Gaming PC Build - £500

Hey everyone,

I've had an Xbox 360S for quite a while now and I'm thinking of selling it and building my own gaming PC.

Is there anyone out there who's built their own PC? Any tips/guidance/warnings before I begin?




Thanks!

You can easily build a decent PC with a £500 budget, my build wasn't too expensive, I already had motherboard and cpu, get a gtx 670, not too expensive but decent, get an i5 4670k I think? Only £165 and its beasty for gaming, get a full tower, choose any, as long as you like it and the stuff will fit, get 8gb corsair vengeance ram, 650 watt power supply, corsair hydro series h80, BTW you're still gonna need peripherals like monitor mouse keyboard and sound system :')

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Quite easy it all just fits together, I don't know about getting it for less than 500 though! My monitors nearly cost £250 together!

I already have a 27 inch acer monitor which I'll be keeping

If you can go a little bit over, I would go with this for £535 http://imgur.com/W6NEGe3. No mouse and keyboard though.

X

Check out Austin Duncan's channel on Youtube, he has some good builds or Linustechtips and they have a range of budgets

Haha alrighty then,

you will need:

Motherboard
Power supply
HDD or SDD
Graphics Card
Wireless card (optional depending on how your house is set up)
Tower unit
Processor
RAM - get two of the same card (make sure it is compatable with the motherboard I got 8gb (2x4gb cards)

You also have to choose between intel or amd (processor). Personally I'm not a computer whiz and so I went for intel because I saw it on TV more... and well it never failed on my other PCs. From what I understand AMD is cheaper and not too different. Just make sure you can attach the different processors! You should be able to find that on the motherboard


My set up was:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004HZG4ZO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0081G2ZK8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007RUZKK6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009LI7C5I/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s03?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007KHROSC/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009LI531S/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B006G67QPO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I salvaged a 500gb HDD from my old PC along with a CD drive (which I plan on upgrading to a blu ray disc drive in the near future so I don't need to buy a blu ray player when I leave for uni)

Hope that helps you and feel free to ask any questions... although I am pretty much a lay person when it comes to computers...

EDIT: Don't just look on amazon but look at places like ebay and maplin for better deals.

I'd recommend you over specify on certain long-term components, like the PSU where redundancy comes second to wear-and-tear failure. You can always take them out and drop them into a newer, more powerful build and save a bit of money in the long run, rather than finding yourself in a situation where you want to upgrade your CPU and are falling short on power

Also if you're getting an aftermarket cooler then forget high-profile RAM, it doesn't do much, if anything, and can sometimes get in the way of the cooler, especially if you're using 4 sticks instead of 2.

That being said, make sure you get your RAM in a pair, rather than a quad setup. Leaves you room to expand in the far future

Also getting a modular PSU means you won't have ten billion spare cables arsing about in the bottom of your case that you aren't using - Corsair does some great ones. Pay attention to the Bronze/Silver/Gold/Plat classification, its related to the % power wastage and AX > HX > RM

For the Case consider portability, if it's a big case with a lot of weight, how will you pick it up and get it to your car comfortably etc. It's the little things that make the difference between you loving your machine and just being lukewarm about it - take advantage of the customisation freedom!


p.s. LinusTechTips did an excellent video on how you can use a HDD and SSD in conjunction to get faster run speeds with the larger storage space, rather than having them sit standalone in your machine.

What graphics card did you get?

And nice case!

p.s. LinusTechTips did an excellent video on how you can use a HDD and SSD in conjunction to get faster run speeds with the larger storage space, rather than having them sit standalone in your machine.

Please can you link me the video? Can't find it

Thank-you

As an alternative check the cache option he suggests at the very end

Disclaimer, not 100% sure if it gives your installed applications SSD-worthy run speeds, it might just be you run your OS at SSD speeds and just have storage mapped more tidily onto the larger drive