Budget PC Gaming Builds

PenguinJim

The Pentium Anniversary Edition isn't really a good gaming/power choice unless your budget is severely restricted. Two real cores and no HT just doesn't cut it in most applications from 2013 onwards. I can see the argument for it on a £250-299 budget if it's really set in stone (it can have great per-core performance which sometimes makes it okay), but as your budget is over £500 the Pentium AE shouldn't be anywhere near your shortlist. I'd recommend the i5 - either pick up an H97 + i5 or spend a little extra for a Z97 + i5-K (overclockable - needs a "Z" motherboard & "K" CPU).

However, I'd recommend *nothing* this week. In three weeks (well, January 21st, most likely) Intel's Broadwell series will replace Haswell, so you'll either pick up a slightly cooler CPU or get a better price on clearance stock. Broadwell isn't revolutionary - just a bit more performance per watt - but you'll either get a cheaper Haswell or a more efficient same-price-as-Haswell-today Broadwell, so either way you win. Both today's Haswell and next month's Broadwell fit on socket 1150 motherboards, so any 1150 research you've done won't go to waste.

With motherboards, you don't really "need" anything higher than the most basic spec with the correct chipset. All the H97s and Z97s have 6+ SATA ports and onboard sound and USB3. However, for completely new builds - especially in a house without boxes of PC parts lying around - it can be worth getting a better motherboard that includes all sorts of useful extras in the box. As a basic comparison, ASRock (possibly the best price/performance, short-term bargains aside) have a basic "Pro4" for £85, or a superior "Extreme4" for £107 (prices at Amazon.co.uk, using UKPCPartPicker).

We should also see Nvidia's 960 release next month. The 760 was a decent buy briefly until the 770's price cut in November 2013, and since then has never had the price cut it's needed to be a bargain buy. The 960 should womp it in performance and use far less power. It's rare that I judge items before they've even released, but the 760 sticks out like a sore thumb with its unimpressive price for the performance/power, and the 970 has been a brilliant card, so the 960 should be much better than the 760 - in theory. Obviously wait for some reviews before buying.

You do not need a 600W Corsair power supply unless you're running two high-end graphics cards and a few HDDs! Aim for a decent brand 500W, but 450W should be more than enough unless it's a terrible-brand (or unbranded) PSU. (I quite like the German beQuiet! PSUs - very price/performance competitive, and near-silent.)

So I'd suggest:

Wait for 23 days.

Get the cheapest 1150 i5-K (either Haswell if it's significantly cheaper, or Broadwell) + a nice Z97 motherboard (£85 for a basic Z97, £107 for a nice one)
£60 8GB RAM (that ludicrously-named G.Skill RipJawMunchFasten set is fine for £62)
£48 500W PSU (Here you can get a 500W Corsair Builder series 80 PLUS Bronze or a 500W beQuiet! 80 PLUS Bronze for under £48.)
At least a 64GB SSD for Windows for £30.
At least a 1TB HDD for £40.
Case is very much a personal choice, but I recommend picking one up with four front USB ports, at least two of which are USB3.
Graphics card - wait for 960.

If you're desperate to buy today, the i5-4670K is £152 from Amazon at the moment, which is a bit of a bargain. It would bring the parts I've listed above to £447 + graphics card (expect the 960 to land at ~£160). Of course, you can buy everything except the graphics card today, and use the CPU's onboard graphics for a few weeks (the H97 and Z97 motherboards both support the CPU's GPU feature).

You can also consider a 96/120/128GB SSD if your budget allows for it, and stick a few slow-loading games on there - I spy a 120GB Kingston SSD for £39.45 at Amazon at the moment.

If you're looking at buying any parts from Scan, note that you can get free shipping from them - you just need some non-spam posts on certain forums (Hexus or AVForums, if memory serves).

Thank you for helping me procrastinate in the office today.

DBGage

Thanks for the help everyone, especially you PenguinJim.

You mentioned an SSD to load off windows, does that increase performance? Or just load the machine quicker?

Tropez

DBGage wrote: »

Thanks for the help everyone, especially you PenguinJim.

You mentioned an SSD to load off windows, does that increase performance? Or just load the machine quicker?

Applications installed to an SSD will load significantly quicker than they would off a standard HDD.

As an example, I have a 512GB SSD in my machine. Windows is installed on it. My system boots and is usable (ie. no startup lag) in less than 25 seconds (most cases - ignoring Windows updates and the like). General running of the Operating System is much faster as well because Windows functions are loaded from the SSD at much faster speeds so the experience is more pleasant.

They don't tend to have much use for games though except for decreasing level-loading times. Something like WoW with a bunch of addons installed really benefits from being on an SSD due to the decreased loading times but it isn't a necessity.

bingo_bango

Another fan of the SSD here. I have a WIN7 Ultimate boot which loads from power on to usable in just under 14 seconds on a 128Gb Sandisk.

I also have one game and one app (Photoshop) that I use all the time installed on it. Eveything else is installed on and runs from a normal SATA HDD.

As Tropez says, you get a much smoother Windows experience running from the SSD. I have toyed with the idea of getting an SSHD as a replacement for the SATA drive, but I don't see that the minimal performance boost would be worth it for me.

