My PC Build £300-£350 budget

Hello people, i'm going to build a pc in december with a budget of about £300
i've been looking around and the things that i have seen are at a good price

CPU: £77.81 AMD Phenom II X4 840, Propus Core, S AM3, 3.2GHz, 2MB Cache, HT 2000MHz, 95W, Retail
Motherboard: £59.84 MSI 870A-G46 AMD Unlocked CPU AM3 Motherboard
Power Supply: £45.04 BeQuiet Pure Power L7 530W Power Supply BN106
RAM: £19.04 Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz Memory Kit Unbuffered CL9
GPU: £50.00 GeForce GTX 260
CD/DVD Drive: £12.47 Sony Optical DVD-ROM, DDU1681S-0B, SATA, OEM
Card Reader: £10.74 Akasa BayMaster Card & Drive Reader
Case: £17.75 CiT 2206B Piano Black Midi Case
HDD: 160GB SATA, don't know when to buy since prices are so high

Any additions feel free
this computer will be used to play games such a Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3

The gtx260 is a bit old now, however it still works fine on most games at 1680x1050 resolution and you not be able to buy a current generation card fr that much which will be half as good.
(ps I'm assuming you're looking at 2nd hand because of the age of the card and the price)

If you are willing to go the 2nd hand route have a look at the prices of the 5770 which was slightly better and is a dx11 card.
nvidia cards seem to hold 2nd prices better than ati (ie ati are cheaper 2nd hand)

I would trim some fat on the mobo and CPU and spend on gfx instead:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-on-board-micr £53

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-a...mhz-95w-retail £60

Then I would stretch to the best gfx card you can for the monitor you have.....what resolution do you game at btw?

well the reason i was looking at the phenom and not Athlon was because i really didn't want to bottleneck with cpu and gpu.

thanks for the help and i will take your options into concideration

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shaithis

I would trim some fat on the mobo and CPU and spend on gfx instead:



Then I would stretch to the best gfx card you can for the monitor you have.....what resolution do you game at btw?

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Umm the Phenom II X4 840 is not actually a phenomII x4 it's a slightly faster AthlonII x4

I do agree with shaithis in general on spending on the gpu, however on this tight a budget you'll find it hard.
Resolution is an issue, I'll admit I've not tried Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 on my pc so I cannot tell you what those games will be like, but Dead Island is pretty smooth on my gtx260 @ 1680x1050, anything below that res and you'd be fine on a gtx260
I did a double check the gtx260 216steam version was the same performance level as the 5770 (the older gtx260 192stream version was below the 5770)
You'd have to jump up to the 6850 at least to get better performance @ around £110 http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-x...layport-2x-dvi it's nearly double the price for about a 20% performance gain.
A 6870 or gtx560 (non-ti) would be better about +40% performance, but then you're looking at around £140-150 so 3 times the cost and nearly half the budget.

to save some time and money i've been looking at ready build pc's which can also be upgraded, here is the one i'm most interested in, http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/b.../bb-8504a.html

The Novatech you're interested in does not show what motherboard and PSU are used. If you need USB3 or overclocking then you would be better off buying something else, I would not get the Novatech due to not knowing how good the PSU is.

well i did find another one which looks preety decent http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/b.../bb-8504n.html

Do you have a copy of Windows already??

If you do I would look at the £350 build in the guide:

http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware/...er-2011-a.html

With the £75 to £85 saved on the Windows license I would get at least an HD6770:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-m...ual-link-dvi-i

I would also get at least this Antec 400W PSU:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/400w-...et-fan-atx-v23

If you intend to do a bigger upgrade a few years later I might get this PSU instead:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/550w-...s-12v-queit-fa

However,the Antec 400W would be fine with an HD6850 1GB or even an HD6870 1GB.

Regarding a hard drive I would suggest getting an SSD. You can get a 120GB SSD for around £100:
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/120g...vatech-1047757

A hard drive is still cheaper at the inflated prices,but I would rather get a cheaper SSD now and get a hard drive next year when the prices have fallen.

With Windows 7 installed you should have around 90GB to 95GB free on a formatted 120GB SSD.

I'm probably going to upgrade the psu and gpu later next year if I were to get the pc from novatech

I am defo going to build my pc i've figured it all out that its cheaper to just build than to but all in one nd add a hdd

For a budget of £300, it's decent, though don't expect to play at Ultra settings in BF3 with the GTX 260 :)

yea i kno that i wont be able to play in ultra but for now the gtx 260 is just going to be temp until sometime next year when i got some money to upgrade