new gaming pc build help

superfish

hi guys im new to building pcs and this will be my first build im on a tight budget so buying parts every week im in no rush to finish as have an xbox one for gaming in the meantime, ok so I bought this psu and case already http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CiT-1017-Black-Part-Mesh-Gaming-Case-with-500W-PSU-/141697361909?hash=item20fdd227f5 and after doing more research ive decided to buy another psu as I think I will need one with continuous power and was wondering is this one any good http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Cooler-Master-B500-80-Bronze-Power-Supply-Computer-PC-PSU-/291537264498?hash=item43e0f99f72 hopefully no one else buys it before you guys help me out, ive decided on an amd 2 quad core processor as its cheaper than intel and gets similar results, I need advice on a mother board that's cheap will take a graphics card also up to 16gb of ddr3 ram and the amd 2 processor, I will be installing windows 8.1 or maybe ten if its any good and want it to be able to play some of the newer games such as the witcher 3 ect ,any help would be greatly appreciated as I feel im going in circles thanks in advance

moc moc a moc

Punctuation, son.

Digital Solitude

What's your budget? Unless you're super low budget AMD does not give similar performance to Intel, its much, much weaker.

You'll need a continuous power PSU yeah, peak power is a waste of time

superfish

Digital Solitude wrote: »

What's your budget? Unless you're super low budget AMD does not give similar performance to Intel, its much, much weaker.

You'll need a continuous power PSU yeah, peak power is a waste of time

Im not sure of a budget as im just going to buy parts as I go I just want to keep it as cheap as possible for my first build this is the processor I was thinking of http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AMD-A8-7600-Quad-Core-3-1GHz-FM2-2MB-Cache-65W-TDP-CPU-Processor-/111551877248?hash=item19f9029080
so is the psu I posted a good one ?

TerrorFirmer

The case is cheap but functional, but the power supply that comes with it is absolute garbage.

That AMD Quad is only about €20 cheaper than an i3 and it's way slower.

What's your total budget? No point buying piece by piece, save up the money and buy it all together.

Digital Solitude

As Terror said, an i3 4160 will be much, much faster that that

i3 4160
1tb HDD
8gb DDR3
H81M board
You have a case
Decent 400w PSU from BeQuiet or Corsair
Second hand R9 270X or a GTX 750Ti are the best budget cards.
Straight up, you're looking at a €500 or so investment.

Not to tell you your business but this machine will blow the XOne out of the water, especially if you can find a 270X for a good price. I'd just sell the XOne and put the funds towards this, unless you want exclusives or something.

superfish

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

The case is cheap but functional, but the power supply that comes with it is absolute garbage.

That AMD Quad is only about €20 cheaper than an i3 and it's way slower.

What's your total budget? No point buying piece by piece, save up the money and buy it all together.

ok at a guess around 400 pounds (im living in the uk parts seem cheaper here) the reason im doing it bit by bit is ive just had an operation and will be off work for some time so this gives me something to do whilst I have all this free time, so you reccon go for an i3 ? I thought they only come in duel core and you had to get the i5 for quad core ?

Digital Solitude

i3s you can get Quad i3s AFAIK, they have hyperthreading anyways and can functionally have 3 or 4 cores when under pressure.

Its down to the cores performance, not the number of cores and the clock speed it runs. An 8 core AMD chip at 4.0ghz is still worse than a Dual core i3 at 3.6ghz

superfish

Digital Solitude wrote: »

As Terror said, an i3 4160 will be much, much faster that that

i3 4160
1tb HDD
8gb DDR3
H81M board
You have a case
Decent 400w PSU from BeQuiet or Corsair
Second hand R9 270X or a GTX 750Ti are the best budget cards.
Straight up, you're looking at a €500 or so investment.

