the_weegie
New member
Hi all. Firstly, thanks for taking the time to read this and maybe offer some advice.
So I'll fill in the questionnaire from the sticky first:
• Where are you located?
- Glasgow, Scotland.
• What is your budget?
- circa £500.
• Will you need a monitor, keyboard, and/or mouse included in that budget?
- not a monitor, if possible a wireless keyboard/mouse/gamepad but not essential.
• Shall you be requiring an OS?
- nope, have a copy of Win 7 x64 Ultimate for it.
• What will you be using this rig for?
- this will be an htpc located in my little sister's new flat living room (xmas/flatwarming present) to play dvd/bluray, games (at least as good as PS4/XBox One), media/music server and normal internet browsing. Please note that I'd like this to hopefully play modern games for a few years.
• If gaming, what resolution will you be playing at?
- say 1920 x 1080 on a 32" tv from a distance of about 6 feet.
• Will you be overclocking?
- I can if the parts allow it.
• Do you need a full build or will you be reusing some old parts?
- full build except mechanical hard disks as I've got loads lying around and I also have a DVD writer (yes I know optical drives are passe but she'll use this as a dvd player (and later blu ray once I put the drive in )).
Additional:
- I have no preference between AMD or Intel CPUs, nor between ATI or Nvidia GPUs.
- As this PC is hopefully just going to sit and do its job for a few years I'm not bothered about the colouring inside the case matching (i.e. I don't care if the motherboard is blue while the RAM is red. Though it'd be nice). Performance and cost is most important here.
- I would like the motherboard to have USB 3.0 headers on it, and a case with USB 3.0 inputs on front I/O panel.
- I would like it to be as quiet as possible under load (plan on using an AIO CPU cooler).
- I would like the case to be as unobtrusive as possible. No LED fans or flashing lights outside.
- I've seen the PS4 graphics compared to that of the HD 7870 so that level or better.
So having said all that a little more detail and some of my thoughts so far...
This is going to sit in my little sister's new flat sitting room, next to her TV and sky box so one of my first concerns is that the case is in keeping with the aesthetics of the room (i.e. I don't want a HUGE case, preferably as small as possible whilst still allowing good cooling). To that end I had looked at using the
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-case-rc130kkn1 or
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/bitfenix-case-bfcprm300kkxskrp
and going with a mini-ITX build.
However there's no mini-ITX motherboards for the AM3+ FX-6300 (which I believe to be one of the best "bang for buck" CPUs at the moment, plus also slightly future proofed as games will start to be able to take advantage of more cores, and a very good overclocker to boot) which would leave me with Intel CPUs which are slightly out of the price range (at the same price as the FX-6300 seen at http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/parts/cpu/#sort=a7 there's only the Intel I3-s and it's another £50ish to an i5).
I could go with a micro-ATX motherboard in the BitFenix Prodigy for the FX-6300 but they all use the 760G chipset so there's not a lot of boards that have USB 3.0 headers on them, nor do they (to the best of my knowledge) support SLI/Crossfire, so there's no room upgrade further in future.
So long story short:
Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3 - £80 (allows another graphics card in future)
AMD FX-6300 - £85 (good overclocker, multicore, future proofed)
Corsair H60 2013 Edition - £60 (allow overclock and keep it cool)
Samsung 840 EVO 120G Basic - £80 (good ssd, coupl of games at a time)
Corsair CXM600 - £55 (semi-modular, sufficient power)
Corsair Vengance 1x 8GB DDR3-1600 - £55
XFX HD 7870 - £138
Total - £553
As you can see this is all coming in at a little over budget and I don't even have a case for it, although it should be noted that all prices are buying brand new from places like scan, overclockers, ebuyer, dabs and so on.
So people of OC3D, I humbly ask a couple of things:
1. Can you suggest a suitably small case that will take a full ATX motherboard that doesn't look to "showy"? HTPC, SFF, any ideas are welcome. The monolithic look of the Corsair 350D appeals to me but that seems too big (looks the same size as the Antec 900 on my desk and that's huge). Or am I kidding myself on with the idea of a small case?
2. Can you suggest any replacement parts of equal performance that would bring the cost down? If I can find a case for < £50 that provides decent enough cooling that'd total me at about £600 then I could try my luck on eBay and see if I can get the cost down that way.
3. Am I just barking up the wrong tree here? As I said I'd like this rig to run for a few years playing any games she could throw at it so I do want it as future proof as I can make it.
Sorry for the wall of text everyone, thank you to anyone that takes the time to read through it and provide feedback.
