Build Advice £500(ish) mITX build. What could I do better?

I've been intending to do a small living room build for ages, and I'm close to pulling the trigger now, but before I do I'd like to see if the collective wisdom here can see any glaring omissions or where I might be spending more than I need to.

In a nutshell, it's got to be

• small
• very quiet
• as close to maxing 1080p as I can get

This is something close to what I'm thinking to go for at the moment - http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/3sKVc

I know it's quite a bit over my 500-ish budget, but I've already got the PSU and I think I may be overspending on the motherboard and cooler?

Am I looking at the right thing for ~£150 GPU and the same for CPU? An SSD would probably be my first upgrade after.

Thanks folks

 

I'd scrap the hard drive and spend the entire amount on an SSD. OTherwise you are going to have to reinstall your OS which is a right pain! You can always pick up a 320GB or so HD second hand for cheap.

 

I'm pretty sure you should start off without that £40 cooler. You can't overclock, so the only benefit of a cooler is lower noise, but the newer Intel stock coolers aren't that loud, and that PSU, whilst not noisy, isn't super-quiet. So you may find that the Scythe doesn't make _that_ much difference to overall noise levels.

 

Get an SSD instead of the Hard drive. A 120GB SSD can be had for only £50 nowadays. Also, you don't really need a great cooler if you're not using a -K part. If you're not overclocking it won't get all that hot, especially with todays parts.

 

Thanks for the advice so far, all taken on board.

Are stock coolers quieter now then? The last one I had was on a Phenom X2 550 and it sounded like a jet taking off when it got hot, I got a Gelid Tranquilo and the difference was night and day.

 

Aside from the above points, does the combination of GPU and CPU look about as good as I'm going to get in terms of bang for buck, with a view to getting ~60FPS with pretty pretty settings @ 1080p on new games?

 

You can buy a crucial m500 240gb SSD for about £80 now.

 

Not really, AMD FX chips are the best bang for buck in gaming nowadays. In windows 8 they regularly outperform Intel's finest Haswell chips.

 

The FX 6300 is a good budget cpu for gaming I believe

 

I'd go for the FX 8350; it's technically better than the 4570 in all but things like CPU intensive Single threaded applications only. They do overclock like hell as well, but you might want that cooler if you consider it. Still cheaper than the 4570 as well.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/giga...r3-sata-iii-6gb-s-sata-raid-pcie-20-(x16)-atx

For a motherboard, this is a good compatible motherboard for less than the one you picked out for the Intel. Gigabyte boards are very stable on AMD chips and yield great overclocking.

Graphics looks good, ditch the HDD and get an SSD. For £80 you can get 256GB in some places. Spend the money you save on the motherboard and cpu on a beefier power supply; something about 600W.

It will pretty much kick any games arse without breaking a sweat; although be realistic. You're not going to be able to play crysis 3 on this thing at 60fps with everything maxed. Most current games though it'll skim over.

 

Thanks for the food for thought. The only thing with that motherboard though is that it's ATX, and I'm going for a mini ITX build.

I'm not going to fool myself into thinking this'll be the fastest thing on Earth, but as long as I can feel happy in not having bought a new console and still managing to at least keep up graphics-wise for a while, I'll be happy

 

Sorry to take this off topic slightly but why the hell aren't there many mITX AMD boards?

I noticed this a little while ago.

 

That's something I've just noticed and am googling too.

 

Ah, I suppose so.

If it's mini-itx you really need then I suppose the intel route it must be.

I could only find this http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003XLYA...de=asn&creative=22218&creativeASIN=B003XLYAVI

Apparently they don't make it anymore though.

 

mITX is really Intel territory these days, sadly - AMD ITX boards are basically non-existent. If you aren't overclocking, get yourself an H-series chipset ITX board, as you suggest, and you'll be laughing

 

Have you considered Micro ATX ?

 

If I can get it in the same sort of 'in my TV unit' size, then I'd consider anything

 

Don't bother with the 8350 on AMD. It's a total and complete waste of money, given it's the same chip as the 8320 just clocked higher.

AMD are making Centurions. Centurions need to hold 5ghz stock speed stock volts. Any that don't are 8350s and 8320s, they're not particular about what goes in what box.

Both of the 8320s I have will do 4.9ghz on 1.45-1.47v. I've seen 8350s that do less... It's not worth the £40-£50 bump, because either will do 4.5ghz which is the magic number for gaming. Anything higher than that is a bonus

Edit. I also advise trying to get MATX into your rig, because ITX is a rip off from a component stand point. You're paying more for less, something that really needs to be balanced out IMO. ITX should be the cheapest, given it has the least amount of materials.

 

Well - if it's got to fit in a TV unit, mATX will work handsomely!

Also - it depends on the shape/orientation of case that you want. HTPC cases are generally horizontal, in my experience (well the good ones are anyway). As it goes, I have a full ATX build as my HTPC, with a decent GPU, in a passively cooled enclosure. The whole unit is the size of an AV Amplifier, so it's quite big, and the downside of that case is that it is a) discontinued and b) cost, for the case alone, 3/5 of your budget...

mATX will get you better value for money, but a lot of it will come down to case selection.

 

Just because i am really, really bored i decided to go virtual shopping

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor (£105.59 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L9a 57.5 CFM CPU Cooler (£34.00 @ Scan.co.uk)
Motherboard: Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 Micro ATX AM3+ Motherboard (£50.70 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-2000 Memory (£81.36 @ Scan.co.uk)
Storage: Crucial M500 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (£52.50 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X 2GB Video Card (£154.99 @ Novatech)
Case: Silverstone SG02B-F-USB3.0 (Black) MicroATX Desktop Case (£52.82 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: SeaSonic 520W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£88.26 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £620.22
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-04-17 14:12 BST+0100)

Not that i would take responsibility if this turned out to be an awful system