Sub 450 GBP gaming PC build log!

[Bonebreaker777]

Sorry I meant the system base.

G3220 (£40) + H81M-H (£35) < X4 860K (£54) + GA-F2A58M-HD2 (£30)

The later would've provided a lot more muscle for the future I would say, plus the option to overclock (even with the BOX cooler). Maybe even would go as far as suggest a dual-core Richland (A6-6400K £36) and overclock it.

The GPU is good. Recently purchased one (XFX 2GB). Max overclock on stock voltage, both core and memory, auto FAN speed and temp never higher that 69 degrees (even after 12h FurMark).

[MrRockliffe]

I did look at that route but as this computer will need to last a few years, even if I put a cheap i5 in it when Haswell drops in price, I can get much better performance for less over the next few years as I won't have to replace the motherboard and that also saves me the hassle of installing windows again.

That's something I must add - bought an SSD for my computer and there isn't a noticeable improvement performance over a hard drive. Boot ups are the same and so is opening apps. Honestly a waste of money. My opinion will remain - great for laptops but not needed on a desktop.

[Bonebreaker777]

...even if I put a cheap i5 in it when Haswell drops in price...

Well, good luck with that. I mean when I purchased my i5 Ivy Bridge (to replace an i5-2400 Sandy Bridge) costed me a good £20 less that they are selling for right now.

[MrRockliffe]

I originally bought an i3 over an FX 4300 because I knew I'd be able to upgrade it in the future. I purchased my current 3470 for 80 pounds second hand at it has worked flawlessly since. Sold my i3 for 50 ish so I got a good deal. I'll do the same with this system.

[Biscuit]

I did look at that route but as this computer will need to last a few years, even if I put a cheap i5 in it when Haswell drops in price, I can get much better performance for less over the next few years as I won't have to replace the motherboard and that also saves me the hassle of installing windows again.

Second hand you might get something good and cheap, but i have noticed that there isn't actually a lot of old parts circulating, and if they are they hardly cheaper. Intel isnt pushing the performance all that much at the moment so there isn't a lot of reason for people to upgrade.

That's something I must add - bought an SSD for my computer and there isn't a noticeable improvement performance over a hard drive. Boot ups are the same and so is opening apps. Honestly a waste of money. My opinion will remain - great for laptops but not needed on a desktop.

What SSD did you buy? I barely use hard drives anywhere now because they are just so slow it drives me nuts.

I originally bought an i3 over an FX 4300 because I knew I'd be able to upgrade it in the future. I purchased my current 3470 for 80 pounds second hand at it has worked flawlessly since. Sold my i3 for 50 ish so I got a good deal. I'll do the same with this system.

The AM3+ platform is a bit long in the tooth so vs an LGA socket from Intel in that scenario has some is sense in it. The FM2+ seems to be the one AMD are going to be sticking with for the more mainstream chips so I would say its a safer bet of being able to get an up to date chip for that board.

But its done now

[MrRockliffe]

I bought a HyperX 120 GB SSD. I've not used the system a lot at all, but boot up is as quick as my half filled 1TB hdd (but then I do clean the disk a lot and keep it healthy and manage start up apps a lot). One thing I did notice is that apps install much quicker - when it kicked me into Windows after installing, apps hadn't installed yet (normally it takes half hour on a hard drive where as after installing it was ready to use in minutes on the SSD).

I've got an SSD on my laptop and haven't felt the need to buy and SSD, but it was a lightning deal and impulse buying etc...

[Ulti]

Nice build there. I think you did pretty well for the price. I tried to do something similar with a mix of brand new and second hand parts as it was a machine for my gf but it still cost around £400 for the PC without a monitor, OS or peripherals with similar hardware.

I chose a Pentium G3258 as I wanted it to try OCing again along with a GTX 750 Ti on an ITX platform. The parts I chose weren't the best VFM but I was mainly interested in low heat (=> low noise) in a small package.

Like you, I chose a Pentium as we don't play the latest games, just some casual gaming and tbh, I think spending the extra £50+ on the graphics would increase the FPS more than by spending it on the CPU.

Nice choice on the OPO, I myself have a Xiaomi Mi4 and I do love it. The recent sales on the LG G3 and HTC M8 I've seen on HUKD for under £300 make it less of a deal but surprisingly enough, I find I like MIUI more than the stock android system on the LG or HTC, and especially more so than the Samsung's horrible TouchWiz.

I've ordered a IUNI U2 for my younger bro for his xmas present which is shipping from China too. Snapdragon 800, 1080p screen and 2GB RAM for £120 was a pretty good buy IMO. Only thing is there's not a whole lot of support for the IUNIs unlike the Xiaomi and OPO phones.

Anyway, back onto topic, I'm surprised you don't find the SSD that big of a change. I agree with you that a fresh W8 system is pretty fast, but I find that an SSD improves the overall responsiveness of a machine by quite a bit in the long run. They're also not too expensive nowadays so I think for self builds they're pretty much a must buy now unless you're building for someone who does a lot of downloading and isn't good with file management.

I replaced HDDS with SSDs in my whole house now; parent's machine is just used for basic accounting, web browsing and streaming and their machine has run fine with a 120GB SSD (NUC with the i3 3217U and 4GB RAM) for quite a bit of time now. My sister (18) has had her laptop (Pentium B960 and 4GB RAM) also with a 120GB SSD in it, but I had a quick look at it the other day and there was less than 10GB free! I cleared up all the temporary files and somehow that managed to clear over 50GB and now it's just over half full - I'm not sure how she managed to rack up so many temp files as all she does is mainly her coursework, browse, stream and social media. My brother (12) on the other hand, is more savvy so I thought he'd be fine with a 120GB SSD too even though he games but it seems games take up a ton of storage now. Some of the games he plays is around 20GB! Within a week it was already almost full so I had to sell his SSD back out and I grabbed him a 240GB which he has managed fine with for a couple of months now as he does uninstall things that he doesn't play. His machine had a Celeron G530, HD7850 1GB, a very old Samsung F1 500GB HDD and 4GB RAM but he said the machine was freezing a bit in some games so I looked at his machine and found out he didn't have enough RAM and so I upgraded to 8GB RAM and also added a SSD as he's on W7 and it seems to be a bit slower than W8 on a HDD. Just these two upgrades made his machine fast again and now it doesn't struggle with anything.

Sorry for the long winded post.

Tl;dr: 120GB SSD is enough for people who don't do much, 240GB is probably needed for people who are on a lot or play games or don't know how to manage a drive. Celeron/Pentium CPUs are enough for gaming, spending the money on a GPU is probably better. 4GB RAM is also enough for every day use but 8GB might be needed in the future.

All in all, I think the machine you built fits your needs perfectly, well done on that.

EDIT: Oh and thanks for the photos!