I'm putting together a budget tower together for a friend, came up with this. Best I can think of for >£400, which is his upper limit. CASE: Silverstone Precision PS04B - £29.63 CPU: AMD A8-3870K Black Edition - £107.75 MOBO: Gigabyte GA-A55M-S2HP - £55.86 RAM: 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair DDR3 XMS3 -£21.79 HDD: 500GB Seagate ST500DM002 - £64 PSU: 530W PSU, Be Quiet Pure Power - £45.04 ODD: Random Samsung drive - £13.55 TOTAL: £337.62 from Scan.co.uk without ScanSure and delivery charges. That PSU is so he can get some upgrade in at a later date, like a dedicated GPU. Anywhere where money could be saved so I can fit something like a HD6770 in there? For some gaming in low settings, at a lowish resolution (I don't know exactly) would this do well? I don't have experience with "Lynx" APU's.
The APU will be fine for even mid resolution gaming, so there shouldn't be a need to put a 6770 in there anyway. Read Bit Tech's review of the APU, you'll see.
The APU will overclock quite nicely also. I got the 3670K for a friend when it was on a nice deal and it was a surprisingly little chip! The CPU cores clocked nicely as did the GPU cores. I'm not an AMD fanboy but I love the APU's.
I have an APU-setup and it really surprised me! I have the A75-UD2H board and the 3850-chip and it's such a versatile little platform... I've also had the HD5- and HD6-low end cards around and personally I wouldn't bother. If he really needs more gaming performance than the APU provides, he's going to need something better than the low-end cards anyway, as the difference between those seems so small. (EDIT: WHOOPS I suppose the HD6770 is a genuine upgrade, I was thinking about the HD6570 and 6670) I would tell him to stretch the budget another £20 or so and get 2*4 GB of memory, because that will really help!
Can the 6670 do crossfire with the built in 6550D? I'd like him to be able to play a decent game with me for once ^^
I read somewhere earlier today that you can use an HD6670 or HD6770 in crossfire with the built in HD6550D. I was checking because I have an A8-3870K coming soon and already have an HD 6770 I can put with it
Hmm. After posting that I did some googling and people say that the 6670 is the best you can use with it
M'kay. Settled it, I'm getting him the system from above with a 6670 included ^^ He'll appreciate that.
http://www.pureoverclock.com/review.php?id=1427&page=9 They say 6770 is the best, but it will downclock to act as a 6550. EDIT: I did some more checking, and that site seems to be the only one that says 6770 will work. Looks like my IGP will be a physx processor once I'm done with benchmarking it