Parts for a desktop PC - budget £300

Steve-o

With the recent death of my Xbox, and my laptop being a chugger, I have decided to rebuilt my desktop PC. I don't need a case or PSU, or a hard drive, so my £300 needs to cover:

• CPU
• motherboard
• graphics card
• minimum 4gb RAM
• possibly a small SSD to use as an OS drive

I'll be wanting to play games on the machine, so the spec should fit with that. Any suggestions?


I usually order from Dabs, as I've found them reliable and fairly good on price.

banger9365

your not going to get a lot for £300 http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-224-OK&groupid=43&catid=2512&subcat=2686

not that will play BF4 or COD

Cisco001

AMD Athlon x 4 760K
Asus A88XM-A
Kingston HyperX 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600
Samsung Evo 840 120GB
Asus AMD 7790.
However, I would recommend you drop SSD, and get 2 x 4GB RAM with better CPU/ faster GPU. SSD won't help for gaming.

Cycrow

i assume you not need a monitor, keyboard/mouse, or OS ?

aslo, what PSU do you currently have ? does it have the right connectors and enough power for a gpu?

also, what types of games do you plan to play ?

i would focus primarily on the GPU, and build the rest of the system around that.
Don't bother with a SSD, you can always add one later if you wanted, but with a limited budget, it'll just reduce what you can afford on everything else.

with ram, 4GB would be the minimum, but you should be able to get away with it, and you can always increase this later and is pretty cheap to do. Upgrading the CPU or GPU later is not cheap

Steve-o

Cycrow wrote: »

i assume you not need a monitor, keyboard/mouse, or OS ?

Nope, keyboard, mouse, and monitor not needed. I need an OS, but I'll keep the cost for that separate from the hardware budget.

The PSU is 500W and about 4 years old. If I need a new one to run the hardware, I'll have to decide if that comes into the main budget or not.

Game-wise, I'm not too sure. I've been out of the PC game-loop for a while, so some of the older games will no doubt appeal to me. But off the top of my head I'll throw out a few examples: Xcom (the modern multi-platform one), World of Warcraft, Legend of Grimrock, Borderlands 2, and maybe Skyrim. Possibly Team Fortress 2, if anyone still plays it.

gonzo127

at the moment for gaming on a low budget you have a dilemma, currently Intel processors have much better 'per core' performance which in the current crop of games is better since most games only use one core, which if games is the main use, a duel core, core i3 processor will usually be better than a quad core AMD cpu. HOWEVER now that the current lot of next gen consoles all use AMD CPUs with a high processor count, you could find that the new games start to make much better use of multiple core processors, which is the dilemma better current games performance or the chance at better future games performance (so longer shelf life)

Cisco001

gonzo127 wrote: »

at the moment for gaming on a low budget you have a dilemma, currently Intel processors have much better 'per core' performance which in the current crop of games is better since most games only use one core, which if games is the main use, a duel core, core i3 processor will usually be better than a quad core AMD cpu. HOWEVER now that the current lot of next gen consoles all use AMD CPUs with a high processor count, you could find that the new games start to make much better use of multiple core processors, which is the dilemma better current games performance or the chance at better future games performance (so longer shelf life)

The problem is for his budget, it is not enough for i3, unless he drop SSD