Not to tell you your business but this machine will blow the XOne out of the water, especially if you can find a 270X for a good price. I'd just sell the XOne and put the funds towards this, unless you want exclusives or something.

that's very very helpful as I was unsure about psu and motherboard and was under the impression I would need 500w, also I hope its better than xbox one as ive been playing the witcher 3 and its horrendously slow at loading and so many bugs I also find the xbox itself can be quite glitch, I forgot to mention I have a 120gb ssd 2.5 that I was going to use for the os and I have a 1tb hdd 7200rpm for storage will this work or should I just install os on the hdd and not bother with the ssd thanks

Digital Solitude

SSD is a savage upgrade, definitely do that.

What components do you currently have then? The case, SSD and HDD?

superfish

Digital Solitude wrote: »

SSD is a savage upgrade, definitely do that.

What components do you currently have then? The case, SSD and HDD?

ok so I have the case, ocz agility 3 120gb ssd, western digital 1tb hdd, a wifi card, gaming mouse and keyboard also a hd monitor, and will be buying a psu today, just need motherboard, ram, processor and graphics card. oh and I have an optical dvd drive, I was just looking at the i3 you suggested I can pick it up for 80 quid looks decent

TerrorFirmer

i3's are dual core but they have hyperthreading, i5's are true quads. Pentium's are basically i3's without hyperthreading, but this makes a massive difference in some games.

Overall, in the vast majority of games, the i3 performs almost identical to the i5, including The Witcher 3. The only point at which the difference would manifest itself would be if you were playing with an €800 graphics card but I don't think you need to worry about that!

All quads are not equal either, an AMD quad of any description, and even their six and eight core CPU's, are generally slower than Intel's good i3's, and are devastated by the i5 line. The processor you originally linked to is an APU - it offers the best in-class integrated graphics performance, but this offers no benefit in a proper gaming PC. This entire line of AMD APU's is very inferior to the i3.

A budget of 500 pounds is very decent. To be honest I'd scrap that case you had as the power supply is worthless and the case itself is a bit crap, but it'll suffice if you're content to put up with it, but lower quality cases tend to be flimsy, made of poor material, have bad airflow, etc. It's not going to make or break the PC but if you're building a 500 pound machine you might as well start the right way.

If you already have a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HD that's a great start, most definitely use the SSD as it makes a huge difference to day to day usage.

Something like this, taken from Dabs.co.uk:

Thermaltake Versa H22 Case
Thermaltake Challenger 500W PSU
i5-4460 Processor
H81M-E32 Motherboard
Gigabyte GTX970
Kingston 8GB 1600mhz Ram

Comes in at £520. Loads of ways you can get that a good bit cheaper. Change the processor to an i3-4170, or change the graphics card to a GTX960, and the price will be way under the £500.

Digital Solitude

I had half a reply typed out but Terror has beaten me to it.

An i3 or an i5 will be a total beast paired with a GTX 970, your XOne will look like a 360 in comparison

Going for the components Terror has listed is probably the best job.

superfish

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

i3's are dual core but they have hyperthreading, i5's are true quads. Pentium's are basically i3's without hyperthreading, but this makes a massive difference in some games.

Overall, in the vast majority of games, the i3 performs almost identical to the i5, including The Witcher 3. The only point at which the difference would manifest itself would be if you were playing with an €800 graphics card but I don't think you need to worry about that!

All quads are not equal either, an AMD quad of any description, and even their six and eight core CPU's, are generally slower than Intel's good i3's, and are devastated by the i5 line. The processor you originally linked to is an APU - it offers the best in-class integrated graphics performance, but this offers no benefit in a proper gaming PC. This entire line of AMD APU's is very inferior to the i3.

A budget of 500 pounds is very decent. To be honest I'd scrap that case you had as the power supply is worthless and the case itself is a bit crap, but it'll suffice if you're content to put up with it, but lower quality cases tend to be flimsy, made of poor material, have bad airflow, etc. It's not going to make or break the PC but if you're building a 500 pound machine you might as well start the right way.

If you already have a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HD that's a great start, most definitely use the SSD as it makes a huge difference to day to day usage.

