£500 build for a friend

R

RadeonHDx

New member
So I know I've already done a thread about a build for a friend, his laptop just broke so his build log should be coming soon.

The £500 is his absolute max he can spend, as I have already brought up the budget from £400. I'll start off with what I've found. He told me that he will be using this as a gaming rig for mainly Planetside 2 (He told me it is a very CPU intensive game) so this is what I found: (Amazon is he cheapest overall)
AMD FX-8320 £137
Powercolor HD 7790 1GB £118
1x 8GB Kingston ValueRAM 1333Mhz £27
Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 970 £56
Corsair CX 430w £38
1TB Seagate Drive £50
BitFenix Merc Beta Midi £33

TOTAL: 459.80

I've left him 40 quid for a decent air cooler.
Thanks and any suggestions are welcomed! REMEMBER! This is a budget build and £500 is his max!
 
i would say get the 650ti boost over the 7790 fella but other than that its a nice set up
 
Had another look and seen that i could grab a 2GB 7850 for £140 still keeping under budget so he can get himself a new mouse
 
I personally think the GPU needs to go up a bit. A cooler isn't entirely necessary, but if so I wouldn't say spend any more than £25. I'd downgrade the CPU to a 6300. 8gigs is a bit too much, I'd say go for 4gigs, but maybe have 1600mhz rather than 1333 to some what compensate, kinda.

Then go for a 7850, you could even just squeeze a 7870.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. My friend has told me that he wants a monitor included, so that drops me back to where I started at £400. So far on the budget I've got a 7770 for £88 and a FX 4300 for £96. Should I tell him to get a 760 motherboard? I only say this so I can upgrade the graphics or the CPU to a 6300, opinions please.
 
how about Windows, speakers, Keyboard+Mouse... These 3 (4) on their own can be had for under £100.

Monitor - I picked up a Samsung 22' 1680*1050 in almost new condition via a nearest first ebay search - £35 (ok, I had to drive 10 miles but still)
 
RadeonHDx said:
Thanks for the suggestions. My friend has told me that he wants a monitor included, so that drops me back to where I started at £400. So far on the budget I've got a 7770 for £88 and a FX 4300 for £96. Should I tell him to get a 760 motherboard? I only say this so I can upgrade the graphics or the CPU to a 6300, opinions please.
Click to expand...

i have parts i need to sell if you are interested including an amd 970fxa motherboard
 
For windows I'm just putting the service pack on for him and as for the monitor, you can get a nice new 1080p 24" monitor relatively cheap these days. Would you recommend using a 760G board though if hes on a budget and has no need to overclock past what i can squeze out of it at stock volts?
 
Amazon build -

Atrix MD-001B Midi Tower Case - Black - Atrix
£19.75 - Ugly but the Merc would have pushed it over the budget by 10 pounds

MSI 2GB nVidia GTX 650Ti Boost Edition PCI-E Graphics Card - MSI COMPUTER
£148.00 - Best bang for buck in the budget sector

Corsair Builder Series CXM 500W Modular 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX/EPS PSU - Corsair
£49.99 - Bare minimum for any build i think.

Corsair CMZ4GX3M1A1600C9 4GB 1600MHz CL9 DDR3 Vengeance Memory Module - Corsair
£27.42 - put in another 4gb later on if he needs it

MSI FM2-A55M-E33 AMD FM2 Micro ATX Motherboard - MSI COMPUTER
£42.10 - good basic little board, that has decent overclocking options

AMD A8 5600K Black Edition CPU (3.6GHZ, 4MB Cache, 4 Core, HD6570, Socket FM2, 100W, Retail Boxed) - AMD
£78.70 - excellent budget chip. very overclockable as well.

Samsung 840 Series 120GB 2.5 inch SATA Solid State Drive - Samsung
£84.95 - no system should be without an ssd

Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATAIII 6Gb/s 16MB Cache 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive OEM - Western Digital
£44.90 - dirt cheap hdd for everything else.

Total = £495.81
 
Deejeta said:
Amazon build -

Atrix MD-001B Midi Tower Case - Black - Atrix
£19.75 - Ugly but the Merc would have pushed it over the budget by 10 pounds

MSI 2GB nVidia GTX 650Ti Boost Edition PCI-E Graphics Card - MSI COMPUTER
£148.00 - Best bang for buck in the budget sector

Corsair Builder Series CXM 500W Modular 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX/EPS PSU - Corsair
£49.99 - Bare minimum for any build i think.

Corsair CMZ4GX3M1A1600C9 4GB 1600MHz CL9 DDR3 Vengeance Memory Module - Corsair
£27.42 - put in another 4gb later on if he needs it

MSI FM2-A55M-E33 AMD FM2 Micro ATX Motherboard - MSI COMPUTER
£42.10 - good basic little board, that has decent overclocking options

AMD A8 5600K Black Edition CPU (3.6GHZ, 4MB Cache, 4 Core, HD6570, Socket FM2, 100W, Retail Boxed) - AMD
£78.70 - excellent budget chip. very overclockable as well.

Samsung 840 Series 120GB 2.5 inch SATA Solid State Drive - Samsung
£84.95 - no system should be without an ssd

Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATAIII 6Gb/s 16MB Cache 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive OEM - Western Digital
£44.90 - dirt cheap hdd for everything else.

Total = £495.81
Click to expand...

apu and nvidia gpu? why would you do that?
 
could easily swap it out for a 7850 as they are the same price and similar performance. one does not need to match gpu vendor to cpu/apu vendor.
if the budget had allowed to go even £50 more i would change it to a 3470 ivy setup.
 
oh lawd alarm lights just went on. AMD cpus work terribly with PS2, you need to put an Intel CPU in. the game depends on singlethreading a lot and it is horribly optimized for AMD, his framerate will be horrendous.
 
SeekaX said:
oh lawd alarm lights just went on. AMD cpus work terribly with PS2, you need to put an Intel CPU in. the game depends on singlethreading a lot and it is horribly optimized for AMD, his framerate will be horrendous.
Click to expand...

This. Saw a few guys on here talking about getting a max of 20 ish fps no matter what settings in ps2. I'd check that out before he gets it.
 
SavageCupcake said:
This. Saw a few guys on here talking about getting a max of 20 ish fps no matter what settings in ps2. I'd check that out before he gets it.
Click to expand...
yea that was me, but i ain't the only one and the other guy was using an fx-6100 i think and he had the same problems.
never seen a game being that terribly optimized for AMD.
 
I'm yet to try ps2 on my new rig but as there does seem to be poor performance with the fx-6100/fx-4100s in game. However, there is a definite improvement with the 6300 (not found much about 4300) so you might want to check that out.

If you'd want to go the blue route instead, I'd recommend getting an i3-3220. While it doesn't perform as well as an i5 it'll give you more flexibility with the 'card (depending on other choices you could stretch to a 7870 xt). I have first hand experience with ps2 on i3 (my old rig was a i3-550 with a 7870) and it had good performance on high settings and in the future your friend could get an i5/i7 if they feel like it.
 
He said that he wanted a monitor as well for the £500 so the rig its self will have to cost ~£400. I realize that this is a laughable idea to think that he could get something capable of running games on high etc. but he wants the best performance for his limited budget.

I will have another look over the blue side and see what i can gather up from that. Thanks so far guys!

EDIT: What I've found from amazon (cheapest)
i3 3220 £93
HD7790 £120
MSI H61 motherboard £35
8gb ram £27
CX430 £38
Fractal Core 1000 case £30
1TB HDD £50
 
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