Solid-State-Disk/56865/Samsung+SSD+830+64GB+SATA+6GB's+Paper+Box.article

Squaredude

Excellent I've plenty of those plugs lying around the house.Thanks for all the help.

Monotype

If you happen to be doing a lot of heavy work with photoshop, it might be worth considering 8GB of RAM as it's not too expensive at about €40.

Squaredude

ordered and paid for this build yesterday.got everything except the ssd and swapped the 4gb for 8gb of ram.

U_Fig

If I was building a budget machine..I wouldnt bother too much about non essential parts like SSD if you have a HDD even a slow one it'll do and can be upgraded a lot Easier and cheaper than say a GPU abd CLU so I'd spend as much as possible on CPU and GPU and motherbaord..then upgrade the rest as you can afford to...

Procrastastudy

Why does anyone buy a PS3 when Mono can put together a gaming machine for €400 - thats insane!

Stereomaniac

Well I bought a PS3 secondhand for less than half that price, so that's why, it's cheaper to wait!

The Omen 666

Monotype wrote: »

Well that is reasonably serious gaming. The demands of that game are actually heavier than you might think... poor coding?

I assume that DVD is SATA?

That's a fairly toughish budget.
Here's what I think:

Item|Price
WD Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 3 6Gb/s|€61.79
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 450W|€40.99
BitFenix Merc Beta|€32.17
4GB-Kit G-Skill PC3-10667U CL9|€19.89
Powercolor HD6870 1024MB Dual-DVI/HD1M2I5|€137.82
ASRock B75M, Sockel 1155, mATX|€60.07
Intel Celeron G530 Box, LGA1155|€37.27
TP-Link TL-WN781N, 150Mbps, PCIe x1|€10.20
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€419.19

-Case has unknown delivery date, so you may want to change that if you're ordering soon. There's an alpha version with more fan holes but go for the beta unless you plan to fill them.
-Graphics card is a reasonably good midrange one, but you could go for a 7750 if you really need to save funds, but it wouldn't be as good.
-Board is reasonably upgradable. It can't overclock but it has a recent chipset with 3 SATA 6Gbps and 4 USB 3 ports so it's not too bad.
-Celeron 530 is a dual core running at 2.4GHz. Not a bad CPU; that 2.4GHz is quite powerful and one of the best value around.

just wondering about those g series cpus. would they b better than an equivelant core 2 duo running at same 2.4ghz. trying to put together a similar build

Genghiz Cohen

The Omen 666 wrote: »

just wondering about those g series cpus. would they b better than an equivelant core 2 duo running at same 2.4ghz. trying to put together a similar build

G530 gets 2272 numbers.
E6600 gets 1502.

The Omen 666

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

The Omen 666 wrote: »

just wondering about those g series cpus. would they b better than an equivelant core 2 duo running at same 2.4ghz. trying to put together a similar build

G530 gets 2272 numbers.
E6600 gets 1502.

i see!!! nuff said, thanks