Peace out.
So I'll fill in the questionnaire from the sticky first:
• Where are you located?
- Glasgow, Scotland.
• What is your budget?
- circa £500.
• Will you need a monitor, keyboard, and/or mouse included in that budget?
- not a monitor, if possible a wireless keyboard/mouse/gamepad but not essential.
• Shall you be requiring an OS?
- nope, have a copy of Win 7 x64 Ultimate for it.
• What will you be using this rig for?
- this will be an htpc located in my little sister's new flat living room (xmas/flatwarming present) to play dvd/bluray, games (at least as good as PS4/XBox One), media/music server and normal internet browsing. Please note that I'd like this to hopefully play modern games for a few years.
• If gaming, what resolution will you be playing at?
- say 1920 x 1080 on a 32" tv from a distance of about 6 feet.
• Will you be overclocking?
- I can if the parts allow it.
• Do you need a full build or will you be reusing some old parts?
- full build except mechanical hard disks as I've got loads lying around and I also have a DVD writer (yes I know optical drives are passe but she'll use this as a dvd player (and later blu ray once I put the drive in )).
Additional:
- I have no preference between AMD or Intel CPUs, nor between ATI or Nvidia GPUs.
- As this PC is hopefully just going to sit and do its job for a few years I'm not bothered about the colouring inside the case matching (i.e. I don't care if the motherboard is blue while the RAM is red. Though it'd be nice). Performance and cost is most important here.
- I would like the motherboard to have USB 3.0 headers on it, and a case with USB 3.0 inputs on front I/O panel.
- I would like it to be as quiet as possible under load (plan on using an AIO CPU cooler).
- I would like the case to be as unobtrusive as possible. No LED fans or flashing lights outside.
- I've seen the PS4 graphics compared to that of the HD 7870 so that level or better.
So having said all that a little more detail and some of my thoughts so far...
This is going to sit in my little sister's new flat sitting room, next to her TV and sky box so one of my first concerns is that the case is in keeping with the aesthetics of the room (i.e. I don't want a HUGE case, preferably as small as possible whilst still allowing good cooling). To that end I had looked at using the
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-case-rc130kkn1 or
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/bitfenix-case-bfcprm300kkxskrp
and going with a mini-ITX build.
However there's no mini-ITX motherboards for the AM3+ FX-6300 (which I believe to be one of the best "bang for buck" CPUs at the moment, plus also slightly future proofed as games will start to be able to take advantage of more cores, and a very good overclocker to boot) which would leave me with Intel CPUs which are slightly out of the price range (at the same price as the FX-6300 seen at http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/parts/cpu/#sort=a7 there's only the Intel I3-s and it's another £50ish to an i5).
I could go with a micro-ATX motherboard in the BitFenix Prodigy for the FX-6300 but they all use the 760G chipset so there's not a lot of boards that have USB 3.0 headers on them, nor do they (to the best of my knowledge) support SLI/Crossfire, so there's no room upgrade further in future.
So long story short:
Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3 - £80 (allows another graphics card in future)
AMD FX-6300 - £85 (good overclocker, multicore, future proofed)
Corsair H60 2013 Edition - £60 (allow overclock and keep it cool)
Samsung 840 EVO 120G Basic - £80 (good ssd, coupl of games at a time)
Corsair CXM600 - £55 (semi-modular, sufficient power)
Corsair Vengance 1x 8GB DDR3-1600 - £55
XFX HD 7870 - £138
Total - £553
As you can see this is all coming in at a little over budget and I don't even have a case for it, although it should be noted that all prices are buying brand new from places like scan, overclockers, ebuyer, dabs and so on.
So people of OC3D, I humbly ask a couple of things:
1. Can you suggest a suitably small case that will take a full ATX motherboard that doesn't look to "showy"? HTPC, SFF, any ideas are welcome. The monolithic look of the Corsair 350D appeals to me but that seems too big (looks the same size as the Antec 900 on my desk and that's huge). Or am I kidding myself on with the idea of a small case?
2. Can you suggest any replacement parts of equal performance that would bring the cost down? If I can find a case for < £50 that provides decent enough cooling that'd total me at about £600 then I could try my luck on eBay and see if I can get the cost down that way.
3. Am I just barking up the wrong tree here? As I said I'd like this rig to run for a few years playing any games she could throw at it so I do want it as future proof as I can make it.
Sorry for the wall of text everyone, thank you to anyone that takes the time to read through it and provide feedback.
Peace out.
