Advice on Gaming Pc Build

Frankmagnet

Hi

Always wanted to have a decent pc for playing games and finally got some money together that I can justify spending.

Not sure if 650e will get me alot. I have been looking at a few sites like tomshardware but I really don't have a great understanding of the whole pc build scene so any help would be greatly appreciated.



1. What is your budget? €650

2. What will be the main purpose of the computer? Gaming, Battlefield, Skyrim, Most FPS, GTA, Football Manager.

3. Do you need a copy of Windows? No

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer? No

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? 1920x1080 No

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? No

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? Not at the moment.

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

9. When are you purchasing? Next two weeks

10. If you need help building it, where are you based? Based in Longford, hopefully have someone who would build it for me.

Thanks boys/girls

Monotype

Item|Price
ASUS DRW-24B5ST bare|€17.73
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 550W|€55.73
8GB-Kit G-Skill RipJaws PC3-12800U CL9|€41.98
BitFenix Merc Beta|€33.09
AMD FX-8120 Prozessor, Boxed, Sockel AM3+|€150.37
XFX DD RADEON 7850 860M 2GB D5 2x mDP HDMI 2x DVI|€203.21
ASRock 970 Extreme3, AM3+, ATX|€74.54
WD Caviar Blue 1TB 6Gb's|€79.90
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€675.54

A little bit over budget, but if you need to, we can whittle it down a bit. That CPU should come down a few euro (5-10) in the next few days if they pass on AMD's cuts.

Frankmagnet

Monotype wrote: »

Item|Price
ASUS DRW-24B5ST bare|€17.73
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 550W|€55.73
8GB-Kit G-Skill RipJaws PC3-12800U CL9|€41.98
BitFenix Merc Beta|€33.09
AMD FX-8120 Prozessor, Boxed, Sockel AM3+|€150.37
XFX DD RADEON 7850 860M 2GB D5 2x mDP HDMI 2x DVI|€203.21
ASRock 970 Extreme3, AM3+, ATX|€74.54
WD Caviar Blue 1TB 6Gb's|€79.90
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€675.54

A little bit over budget, but if you need to, we can whittle it down a bit. That CPU should come down a few euro (5-10) in the next few days if they pass on AMD's cuts.

Thanks monotype.

Excuse my ignorance on this but this would be able to handle most games reasonable well?

Know 675 isnt a massive amount so not expecting miracles and i could always upgrade in the future.

Thanks again

Eboggles

Frankmagnet wrote: »

Thanks monotype.

Excuse my ignorance on this but this would be able to handle most games reasonable well?

Know 675 isnt a massive amount so not expecting miracles and i could always upgrade in the future.

Thanks again

That's actually a very good build for €675, the HD7850 should be able to handle all games at 1080p very well.

Monotype

For a standard monitor at resolution of 1920x1080, I'd expect you to be able to run nearly everything at maximum.
With the 7850, apparently you can still get Ultra settings with Battlefield 3, although it may dip just below the 30 frames per second mark.
http://pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-HD-7870-2GB-and-HD-7850-2GB-Pitcairn-Review/Battlefield-3-Radeon-0

This test is probably done on single player and it's supposedly tougher on systems in multiplayer, so you might have to scale it back to high settings. I don't have the game myself, so I can't say for certain.

Andy!!

Weird why am I getting 403's on half of those links Frank posted?

Excellent system for helping someone out though, the spreadsheet I mean, fair play. Considering building myself soon, there should be a sticky for threads like this so we don't spam the place out of it. :pac:

Monotype

Andy!! wrote: »

Weird why am I getting 403's on half of those links Frank posted?

Boards messes up links a bit. I think it's their system where each link is tested for safety. For a brief while they changed every link so it didn't show the original one posted but there were some complaints so they made it a more invisible process. Seems there's a few bugs still in the system. Links are fine in the original post, just don't click on the quoted ones as there's an extra http:// and quotation mark at the end of each.

Excellent system for helping someone out though, the spreadsheet I mean, fair play. Considering building myself soon, there should be a sticky for threads like this so we don't spam the place out of it. :pac:

There's a budget gaming thread. Doesn't get updated that often though because stuff gets obsolete so fast. Had to be de-stickied as boards said there should be less stickies (for mobile devices, if I recall correctly).

Edit: The spreadsheet is fluffy's script.

Frankmagnet

Monotype this might sound like a noob question but is this set up similar to an intel processor and a geoforce card?
They are two that were mentioned to me earlier but i assume the budget would have to be upped or would this set up do more or less the same?

Sorry about all the questions. Thanks again

Eboggles

Frankmagnet wrote: »

Monotype this might sound like a noob question but is this set up similar to an intel processor and a geoforce card?
They are two that were mentioned to me earlier but i assume the budget would have to be upped or would this set up do more or less the same?

