First build

[BloodAlchemist]

Hey guys this is my first build and it is gonna mainly be used for gaming. i have a £750 budget.
here are my parts so far

8GB Corsair DDR3 Vengeance
1TB Seagate ST1000DM003 Barracuda
Fractal Design ARC MIDI R2
Intel Core i5 4670
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H
650W Seasonic M1211-650W
2GB MSI GTX670

This totals upto about £749. What do you guys think?

 

[Feronix]

Welcome to the forums dude!

Looks pretty good but I'd change a few things around.

- Swap out the Seagate drive for a WD Caviar Blue. Not saying Seagate are terrible drives but they are the brand that I hear most complaints about. Would personally much rather go with a respectable brand like Western Digital.

- Why a non-overclockable CPU with an overclock motherboard? The K versions of processor are usually not much more, but they do come with an unlocked multiplier so you can set the clockspeeds a little higher (in the future maybe).

- That's a good board and will definitely do everything you want from it. Just a tip though, for a tenner more you can get an MSI G45 Gaming which features a better audio and ethernet solution. Either will be fine for you though



Then two things I'd really recommend you, even though I know it's going to push you over your budget.

The first one being a proper CPU cooler. Surely the CPU comes with a stock cooler but that one's not ehm... very good (especially since Haswell tends to run hot) and a bit noisy. You don't need a high-end cooler but a personal favorite of mine, and a lot of people on this forum, is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo. It's a really good cooler, especially for the price and it will keep things cool and quiet.

The second one is an SSD. It doesn't have to be a big one, just 60GB will be enough for the OS and some apps, but the speeds you get from that thing beats any CPU or RAM upgrade you could get. In my personal opinion, an SSD must be in any modern gaming PC

 

[Mathius]

Looking good....

but I just ran prices........ I make it £17 cheaper. (£732.76)

Blue Corsair Vengence 2x4gb are CAS 8 which is a big bonus.


Bare in mind, you can get a Radeon 7950 which is a 3GB vram, for slightly cheaper, chance of bundled games, and overclocks pretty darn well.

 

[Willock]

- Swap out the Seagate drive for a WD Caviar Blue. Not saying Seagate are terrible drives but they are the brand that I hear most complaints about. Would personally much rather go with a respectable brand like Western Digital.

I have to object to that, I have had BOTH WD and Seagate, and I've found no difference with the two. I have had to RMA one of my Seagate drives before, but they make it super easy, you just fill in a form online, print off the postage label and send it off to them, and within a week or two you'll get a refurbished drive back.
I can't say how WD do it but I've been a customer of Seagate for a long time and can't say a bad word against them.

Other than that, I agree an SSD is a must, DO get a K-Series if you can help it, and even if you don't you'll need a better cooler just to keep temps down purely for the longevity of your CPU if nothing else.

Bare in mind, you can get a Radeon 7950 which is a 3GB vram, for slightly cheaper, chance of bundled games, and overclocks pretty darn well.

This, but also keep in mind next month AMD are releasing their next gen cards. At your price range, its going to be the R9 270X, which is only 2GB not 3GB, and will probably be the same price, but we don't know until it drops what its going to be like.

But yeah, even though I am an NVIDIA lover, I can't recommend them at your price point, AMD give you alot more bang for your buck.

 

[Wraith]

Got to admit you have a great selection there, but I'm with Feronix on the hard drive definitely go with WD not seagate.

 

[NeverBackDown]

I would advise against a GPU at the moment. Wait for that and see how the newer AMD R9/R7 series will perform on release. If anything you save money doing this, newer cards will drive prices down on older cards and if they are not that much better then you can get an older card for less and possibly SLI/Xfire. I only recommend waiting simply because they are supposed to be released by end of OCT(rumors at least).