£600 build - any changes?

Davva2004

New member
Hi all,

Friend has asked me to build him a gaming rig for Xmas, budget is £600 and not a penny more, already has peripherals and single 1080p monitor. He's an Intel / Nvidia fan so that rules out any AMD kit. I'll be applying an aggressive OC to the CPU to gain any free performance I can, hence the cooler.

My proposed build:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor (£49.14 @ Aria PC) - 4.5ghz overclock
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£23.54 @ CCL Computers)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H81M-H Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£33.35 @ Aria PC)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport XT 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£57.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Sandisk Solid State Drive 128GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£42.99 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Toshiba 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£37.60 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card (£239.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Aerocool DS Cube Black Edition Silent Cube MicroATX Mini Tower Case (£59.53 @ CCL Computers) - non negotiable, he loves it in orange and black
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£44.99 @ Amazon UK) - estimated system wattage is 300W
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer (£9.98 @ Scan.co.uk) - yeah, I know, but he wants one.
Total: £599.10
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-11-27 23:47 GMT+0000

Anything in there that screams out "CHANGE ME!?!?!?"
 
Wow, demands Intel and nVidia on a £600 budget.

Personally if someone wanted me to build them Intel and Nvidia for £600 then I'd:

Get Corsair memory for the same price, better customer support.
GTX 970 in Aria for £30 less (-£30)
Swap out the SSD HDD combo and ger 1TB SSHD for (-£27)
Then swap the G3258 for a i3 4330 OR get a Z97 board for the Pentium.

I wouldn't overclock the G3258 on a cheap board unless you want something to die in 6 months. If you want to overclock the G3258 chip to be near on par with an i3 4330 you are going to need a Z97 series motherboard to reach 4.5-4.6GHz safely.

Where as a stock i3 4330 will be perfect on a cheap H or B series motherboard and will still out perform the clocked G3258 on a Z97 by around 10% overall (and that's assuming you get a good chip).

Just please do not get the G3258 without a decent board, if you do, post pics of white smoke ina few months :p :p :p

Edit: GPU is no longer available at that price.
 
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Cheers mate, took your advice and specced an i3 4160, dropped the cooler and ssd and specced a 1tb hybrid drive.

£3 over budget, he'll just have to miss out on a pint!
 
Considering some games have troubles with two cores I'd go for atleast an i5 4460
-edit-
This is my attempt:
PCPartPicker part list: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/MmPJRB
Price breakdown by merchant: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/MmPJRB/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (£130.94 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo 43.1 CFM CPU Cooler (£15.98 @ Scan.co.uk)
Motherboard: MSI H97M-E35 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£57.56 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport XT 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£57.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£39.95 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£39.99 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Palit GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB StormX OC Video Card (£103.47 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design Core 1100 MicroATX Mini Tower Case (£28.64 @ Ebuyer)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 500W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£48.19 @ Amazon UK)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 (OEM) (64-bit) (£72.35 @ Aria PC)
Total: £595.06
While the GPU isn't balls to the wall fast I thought it'd be best to go for a more powerful processor over something that can be easily upgraded.
 
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Considering some games have troubles with two cores I'd go for atleast an i5 4460.
+1 sorry, I forgot to mention this, a few games stutter because they struggle on 2 cores.

Also here's a chart, the i3 will be fine for 1080p

Intel-Pentium-bf4.jpg
 
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