So I foolishly bought a cheap graphics card and now need to put together a budget rig for the other half. She's got a few-year-old all-in-one and it isn't too happy with the likes of Left for Dead 2 let alone anything cutting edge.
I've got myself a srubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishy looking R7870 from the classifieds, and have a m-atx case, hdd and 500W PSU kicking around and extra DDR3 RAM I can steal from my machine so I'm just short a CPU and motherboard. Money is tight so I've set aside £100 for the pair. Not interested in overclocking, I need something out of the box that works rather than needing fiddle time.
So, the best options so far seem to be:
- AMD Athlon II X4 860K FM2+ 3.7GHz 4MB Black Edition, and some FM2+ motherboard (A88X chipsets seem to start at £40)
- Some Pentium Intel Dual Core (stretch to a G3440?) and a hopefully a B85 based motherboard (or H81 if the processor is the more expensive of the dual cores).
i3s and 6 core AMD-FX chips seem to be out of reach. The other option is uber low spec AM1 CPU and motherboard for £60, though I'm not sure at what point the CPU will become a bottleneck and by how much. Aiming for 1080p.
Opinions from the cost-concious Hexites please