Sorry about all the questions. Thanks again

Monotype doesn't seem to be online at the moment so I thought I'd take this.

At your pricepoint AMD are actually the best bet due to the fact that their chips are as cheap as chips (pun intended) and their new processors are out soon, meaning a good upgrade path.

Nvidia (Geforce) haven't actually released any cards in your price segment yet, and the HD7850 is a killer card in it's own right.

My advice: Stick with Mono's build as it's the best your going to get for the price, but if you really want an Intel/Nvidia build you're going to have to wait a while and save up, as Intel's quad-cores are quite expensive and Nvidia's mid-range cards (GTX 660, GTX 650ti) haven't been released yet.

Monotype

From Intel, the closest CPU is the i3 -2130 for €140. Bear in mind that you'd need a different motherboard for these too.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/Socket+1155/50381/Intel+Core+i3-2130+Box%2C+LGA1155.article

The Intels are quite good at gaming as they offer better performance per core. But it's just a dual core though with hyperthreading.

The AMD in comparison, is an octo-core. Well some of those resources are shared, so you're not exactly getting 8 full cores. Worst case is that it's a quad core, but it's quite a bit better than that.

If you were to spend more on the CPU, the next one up is the i5-2310 €168.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/Socket+1155/47384/Intel+Core+i5-2310+Box%2C+LGA1155.article
Without sacrificing too many features and cutting costs a little, you'd probably go for a board like this:
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/DDR3/46918/ASRock+H61M+U3S3+(B3)%2C+Sockel+1155%2C+mATX.article

I suppose it wouldn't be a bad choice as it's a reasonably powerful quad core. You'd probably do a little better in games as it goes back again to how powerful a few cores are rather than how many as so many games are still designed around using only around two cores.

I recommended AMD because - (i) good motherboard for the money, (ii) upgradable to AMD's next lineup of CPUs, (iii) can overclock (more about this later), (iv) price reductions - they were announced yesterday but it takes a few days to apply them.

Neither of the Intel CPUs are overclockable. For that you need two ingredients - a "K" CPU, which starts at about the €200 mark and an appropriate motherboard, which is about €90. The i5 is pretty good by itself, but you could probably make up the difference with overclocking the AMD. With a high budget, Intel is the way to go as their CPUs can be overclocked by quite a bit.

Intel's upgrade lineup is quite good if you were to choose the i3 and upgrade later, but you'd probably want a motherboard that allows overclocking if you want to maximise upgrade opportunities. AMD will have some new CPUs soon enough and this socket will be compatible should you decide to upgrade down the line.

This generation of AMDs do start to consume quite a bit of power if you're doing a lot of overclocking, but if you keep it balanced and just overclock by a bit, you should have pretty good performance. For games, the graphics card is really the biggest consideration for games.

If you thought that you'd upgrade the CPU to next generation in a year or so, you could go with a slightly older CPU (still compatible with the same motherboard) such as this and use the funds to buy a solid state drive.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/Socket+AM3/27814/AMD+Phenom+II+X4+965+Black+Edition+Box%2C+Sockel+AM3.article
This is due for a price drop too... I don't think it's been applied yet so it should drop by possibly €10-15. This would still be a lot of power for games and it's overclockable.

As for an nVidia Geforce card - nVidia don't currently haven't anything directly competing here. There's the 560ti, but pricing on these just isn't good enough.
There's a GTX 660 coming with in the next few weeks ("early September") and is reckoned to cost a little over the 7850 so it might be a good option; we'll see.

Frankmagnet

Monotype wrote: »

From Intel, the closest CPU is the i3 -2130 for €140. Bear in mind that you'd need a different motherboard for these too.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/Socket+1155/50381/Intel+Core+i3-2130+Box%2C+LGA1155.article

The Intels are quite good at gaming as they offer better performance per core. But it's just a dual core though with hyperthreading.

The AMD in comparison, is an octo-core. Well some of those resources are shared, so you're not exactly getting 8 full cores. Worst case is that it's a quad core, but it's quite a bit better than that.

If you were to spend more on the CPU, the next one up is the i5-2310 €168.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/Socket+1155/47384/Intel+Core+i5-2310+Box%2C+LGA1155.article
Without sacrificing too many features and cutting costs a little, you'd probably go for a board like this:
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/DDR3/46918/ASRock+H61M+U3S3+(B3)%2C+Sockel+1155%2C+mATX.article

I suppose it wouldn't be a bad choice as it's a reasonably powerful quad core. You'd probably do a little better in games as it goes back again to how powerful a few cores are rather than how many as so many games are still designed around using only around two cores.

