Hi, I remember when all this was trees. It's been a while since I have looked at a PC. My wife and I have a couple of MacBooks and I have an Xbox for games which I rarely use so I don't need anything for browsing etc. I miss FPSs on a PC. I have a massive watercooled PC that hasn't been switched on for well over a year. According to an old thread its spec is: XP2600+ @2.5 GHz DFI Infinity 512mb BH-5 DDR 120GB Hdd P-ATA 9800pro 128mb 500W power supply It's watercooled with 2 rads (1 BIX + heatercore, RBX, 1250 pump) It was a beast, 8 years ago. I'm looking at building a machine to play FPS games, maybe watch some films etc. I will have it connected to my main TV and it will be located in my TV cabinet so a nice HTPC case would be good. Budget: £300 to £400 Main uses of intended build: Gaming (Borderlands 2 etc) Parts required: Everything except for keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers Previous build information (list details of parts): See above, fairly worthless Monitor resolution: 1080p 37" TV Storage requirements: I have a 1TB NAS so only need 500GB or so Will you be overclocking: yes Any motherboard requirements (no. of USB, Xfire/SLI, fan headers): Extra information about desired system: Will sit in my TV cabinet. I'm fairly ignorant on PCs these days but so far on the list I have: GTX 650 1024 MB - £97 AMD 3870K 3GHz - £84.77 MSI A55M-P33 A55 Socket FM1 - £36.29 Corsair 8GB DDR3 1866Mhz - £38.99 Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 - £23.43 Seagate 500GB Barracuda - £44.99 An optical drive, power supply and case of some sort. Are these good choices, what would you recommend? Thanks!
FPS games demand grunt and £400 won't really cut it to be honest. Also HTPC chassis are expensive buggers! How about a nice Mini-ITX motherboard in a BitFenix Prodigy case...
Looks like a pretty good build, but the 650 will struggle to run the latest games at high settings with acceptable frame rates. If I was in your position I would buy a second hand GTX 470 or something like that. You could probably get a 470 for around £80. It's an older and more power hungry card, but it's still pretty handy. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/519?vs=681
True. A bit noisy and a bit hot, but you get good bang for buck. They are going for silly prices second hand. Might also be able to get a 560Ti for around 100. That's a fair bit cooler/less noisy.
The cheapest overclockable Intel is the 3570K, which is quite a bit more expensive than the AMD you have chosen. On the other hand, you will also get literally more than twice the performance.
