Build Advice New Gaming Focussed Build £800-£900

Hopefully just one last question. As the MSI P67A-GD53 (B3) is a good £22 cheaper than the Asus P8P67-M Pro I have listed, and bit-tech themselves seem to recommend the GD53, will that be a change worth making at this late stage?

That would take to me to the £800 mark, making a cheeky little monitor upgrade much closer

 

Do it, much better motherboard layout.

 

Brilliant, thanks once again

That means that tomorrow I'll be picking up:

PSU: 650W PSU, Antec TruePower New Modular, 82%Eff', 80 PLUS Bronze, SLI/CrossFire, EPS 12V, Quiet Fan, ATX £64.38
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K Unlocked £167.98
GPU: 1GB MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II OC, 40nm, 4200MHz GDDR5, GPU 880MHz, Shader 1760MHz, 384 Cores +Free Batman £184.27
Cooler: Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced BK014 CPU Cooler LGA775/1155/1156/1366/AM2/AM2+/ AM3/754/940 £41.39
Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD53 (B3) £101
Case: Coolermaster HAF 912 Plus, Black Chassis £63.72
Hard Drive: 1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache, 8.9ms, NCQ £43.67
SSD: Crucial RealSSD M4 64GB - Solid State Drive - CT064M4SSD2 £78.77
DVD: Samsung WriteMaster SH-S222AB/BEBE 22x DVD±R, 12x DVD±R, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, SATA, Black, OEM £13.86
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Jet Black LP, PC3-12800 (1600), Non-ECC, CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, 1.5V £43.36

Which will set me just below the £800 mark. Can't bloomin' wait! Thanks once again everyone for all your help. In exchange I'll make sure to take lots of pictures! Hopefully the wait for the cooler won't be too long - it's the only thing out of stock at the moment.

 

Default cooler should tide you over for the time being. Good luck with the build

 

Thanks Shame the cooler won't be here with everything else, but at least it'll give me a chance to finish salivating over a pretty cracking PC, before OC'ing it to whole new levels once it appears!

Realised I can save a few more quid by simply cannibalising the disc drive out of this almost perished PC. Hurrah!

 

Boo.

Layout vs Superior UEFI and DIGI+ VRM?

 

I'm literally in the process of ordering what I last mentioned, but spotted something in the Today Only deals at Scan.

The GPU is down to £172 for today, with the 2GB version of the card just £195. Worth going for the 2GB version considering I was happy to pay the original £180 for the 1GB version?

 

In actual fact I was all set to pay £184 for the 1GB version of the card, and considering I've saved £7 on the case, it's less than a fiver to upgrade to the 2GB version. Worth it if I'm planning on upgrading to a 1920 x 1080 monitor?

 

I do like my ASUS BIOS but in comparison to a Micro-ATX I'd pick the MSI board all day long.

Also go for the 2GB, you'll only start second guessing if you buy the 1GB now!

 

Thanks

All ordered, and as a few items were part of the 'Today Only' deals, and the cooler was out of stock, it came out at £795. Not bad considering I ended up with an even better GPU out of it!

Thanks for all the help once again. Just got to get a cooler and decent sound card and I'll be a very happy chap.

 

Just jumping in via the laptop to say thanks again. Everything arrived Thursday - apart from Windows which appeared Friday - and I set about the build today. Slotted it all together, and currently Windows is installing. Left the sides off the case though, just in case

Considering it's my first full scale build (I've changed GPU's, RAM, CD drives, PSU's in the past - though I helped build a good old 486 before I was even into double figures age wise) I'm amazed at how well it's all gone! Only minus point is I desperately need to do some major cable management work this afternoon.

Once that's been done I'll add lots of lovely pics. Thanks again folks!

 

Good to hear it went well!

 

Good choice on the card there btw, will last longer and if you ever want to upgrade to a larger screen, it wont be a issue.

Hope the windows installation went well. Always so tense on a new system, just praying its not going to fail. Cable management is a pain, on my last build I never bothered, kept saying id get round to it, well 4 years later, its still a bundle of cables - blocking airflow and all.

 

2GB should be plenty. For the first time ever I actually ran out of VRAM playing Batman: Arkham Asylum at 2560 by 1440! Everything was on high and I nudged the AA to 4 and in particular light heavy scenes it'd just slow to a crawl. Next generation I'll definitely be holding out for a 3GB card.

Look forward to the pics!

 

Still got pics to come, but cable management has been set back to this weekend and I don't want to go showing off that big old mess of wires!

On the plus side, it's an incredible jump from my last PC performance wise. And it's running so gloriously cool, even with some major gaming action going on! Hopefully Battlefield 3 is waiting for me when I get home tonight to give it a real test