I recommended AMD because - (i) good motherboard for the money, (ii) upgradable to AMD's next lineup of CPUs, (iii) can overclock (more about this later), (iv) price reductions - they were announced yesterday but it takes a few days to apply them.

Neither of the Intel CPUs are overclockable. For that you need two ingredients - a "K" CPU, which starts at about the €200 mark and an appropriate motherboard, which is about €90. The i5 is pretty good by itself, but you could probably make up the difference with overclocking the AMD. With a high budget, Intel is the way to go as their CPUs can be overclocked by quite a bit.

Intel's upgrade lineup is quite good if you were to choose the i3 and upgrade later, but you'd probably want a motherboard that allows overclocking if you want to maximise upgrade opportunities. AMD will have some new CPUs soon enough and this socket will be compatible should you decide to upgrade down the line.

This generation of AMDs do start to consume quite a bit of power if you're doing a lot of overclocking, but if you keep it balanced and just overclock by a bit, you should have pretty good performance. For games, the graphics card is really the biggest consideration for games.

If you thought that you'd upgrade the CPU to next generation in a year or so, you could go with a slightly older CPU (still compatible with the same motherboard) such as this and use the funds to buy a solid state drive.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/Socket+AM3/27814/AMD+Phenom+II+X4+965+Black+Edition+Box%2C+Sockel+AM3.article
This is due for a price drop too... I don't think it's been applied yet so it should drop by possibly €10-15. This would still be a lot of power for games and it's overclockable.

As for an nVidia Geforce card - nVidia don't currently haven't anything directly competing here. There's the 560ti, but pricing on these just isn't good enough.
There's a GTX 660 coming with in the next few weeks ("early September") and is reckoned to cost a little over the 7850 so it might be a good option; we'll see.

Lads couldnt ask for anymore help. Thats excellent and your a gent for taking your time to explain all that to me.

I think im better off going with your original build. This should do me for a year or so and when the finances are better i could upgrade.

Thanks again and i will keep you up to date on how im getting on.

Frankmagnet

One last question.

Will this website put together the pc for me before delivery?

Thank you

Monotype

You need to add this to your cart and they'll build it.
http://www1.hardwareversand.de/Service/746/Rechner+-+Zusammenbau.article

They usually don't put in the graphics card as it can be heavy. Building it yourself isn't that hard with a little research and care. It's like lego.

Frankmagnet

Hey Mono,

Was just putting all that stuff in the basket and I noticed that the ram has no date for stock. Could that be changed out for a different ram? No matter if its a few more euro.

IamSatai

Hey Frankmagnet.
This ram should do the trick:
8GB-Kit Corsair Vengeance Low Profile schwarz PC3-12800U CL9.
Or if you want to stick with RipJaws go for:
8GB-Kit G.Skill RipJaws-X PC3-12800U CL9
There really isn't a difference between these two and the one monotype suggested, so go for whatever you prefer.

Frankmagnet

IamSatai wrote: »

Hey Frankmagnet.
This ram should do the trick:
8GB-Kit Corsair Vengeance Low Profile schwarz PC3-12800U CL9.
Or if you want to stick with RipJaws go for:
8GB-Kit G.Skill RipJaws-X PC3-12800U CL9
There really isn't a difference between these two and the one monotype suggested, so go for whatever you prefer.

Thank you for getting back to me, changed it out there.

Cant order until friday and two items have come up with only one remaining :eek:

Going to be a long week!

IamSatai

Ha, I know the feeling.
I'm still waiting for money to come in before I can purchase the parts for my build, should be a day or two. Watching the availability really is a form of torture, especially when the dreaded "Delivery date unknown" rears it's ugly head.

Frankmagnet

IamSatai wrote: »

Ha, I know the feeling.
I'm still waiting for money to come in before I can purchase the parts for my build, should be a day or two. Watching the availability really is a form of torture, especially when the dreaded "Delivery date unknown" rears it's ugly head.

It is torture alright, Sure something will be gone by friday, ah well, all i can do is wait suppose.

Monotype

Yep, those RAMs are fine. The one I picked out was one of the cheapest of that specification at the time. The prices move around a bit and much of the RAM is very similar so whichever one is cheaper tends to get sold out fast.

Frankmagnet

Monotype wrote: »

Yep, those RAMs are fine. The one I picked out was one of the cheapest of that specification at the time. The prices move around a bit and much of the RAM is very similar so whichever one is cheaper tends to get sold out fast.

Thanks again.

The graphics card and hdd are down to the last one left. Hopefully they get more instock before weekend. Kinda set on getting this now.

Monotype

Just go off and enjoy your week. Forget about it and take another look come Friday. Hardwareversand change their stock all the time. It's a huge company and there's always stuff coming in and out of stock. If one 7850 is out of stock, then that's no problem as there's at least 10 more there.

