£1000 Budget PC

[Jonnywb]

OK, so I've set myself a budget of around £1000. I might extend that at some point.

I'm looking at Intel, as it seems like it's the only option, since AMD are falling behind (which is a pain in the ass, as i have an AM3+ motherboard just lying around at the moment).

I know ivy bridge is coming out (hopefully) soon, so I'm thinking of waiting for that, but I thought that this would be a good idea to research for now as I've not kept myself up to date with all the newest hardware etc.

I have no preference between AMD or nVidia graphics.

It'd be great to have the ability for SLi/Crossfire, so I have the option to boost my graphics later on if I need to.

It'd be nice to have a colour theme of red/black if I could... but it's really not that necessary... Performance is key.

What I already have:

A 120GB SSD and 3 or 4 HDDs.(so no need for storage)

A Coolermaster 600M Silent Pro (600W - not sure if i'll need to upgrade this or not).

A few sound cards / audio interfaces.

Mouse/keyboard/earphones/speakers etc.

A Monitor/Screen

It's not really going to be used for just one thing. I'll be using it for some photography, some video editing, some gaming etc.

I've never overclocked before (not properly anyway), but I'd love to learn if it means that I can get improved performance...

...and I don't mind what cooling it would use.

Things like the Cooling, RAM and the PSU could always be upgraded at a later point when I have more money. So, for example, I could go for 8GB of RAM now, and then upgrade to 16GB later on.

So... If you've got time, it'd be great to hear some suggestions! I'm gonna go and look around and come up with (what looks like) the best rig I can do for this money... but It'd be interesting to hear what you guys think.

Cheers!

 

[Joshct]

I'm doing a build on a very similar budget, since you have storage/power supply you can probably go higher than what i am but basically if you want a starting point my build for 1.1k is going to be:

Corsair 600T SE case

Gigabyte z68xp-ud3p Mobo

Intel i5-2500k

Gigabyte Geforce GTX 570 OC

Either Alpenfohn K2 or Noctua Nh-d14 cpu cooler

8GB low profile corsair vengeance

XFX 850W XXX Edition Modular '80 plus silver' PSU

Seagate barracuda 1TB

Windows 7 home premium retail.

The power supply is so i can add a second 570 later, but if you were to look at Case, mobo, CPU, cooling, Ram and GPU it would be roughly £800, so you could easily upgrade to a 580 within budget for example. Or even wait and see prices on the nvidia kepler cards.

 

[Jonnywb]

I'm doing a build on a very similar budget, since you have storage/power supply you can probably go higher than what i am but basically if you want a starting point my build for 1.1k is going to be:

Corsair 600T SE case

Gigabyte z68xp-ud3p Mobo

Intel i5-2500k

Gigabyte Geforce GTX 570 OC

Either Alpenfohn K2 or Noctua Nh-d14 cpu cooler

8GB low profile corsair vengeance

XFX 850W XXX Edition Modular '80 plus silver' PSU

Seagate barracuda 1TB

Windows 7 home premium retail.

The power supply is so i can add a second 570 later, but if you were to look at Case, mobo, CPU, cooling, Ram and GPU it would be roughly £800, so you could easily upgrade to a 580 within budget for example. Or even wait and see prices on the nvidia kepler cards.

I'm thinking that I might go for a more powerful CPU rather than the GPU... but I haven't decided yet; I think I need to make a better decision about what I'll be using it for!

That looks like a nice list for me to start looking through though, so thanks!

 

[Joshct]

the i7-2600k is about £60 more, and wont help really with gaming, but will for encoding videos.