Build Advice Trying to build a budget gaming rig for £500, any suggestions?

I need a few minutes to sit and look at the comparisons which i cant really do here in the office, i will investigate on my next break (which may not be till 6pm ish

to steer the argument a different way which of the cards is the quietest when being battered?

 

Going a little bit off topic aren't we

Either way the 650ti boost and 7850 will both be able to get good framerates on a 1080p monitor just some games you might have to turn down the settings a little bit (crysis 3). Either way the important part is 2gb of gddr5 as a lot of new AAA games are using up this or more of vram.

For £500 I would either go for a cheap i5 as mrbungle suggested or an fm2 athlon setup. The advantage of amd is that although a worse processor, you can afford a bit more on the gpu front and if your computer ever starts to slow down you can overclock to give it a boost if need be. Also, as I mentioned earlier, if you can get your build vat free you would be able to afford a ssd which would be ideal for OS and a game or two, you don't realise how beneficial they are until you have one.

Whether you go amd or intel for cpu and amd or nvidia for gpu is really preference and price, both have their advantages and disadvantages. You should decide every other part and then work out how much you are prepared to spend on the cpu and mobo combined. Also, 8gb of ram is probably more than you need but I have had my rig using up 6gb before while gaming, steam and skype with the 2nd monitor running for the internet. 8gb just allows you to be a bit more futureproof and gives you a bit of headroom, the last thing your friend will want is the game crashing halfway through because it is out of available memory.

Anyway, that is my opinion, it is his build at the end of the day and we can't force you only advise

It all depends on the card cooler, xfx cards are quite noisy due to the closed shroud which causes a kind of wind tunnel effect (it is cold right enough). Msi and asus cards are arguably the best for noise to thermals as you can ramp it up to keep the cards cold or have it at 20% fans and have the card running a bit hotter, the choice is yours. On the nvidia front I would say asus and gigabyte cards are your best bet. All these cards do exhaust air back into the case though so you need good case airflow (for the core 1000) a decent exhaust fan and maybe the additional 120mm will be required.

 

Out of those linked so far, the Gigabyte Windforce2 cooler will be the most silent. I've got this cooler on my GTX660 and when playing Borderlands2 or TSW at max settings it's not noticable over the gamesound.
When in desktop-mode surfing the web while all other sounds are off my GPU isn't audible either with this cooler, and I don't live in the city where there's much noise, but in an area, where there's maybe 20 cars a day passing by

 

Right-o cheers for the advise guys,

I'll sit down later once im out of the office and mull it over, see how much money we can get authorised from the bank of wife and then feedback on what we went with and how the build went/goes.

Or i'll come back crying saying the budget is tiny, in any case cheers