I am looking to build a PC for my daughter as she starts secondary school in September. I will be buying the components in overall several months to spread the cost a bit however I have reached a bit of a sticking point over the CPU. I do not want to spend more than £600-£700 and the machine is meant to act as a 'Jack of all trades (Homework, light gaming and a bit of Netflix etc)'. With this in mind I had set my sights on an Intel i3 7350K as the backbone of the build. However the release of the recent AMD processors has made me have bit of a rethink especially as I can get a Ryzen 5 1600 for £30 more. With the higher core count and improved multi tasking would I be better going for the Ryzen or stick with a dual core and go for better single threaded performance with the Intel? My other issue is that I was really looking at a Mini ITX build which currently isnt possible with the Ryzen however I am prepared to wait if its woth it? Any thought would be much appreciated!
If your waiting for mini ITX on AMD you maybe waiting a long time, I would build a normal rig using the Ryzen chip. As its very good value for money. Mini ITX on a budget is hard work at the best of times. I expect AMD Mini ITX to be expensive same as Intel tends to be. Going AMD means you need a GPU, Which may put you above budget might be the only concern.
Tbh you're going down the intel route, you're probably better off buying the G4560 Pentium than the 7350K, 'good enough' performance for 1/3 of the price. The only reason to opt for an i3 atm would if you were attempting to hit the daft hardware requirements for 4k netflix/UHD BluRay playback.
