Cheap and quick Gaming bundle build? Any suggestions?

[subucni]

Hi, Have a friend who has come home to visit and sprung the idea of needing a PC upgrade and preferably ordered and built within the week.

Have chucked together something without too much research, any suggestions?
Have made sure to chuck in an SSD, Went with the MX200 as Scan seem to have the Samsung Evos expensive.

His budget was about £650 with possibility of a little more. Have left room for case, psu and OS but these may not be needed as can salvage from old build.

He's very unlikely to overclock so haven't gone for the 4690K to save a little money, unless you think it's worth it?

Biggest thing I'm not to sure about is which Graphics card is best at the moment for his price range, GTX 960.... R9 380? What would you guys recommend?

Skylake worth investing in now for ddr4 etc?

Any other recommendations, or mistakes, please let me know. Bit of a rushed post as got to head to work, will check in later. Hopefully I've not forgotten anything.

[Bluecube]

Do you really need 16Gb of memory? I reckon everyone would be happy with 8Gb.

What size and brand of PSU will be salvaged? Knowing this will determine what graphics card can be used. I can't see anything wrong with the 960 especially if it'll just be 1080p gaming.

[subucni]

Sorry. I should have mentioned that. Was in a rush. It's a 500-600 watt Corsair one I picked out for him a couple years back when his died so it should be fine for most. Can't remember exact model though.

As for ram. You're right but just figured was worth passing the extra 20 to stop him needing to upgrade later. But. Yeah 8gb would do fine.

[EndlessWaves]

I'd personally avoid the cheap Z97 boards as you're paying an awful lot for not very much. A good B85 board will have more features and capabilities for £10 less. Some people feel the build quality is likely to be a bit better but given everything else is cut to the bone and even the others major selling feature of Z97 (8x/8x split nVidia demands for SLI, Intel RST M.2 slot) are missing that seems like wishful thinking to me.

Ditto on the SSDs. it's hard to find a concrete argument for paying £5-10 extra for a fancier model like the MX200.

Card-wise go for the 4GB versions at that price. With a big ATX Motherboard, correspondingly large case and huge power supply I'd go AMD. They're not as power efficient but they offer better performance for the money.

I don't see mention of case fans, unless his old ones had high quality bearings they might be a little noisy by now.

Skylake & Z170 does add a lot of motherboard features but it is quite a price hike, even more so if you want to use them right now for things like an M.2 SSD (e.g. SM951) instead of a 2.5" SATA one. It's worth looking at broadwell though if he wants the fastest chip in his budget, the i5-5675C is a good chip for gaming.

[lankeyphil]

Depending on salvage able you could defo go skylake

Get an asus pro gamer board
I5 6600
8gb ddr4
Frezer pro 7 v2 (6600 doesn't come with fan)

Depending on salvage that should leave room for a 970 card

[subucni]

Cheers for the info, just got home. Did some digging, turns out the psu he went with was a VX450w So now a little unsure about if it'll handle it all. What do you reckon?

As for the ram, we completely forgot about the fact he has 2x2gb sticks of DDR3 in his current build too so that and a 8gb kit would save him £30 too.

We just had a look at the 4gb cards and Scan have the 4gb Gigabyte Windforce card at just about £9 more than the 2gb EVGA SSC, but slightly less clocked. I assume you'd take the Gigabyte over the EVGA? I haven't really looked at the AMD cards to compare yet, anything in the £175-ish price range you'd pick over the Gigabyte?


We're both still completely unsure which Mobo to go for, but as you said, the only main differences is connectivity options at that price. so there may still be some savings to have there.

Did notice that he could have the i5 4690k for about an extra £10 plus postage from Aria. Worth the extra?

So still with the same CPU and Mobo for the time being, the updated price is looking like this



Which leaves him room for any suggestions you have, a PSU if you think he'll need one, and a new case (may have an Aero Cool DS200 we can pick up for £30 tomorrow). And should probably get him a CPU cooler.


Cheers for all the advice.

[subucni]

I was typing out my last reply while you posted, He has a Xigmatek Asgard case that his old system is in, A Corsair VX450w psu, and Sata DVD drive that could all be salvaged along with his HDD to be used as a storage drive.

As far as I can see the things he'll need

CPU
MoBo
RAM
GPU
SSD

I'll try pricing all that up in a minute, but I can't see him being able to get an SSD and be within budget. Will have to see how much it pushes him over.

[lankeyphil]

For the above you could get it all under 500 but yeah I'd go under for haswell.
Could be worth checking scsn value bundles.
If your gonna go SSD then I'd get a half decent moBo. Don't bother with crap ones there should be some good gamer z97's available at the moment

[subucni]

Yeah, you're quite right, we could get some of that stuff a little cheaper but unfortunately we don't really have the luxury of time to wait for stuff to arrive, hence trying to get it all from one place.

I'm just having a look at boards now, Any you'd recommend? Did just see this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-plus-free-cer which may be tempting to him, I think he mentioned looking at a new headset the other day.
Would give him SATAe and M.2 support.

Speaking of M.2, Is there any benefits using that over SATA3 for SSD other than being cableless?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The R9 380 is faster than the GTX960 but consumes some more power.

Although a 450W PSU is more than enough to run a R9 380(or even a higher end card fine),the Corsair VX450W is pretty old now,I suppose the GTX960 will tax it less.

[subucni]

Cheers Cat, any thoughts on that motherboard and going M.2 over SSD? Just noticed the SSD is on pre-order and the M.2 is in stock at £3 more. Just an SSD would be easier to say would be compatible with whatever future upgrades he'd get down the line. Or is M.2 looking like it's here to stay?

Also would he get away with the stock heat sink for the time being?

[EndlessWaves]

I'm just having a look at boards now, Any you'd recommend? Did just see this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...-plus-free-cer which may be tempting to him, I think he mentioned looking at a new headset the other day.
Would give him SATAe and M.2 support.

£20 set of headphones and SATA Express is a dud. The U.2 (SFF-8639) connector Intel's 750 uses is a more likely bet for PCI-Express 2.5" drives. The M.2 support appears to be only a PCI-E 2.0 2x one rather than the 3.0 4x one that Skylake and everything else will have with quadruple the bandwidth. It also disables both PCI-E 1x slots when you use it.

If you're going to spend £100 on a motherboard for feature support then go Skylake, Z170 is much improved over Z97. Otherwise I'd be looking at a sensible mid-range B85 board for £45-55 depending on whether you want stuff like an M.2 socket.

The only M.2 SSD worth going for in it's own right is the SM951 and that's twice the price. Anything that's £3 more is likely to use the SATA connections on the M.2 connector so should perform identically to the 2.5" version.

Also would he get away with the stock heat sink for the time being?

Obviously it cools the chip just fine but if he wants a particularly quiet computer he might need a replacement cooler.

[subucni]

I forgot to get back to you guys, Cheers for all the help. Got him ordered on the Wednesday (whilst at the Zoo) and built before Saturday afternoon.