If you DO decide to go the AMD route, that mobo has a 100W rail for the processor, so you could fit an FX 6300 in place of the 4300. I have the black edition in mine (same mobo) and it runs at 4.1Ghz out of the box at 95W. Slightly dearer CPU, but worth the performance boost imho. Board fitted with a GTX 650 GPU runs World of Tanks on full settings at ~40fps, and Alien Isolation at the same rates.

Tropez

bingo_bango wrote: »

As Tropez says, you get a much smoother Windows experience running from the SSD. I have toyed with the idea of getting an SSHD as a replacement for the SATA drive, but I don't see that the minimal performance boost would be worth it for me.

Yeah, based on my experience SSHD's are best for situations where you only have a single drive.

I have an SSHD in my laptop and it is wonderful. Nice boot speeds on Windows and the most commonly used applications (Word, Excel and Outlook mostly) launch almost as quickly as they would on my desktop's SSD but when you do begin using applications that you don't use often, there's no noticeable performance increase because all the SSHD does is optimise the most commonly used programs.

Given the average length of a game these days, aside from something like an MMO or another online multiplayer game of course, by the time your SSHD optimised it you would have likely completed it.

PenguinJim

bingo_bango wrote: »

If you DO decide to go the AMD route, that mobo has a 100W rail for the processor, so you could fit an FX 6300 in place of the 4300. I have the black edition in mine (same mobo) and it runs at 4.1Ghz out of the box at 95W. Slightly dearer CPU, but worth the performance boost imho. Board fitted with a GTX 650 GPU runs World of Tanks on full settings at ~40fps, and Alien Isolation at the same rates.

Agreed, if going AMD, higher clock speeds will benefit your gaming performance.

However, AMD's entire CPU line has been hobbled for years as it's still based (essentially) on their disappointing Bulldozer architecture, which is exactly as fast as it sounds.

You can see that even a low-end two-year-old i3 outperforms AMD CPUs in Alien: Isolation as well as more demanding games such as Dragon Age: Inquisition and Far Cry 4 - at only 55W. I'd put the AMD CPUs up against the Pentium Anniversary Edition CPU, where you're choosing either core speed (P: AE) or core count (AMD) - but you end up compromising either way.

Sadly, there's nothing much on AMD's roadmap for 2015, either. Doubly annoying as Intel clearly need a kick up their kaboozle - their i5-2500K and i7-2600K are now four years old (Happy New Year!) and can still top the CPU charts in their classes. :eek:

Cycrow

for clock speed vs cores, it really depends on what games you are running.

older games tended to be single threaded, so could only really make use of 1 core. So having less but faster cores was better overall.

however, more and more games are now becoming multithreaded, so they do make use of the additional cores, so more cores will be better.

for a gaming pc, i would go for an i5 rather than an i3
a 760 is a decent gpu, and should play most games well.

the fps is dependant on alot of things, like the resolution you are playing at, the graphics settings you are using, and the game itself.

if you are only playing at 1080, then most decent gpu's should handle this fine.
There are a few graphics settings that might cause some problems, but they are generally designed for very high powered, expensive pcs

DBGage

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/Gigabyte+Z170XP-SLI+Intel+Skylake+ATX+Motherboard+?productId=64347

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Processors/Intel+CPUs/Core+i5+-+Socket+1151+Skylake/Intel+Core+i5-6500+3.20GHz+%28Skylake%29+Socket+LGA1151+Processor+?productId=64164

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Cases/Full+Tower/NZXT+Phantom+530+Full+Tower+Gaming+Case+-+White+?productId=60595

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/RAM/DDR4/Dual+Channel+2133MHz+DDR4/Corsair+16GB+DDR4+Vengeance+LPX+2133MHz+Memory+Kit+for+Skylake+?productId=64447

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Graphics+Cards/NVIDIA+GeForce/GeForce+GTX+960/Zotac+GTX+960+2GB+Nvidia+Graphics+Card+-+Inc+Heroes+of+the+Storm+Bundle+Pack+?productId=62806

I have a EVGA 500w PSU to go with it.

Cisco001

DBGage wrote: »

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/Gigabyte+Z170XP-SLI+Intel+Skylake+ATX+Motherboard+?productId=64347

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Processors/Intel+CPUs/Core+i5+-+Socket+1151+Skylake/Intel+Core+i5-6500+3.20GHz+%28Skylake%29+Socket+LGA1151+Processor+?productId=64164

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Cases/Full+Tower/NZXT+Phantom+530+Full+Tower+Gaming+Case+-+White+?productId=60595

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/RAM/DDR4/Dual+Channel+2133MHz+DDR4/Corsair+16GB+DDR4+Vengeance+LPX+2133MHz+Memory+Kit+for+Skylake+?productId=64447

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Graphics+Cards/NVIDIA+GeForce/GeForce+GTX+960/Zotac+GTX+960+2GB+Nvidia+Graphics+Card+-+Inc+Heroes+of+the+Storm+Bundle+Pack+?productId=62806

I have a EVGA 500w PSU to go with it.

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