700 dollar budget build, miami, dicember 24

[agustinromero]

Hey guys,

So situation is the following: a friend of mine will be travelling to miami from dicember 24 to january 5. We are from argentina where everything that has to do with PCs is really expensive so he is considering bringing everything but the case from there.

I have made this build which personally i think is great fro the money but i'd like your opinions.
Keep in mind he doesn't care about looks at all, just raw performance
http://pcpartpicker.com/list/3ZGspb

Main questions are:-Can someone give me some good reason to spend more on the motherboard?

-Should i go single 500tb ssd so i have an easy (and not really expesnsive) upgrade of a 1tb drive or just take the normal 250ssd+1tb hdd? Took this ssd from this months ssd recomendations.

-What about price drops around christmas? what should we expect on that matter?

- Is it a good idea not to order everything from amazon and just look around when he gets there for better deals?

I think that's about it! Thanks in advance!

Edit: I also need some clarifiactions about how pcie lanes work. I know they are "direct lanes" to the cpu and that an i 5 6500 has 16 lanes and graphics cards take a 16X slot. So what would happen if i get a pcie nvme ssd? Does it "dinamicly" assing the lanes or the graphics card permanetly lose bandwith? is there a trade off here or i dont lose much?

 

[azaran]

A couple suggestions,

RAM: if you can fit in the extra $20, you can bump your RAM up to 16GB which will give you a lot more headroom as newer games come out needing higher capacity RAM.
http://pcpartpicker.com/product/4vWrxr/gskill-memory-f42400c15d16gvr

PSU: The B1 series isn't very good. A $10 price jump puts you in to a better made and modular PSU
http://pcpartpicker.com/product/TgW9TW/seasonic-power-supply-m12ii520bronze

As for the PCie lanes thing, its a addition/subtraction game. You have so many lanes, each pcie device will use its allotted number of lanes. Your CPU has 16 lanes, and your chipset (the B150) has an additional 8 lanes. So if you were to switch to a PCIe NVMe drive you wouldn't be affecting your GPU's performance (GPU = 16 lanes, NVMe = 4 lanes). That said, unless you're using a high I/O program like editing software, 3D rendering, etc, you'll never notice the speed difference between it and a normal SATA drive. If you're doing it to reduce the amount of stuff in your case (cables, etc) then it'll be fine or you could go with a SATA m.2 drive since your motherboard supports both.

 

[agustinromero]

Thanks for your answer man! about psu i just picked one that suited the price tag perfectly, he isn't much into pc's so its just for rerefense.

I have one more question that i forgot to ask. What about the b150 mobo. I really haven't seen any of those budget builds that go around the internet getting one of these so i feel like i'm missing something huge here. It seems like really great value since we get every connector we will ever need. Any reason to get a better motherboard?

 

[azaran]

Thanks for your answer man! about psu i just picked one that suited the price tag perfectly, he isn't much into pc's so its just for rerefense.

I have one more question that i forgot to ask. What about the b150 mobo. I really haven't seen any of those budget builds that go around the internet getting one of these so i feel like i'm missing something huge here. It seems like really great value since we get every connector we will ever need. Any reason to get a better motherboard?

There are a bunch of different chipsets for the Skylake CPU's and each has its perks. A "better motherboard" is really dependent on what you're looking for. If you want to get more in depth of the difference between the chipsets, this is a good article to read
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Z170-H170-H110-B170-Q150-Q170---What-is-the-Difference-635/

In general the B150 boards will have less "stuff". Depending on the board that may be an lack of M.2 support, or no onboard HDMI, or less USB ports, lower quality audio, etc. For instance the H170 (http://pcpartpicker.com/product/HxcMnQ/gigabyte-motherboard-gah170mds3h) thats $10 more gives you a proper 6x audio ports on the back vs the 3x audio ports on the b150 board, and has more USB 2.0 headers on the board and a second x4 PCIe slot.Which depending on what you're doing may make a difference. For instance I run a 5.1 speaker system at home. The 3x audio ports on the B150 would mean I'd have to jump through a bunch of stuff to enable 5.1 audio on my system.

Really whats important is look for the features you want, and then look at the build quality of the board. Asus, and Gigabyte tend to be really well built (tho they have and do make some boards that arent quite as good as others. But their boards are sometimes more expensive than the MSI or Asrock board with the same specs. Asrock has gotten much better over the years and makes for a pretty safe bet, while MSI still has some QC issues in my opinion. Make sure which ever board you want to get, you look in to and see if there a lot of common reported problems.