I was looking for a scrap together PC made from spare parts, but the missus is being a bit... ambitious with how she wants it to run; so I thought I may as well just bloody build her a new PC. That's when we have the money to spare of course. I'm looking for opinions on how this would run and options on how I could make it cheaper without compromising performance that much; 8GB Corsair PC3-12800 Ram AMD Athlon X4 760K Generic DVD Drive (they all look and cost the same anyway) Gigabyte GA-F2A78M-DS2 Mini-itx Motherboard AMD R9 270 Coolermaster Elite 120 120GB Crucial M500 630W Be Quiet Hybrid Modular Pure Power L8 PSU It costs around £500 depending on the deals I can get and substituting similar parts.
Lower wattage PSU could easily save you cash, with a 100W CPU and 200-300W GFX card you'd probably be fine with a 500W model.
Have you considered an AMD apu, overclock it, and down the road you can always throw in a dedicated gpu / pass your gpu on to her and upgrade yours. I'm just assuming there is some light gaming with that 270 in there. Have you considered 2nd hand? I'm sure there are lots of deals to be had on the market here.
She basically wants to play The sims games (including Sims 4 when it's out) as well as some MMOs like TERA at 1080p with pretty smooth framerates.
would be much better/cheaper to grab a used GTX 580. The spend the extra cash on a bigger SSD. Also there is little to no point in getting a DVDrom unless you actually need it. I have not used my Blueray rom drive since I got it. In 4 years I have used it less then ten times. Unless you burn a lot of back ups or rip to HDD then an external drive is more practical and you only need one for all your PCs. For the PSU I would highly recommend a SFF PSU if it can handle the wattage you require, if not make sure your PSU is under 150mm long. The shorter it is the easier your build will be.
I'm trying to spend the least cash on something that would play what she wants. It isn't really 'light' gaming either as she spends a lot of time playing those games. So any money I save won't be used on making other parts of the rig better.
What about if I switched the CPU and GPU for just a 7850K? Would that suffice for some gaming with the sims 3/4 and TERA?
