£500 gaming pc

[lippy89]

Hi

I am looking to build my first gaming pc. I want it to be able to play minecraft with mods at a good frame rate 40+.
Monitor and OS included in price. ( I am eligible for Windows 8 Student £50)
At this price it probably wouldn't be able to BF4 that well but it would be nice if it could.
The rig i am currently looking at :http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/lippy89/saved/2Y9y
Thanks

 

[lippy89]

Btw in the future i plan to add a decent graphics card to it but not yet.

 

[Rammy]

Looks pretty solid overall. I doubt you'll be able to extract a lot more value for the budget (OS and monitor pretty much cripple your choices).
You could save some money on the motherboard, either by swapping to a weaker chipset or by dropping to the mATX version of the same motherboard. Similarly you could save a few pounds by trading down slightly on the case.
The quicker memory makes complete sense, especially when it is the same price as a more mainstream kit, but the price is anomalous. You'll need to look into an alternative, and if you want to have ram that quick it'll probably cost you.
I'd change the HDD drive too. Yeah it's cheap but its an older version of a NAS/Raid drive, and you can pick up a 64Mb cache Barracuda or Caviar Blue for not a huge amount more.

As something to think about, if you are planning on going for a decent graphics card at some point, it might be worth eschewing an APU system entirely and focusing on getting a good CPU which gives you scope.
Now, I've had to compromise quite a lot to get it under £500. I'd ideally like to spend £10+ more on the motherboard to get a 970 chipset and I'd like to spend £10+ more on the case to make it...not rubbish. I also considered going for the XFX Core 450 PSU which is great quality but potentially limits you a little in terms of graphics upgrades as it only has a single PCIe power connector.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor (£83.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI 760GMA-P34(FX) Micro ATX AM3+ Motherboard (£40.51 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£59.99 @ Scan.co.uk)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£42.50 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon HD 7750 1GB Video Card (£62.00 @ Ebuyer)
Case: Zalman ZM-T2 MicroATX Mini Tower Case (£19.14 @ Dabs)
Power Supply: EVGA 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£38.99 @ Ebuyer)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer (£12.50 @ Ebuyer)
Monitor: Hannspree HL229DPB 21.5" Monitor (£89.00 @ Ebuyer)
Other: Windows 8 Student (£49.99)
Total: £498.61
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-11-28 22:16 GMT+0000)
This will pretty comfortably beat any APU system, and all you really need to do to make it pretty potent is stick in a mid level graphics card. An alternative would be to sort out the motherboard and case a bit and stick in a £45 HD6670, which should still comfortably be better than the 8670D.