Unfortunately do not have the time, but you you kind folk put together a gaming PC for the above cost for a mate, must include Win 7. He is looking to play these games at reasonable settings.Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Guild Wars 2. AMD or intel. No preference. Monitor etc not included.
That is no mean feat, what resolution you playing at? The buyer's guide pc comes in at £500 less Windows 7 but I think it will only meet the medium settings spec for BF 3.
Could go for a Llano chip? It might be possible to eke good performance out of that. Rather than going the Sandy Bridge route, it'd work out cheaper, too. £598.12. Sometimes I surprise myself. I haven't looked around today only offers, but I figure that this is enough for most games on middling settings. https://secure.scan.co.uk/aspnet/Shop/SavedBasket/Show.aspx?id=727f345cf9bd4e90bc08d2e16c46f261
Going off prices I've seen recently i5 2500k - £167 Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3-B3 - £79 4gb 1600mhz DDR3 - £25 AMD 6870 - £130 Corsair CX500 - £47 Antec 100 - £40 Windows 7 HP OEM - £80 Total = £567 Obviously HDD prices have gone up recently and I don't think £60 for a new spinpoint F3 is worth it myself, I reckon you could shop around for a 500gb hard drive for ~ £30. CD drive is up to you I guess. Obviously you have a bit of room for manoeuvre depending on any bargains you can find
Issue at the moment is fitting a good GPU into a £600 budget when including Sandy Bridge. I don't think the HD3000 in 2500K will manage BF3 on "Reasonable Settings".
There's a 6870 in the build I posted above. Cheapest on scan atm is £137 but I've seen em brand new for ~£120 on various offers every now and then. Still a cracking card tbh and for a budget build a ~ £40-50 difference over a 560ti is a pretty decent saving. Hell my 460 is still going strong and it's slower than a 6870, it managed the BF3 beta and still looked great at 1920x1200. Plus CPU and mobo always seems to be the longest lasting parts of my builds so I always look to invest.
Apologies, I must've missed that on the way past. Really i'd love to see the two systems played off against one another. I've squeezed slightly more memory and a better GPU into the one i've suggested, but Sandy Bridge is just so much more powerful on the CPU side of things.
I'd drop the i5-2500k (£167) for a i5-2400 (£148) and replace the HD6870 (£137) with a HD6950 (£192) or a GTX560 Ti (£179) ... he'll still be below £600