Frankmagnet

Monotype wrote: »

Just go off and enjoy your week. Forget about it and take another look come Friday. Hardwareversand change their stock all the time. It's a huge company and there's always stuff coming in and out of stock. If one 7850 is out of stock, then that's no problem as there's at least 10 more there.

Thats what i will do. Take a break from this now and check again friday.
Thanks again

Frankmagnet

Hi Guys,

I was about to order the pc and it seems that few things are out of stock.

Could someone give me advice on a different motherboard, and power supply and graphics card?

Could I change the original card for this one? Its only a few euro more.

http://www1.hardwareversand.de/2048+MB/59765/Club+3D+Radeon+HD+7850+royalKing%2C+2GB+GDDR5.article

Monotype

Trying not to stray too far from the price of that PSU, I'm thinking -

This Bequiet looks okay. Not a whole lot of reviews but it looks stable enough, it's a fairly new line and it's modular.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/500+-+600+Watts/50970/be+quiet!+PURE+POWER+CM+BQT+L8-CM-530W.article

450W should be enough, but I'll have to go back and double check what the power consumption is on those CPUs. They're efficient enough when not overclocked, but they do climb up fairly rapidly when you start adding voltage. A small overclock shouldn't be out of the question.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/400+-+500+Watts/30074/Super-Flower+Amazon+80Plus+450W.article
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/400+-+500+Watts/41092/Super-Flower+SF450P14XE+Golden+Green+Pro+80plus+gold.article

Corsair GS 500W: Not a bad PSU and should give a bit more room.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/400+-+500+Watts/58852/Corsair+GS+Series%2C+500+Watt.article

Yes, that 7850 that you picked out would be fine. There's quite a lot of 7850 2GB out of stock just now.

Motherboard... let's see.

Wow, there's quite a few out of stock there too.
The Extreme 4 is about €10 more. Has a few extras over the extreme 3 although I like the physical colour of the extreme 3 better. I'm sick of blue in motherboards. Has USB 3 header, supports two graphics cards, loads of ports at the back.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=48516

This asus doesn't look so bad, if you wanted to stay close to the same price. It has a few ports less at the back but you get a USB 3 header which would be handy if you wanted more USB 3 ports or got a case with them.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/DDR3/63771/ASUS+M5A97+R2.0%2C+AM3%2B%2C+ATX.article

>>>> Did you see the coupons for €10 or something in the bargain alerts thread? For hardwareversand.<<<<

Edit: It's hard to find specific values, but it might be no harm to get a 500W PSU anway. I'd go for the bequiet or the 450W golden green, which is in fairness nearly as good as most 500W PSUs.

Frankmagnet

Monotype wrote: »

Trying not to stray too far from the price of that PSU, I'm thinking -

This Bequiet looks okay. Not a whole lot of reviews but it looks stable enough, it's a fairly new line and it's modular.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/500+-+600+Watts/50970/be+quiet!+PURE+POWER+CM+BQT+L8-CM-530W.article

450W should be enough, but I'll have to go back and double check what the power consumption is on those CPUs. They're efficient enough when not overclocked, but they do climb up fairly rapidly when you start adding voltage. A small overclock shouldn't be out of the question.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/400+-+500+Watts/30074/Super-Flower+Amazon+80Plus+450W.article
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/400+-+500+Watts/41092/Super-Flower+SF450P14XE+Golden+Green+Pro+80plus+gold.article

Corsair GS 500W: Not a bad PSU and should give a bit more room.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/400+-+500+Watts/58852/Corsair+GS+Series%2C+500+Watt.article

Yes, that 7850 that you picked out would be fine. There's quite a lot of 7850 2GB out of stock just now.

Motherboard... let's see.

Wow, there's quite a few out of stock there too.
The Extreme 4 is about €10 more. Has a few extras over the extreme 3 although I like the physical colour of the extreme 3 better. I'm sick of blue in motherboards. Has USB 3 header, supports two graphics cards, loads of ports at the back.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=48516

This asus doesn't look so bad, if you wanted to stay close to the same price. It has a few ports less at the back but you get a USB 3 header which would be handy if you wanted more USB 3 ports or got a case with them.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/DDR3/63771/ASUS+M5A97+R2.0%2C+AM3%2B%2C+ATX.article

>>>> Did you see the coupons for €10 or something in the bargain alerts thread? For hardwareversand.<<<<

Edit: It's hard to find specific values, but it might be no harm to get a 500W PSU anway. I'd go for the bequiet or the 450W golden green, which is in fairness nearly as good as most 500W PSUs.

Cheers Mono.

I have gone for the bequiet and the extreme 4 and I will go with that graphics card too.

Thats the full set

Thanks for everything, going to order now.