Something like this, taken from Dabs.co.uk:

Thermaltake Versa H22 Case
Thermaltake Challenger 500W PSU
i5-4460 Processor
H81M-E32 Motherboard
Gigabyte GTX970
Kingston 8GB 1600mhz Ram

Comes in at £520. Loads of ways you can get that a good bit cheaper. Change the processor to an i3-4170, or change the graphics card to a GTX960, and the price will be way under the £500.

that's great ive a much better Idea of what im doing now will deffo be buying an i3 as for the case I will use it as a start and throw away the provided psu, and if the case is crap ill just buy a new one I should have done more research before buying but its only 30 quid

TerrorFirmer

Sorry I had it in my head that your budget was 500, not 400 pounds when I wrote that. Sorry about that. If you swap the i5-4460 for the i3-4170, and swap the GTX970 for the GTX960, it will be around 400 pounds if you take out the case if you're going to use that CiT one. And it will still be an excellent performer and all current games will run a lot better than they do on the XB1.

It's a good call throwing away that PSU as a bad case isn't going to make or break your system, but a cheap low quality PSU puts everything at risk. It's a '500w' but realistically it's really probably about a somewhat reliable 200w and not designed for anything remotely close to 500w, it would blow up if you tried to run anything over 300w on it.

There was a guy on here a good few years ago used to make a lot of custom PC's, at one stage his main PC was built into a cardboard box.

Digital Solitude

To be honest stretching a few pound and picking up the 970 would be a good call. It's a massive upgrade over the 960.

superfish

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Sorry I had it in my head that your budget was 500, not 400 pounds when I wrote that. Sorry about that. If you swap the i5-4460 for the i3-4170, and swap the GTX970 for the GTX960, it will be around 400 pounds if you take out the case if you're going to use that CiT one. And it will still be an excellent performer and all current games will run a lot better than they do on the XB1.

It's a good call throwing away that PSU as a bad case isn't going to make or break your system, but a cheap low quality PSU puts everything at risk. It's a '500w' but realistically it's really probably about a somewhat reliable 200w and not designed for anything remotely close to 500w, it would blow up if you tried to run anything over 300w on it.

There was a guy on here a good few years ago used to make a lot of custom PC's, at one stage his main PC was built into a cardboard box.

lmfao that's so cool can just imagine telling your mates your pc is better than xbox one and its made from a cardboard box lol, just out of curiosity have you tried steam os ? and is it any good I have copys of windows xp,7,8.1, and 10 and am thinking ill use 8.1 unless steam is better for some reason ?

Digital Solitude

There aren't very many games on SteamOS compared with Windows, its the reason I'm still using Windows, although I do really like W10.

I'd say keep with W8.1 or 10 for now

superfish

Digital Solitude wrote: »

There aren't very many games on SteamOS compared with Windows, its the reason I'm still using Windows, although I do really like W10.

I'd say keep with W8.1 or 10 for now

I will do I love 8.1 so think ill stick with that I have a few games saved on my laptop one being the long dark and my laptop is so crap it wont play it lol so cant wait to get pc gaming Ive always been a console gamer but sine I got the xbox one ive been very disappointed the graphics look the exact same as the last gen consoles and the games are a rip off hence why ive decided to start pc gaming

Digital Solitude

Recommend using isthereanydeal.com and setting up a wishlist, say what price you're willing to pay for a game and they'll email you when it's below that. Games are dirt cheap

superfish

Digital Solitude wrote: »

Recommend using isthereanydeal.com and setting up a wishlist, say what price you're willing to pay for a game and they'll email you when it's below that. Games are dirt cheap

sweet ill do that (defo wont be using torrent sites for free games :rolleyes: lol) and finally no more paying for xbox live to play online

superfish

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/INTEL-Core-i3-4170-3-7Ghz-ASUS-H81M-PLUS-Motherboard-CPU-Bundle-/121180333748?hash=item1c36e926b4

just about to buy this