A £1k gaming PC

[Black Pelican]

So I have recently been awarded £1000 by my dad for getting good exam results (important exams) and I would like to make the money go as far as possible towards a great gaming PC.
Now a friend has whipped up a quick draft of what it could be:

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 as motherboard
Intel i7 930 as CPU
Coolermaster V6GT as CPU cooler
DDR3-1333 Crucial Ballistix RAM - 6GB (kit) as memory
Lite-On iHAS124 as CD/DVD/R/RW
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB as HDD
Corsair Professional Series HX850W as power supply
Nvidia GTX 570 (whatever brand) as GPU
Coolermaster HAF 922 as case
Then some arctic silver thermal paste he says

Is this a good overall buy? He said I should come here at confirm.

 

[Black Pelican]

Oops, sorry didn't see the build advice template.

Approximate Purchase Date: ASAP


Budget Range: £1000


System Usage from Most to Least Important: gaming, surfing web, watching movies (streamed)


Parts Not Required: keyboard, mouse, monitors


Preferred Website(s) for Parts: no preference but needs to be UK based


Country of Origin: United Kingdom


Parts Preferences: no preference


Overclocking: Probably


SLI or Crossfire: neither


Monitor Resolution: 1920 x 1080 and 1680x1050


Additional Comments: none

 

[circulate]

I don't like it.

Go wiith one of these "mid ranged intel based gaming pc's"

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/317203-31-bestconfigs-poll-budget-intel-based-gaming

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

For gaming the best bet is to be building a system not off from the 1st generation Intel® Core™ processors like the Intel Core i7-960 but off from the 2nd generation Intel Core processors like the Intel Core i5-2500K. Matching the Intel Core i5-2500K up with a good board based off from the P67 or Z68 chipset and a couple sticks of DDR 3 with a voltage of 1.5 or lower will not only save you some money but give you a better performing system.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[Silvune]

You should not be going with the old 1366 socket unless you want to run more than two graphics cards. The high end Socket 1155 CPUs cost the same or less as 1366 CPUs, perform the same or better and consume less energy in the process. It is also not impossible to do three card rigs on 1155.

So change the CPU to the i5-2500K, motherboard to something like an Asus P8P67 Pro, get a dual channel memory set (4GB is fine, but 8GB is so cheap most people seem to go for that anyway), also make sure the voltage on whatever set you pick is ideally 1.5V or below.

Everything else would be compatible with these changes. Personally I would make a few different choices.
For instance you could run that build with a second GTX 570 on a 750W PSU.

The CPU cooler will come with some thermal compound so you could just use that, if you want the best performance then the Arctic Silver is a contender for that but the lengthy curing time and electrical conductivity means that there might be better choices around.

 

[jmsellars1]

Christian is right, a second generation i5 such as the i5-2500k would be far better in games. maybe a build like this would be nice:

Prices from www.aria.co.uk

Intel Core i5-2500k - £159.59
Corsair Vengeance Blue LP 1600Mhz 1.5v - £46.50
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P - £117.59
Gainward GTX 570 Phantom - £275.94
Corsair TX-850 850W - £105.36
Fractal Design Define R3 - £73.99
Noctua NH-D14 - £65.33
Crucial M4 64GB - £82.92
LiteOn DVD Burner - £13.93
WD Green 2TB - £57.90

£999.05 Total

That is probably the route i would go, looks nice (well the Noctua is pretty ugly but the cooling is amazing and it's quiet ) and will easily handle any game on a single monitor @ ultra high settings. As an added bonus you get the super fast load times of an SSD and this system should be super quiet.

You don't need thermal paste because youre buying an aftermarket cooler, they should come with some decent paste.

 

[Black Pelican]

Thanks so much for the replies. Now my friend realises he's been using out of date lists n such

@jmsellars1, if I had 2 monitors would it make much difference?

 

[Motopsychojdn]

Shop round on
scan.co.uk
Ebuyer.co.uk
Dabs.co.uk
and Dont forget Ebay, I picked up 2 packs of Vengeance recently (2 packs of 2x2Gb) for £72 and pence from there, which was from a company called buy.com, not a private seller
Moto

 

[jmsellars1]

Thanks so much for the replies. Now my friend realises he's been using out of date lists n such

@jmsellars1, if I had 2 monitors would it make much difference?

If you mean gaming across both monitors then yes a big difference. If you mean just gaming on one and having one for facebook and music or whatever then not much.

EDIT: That Vengeance RAM i listed is 2x4GB by the way, sorry i forgot to mention that.

 

[Black Pelican]

Fantastic. Thanks everyone for the help, ordering jmsellars1's build now

 

[jmsellars1]

Fantastic. Thanks everyone for the help, ordering jmsellars1's build now

If you haven't already ordered it maybe i should talk you through why i chose those parts, you seem to have trusted me quickly haha. Not to make you paranoid, i like to think i know what i'm talking about .

Just thought i would say that i have geared this toward silence and sleek looks. You could probably get a slightly more powerful system for the price but if youre like me you don't realise how nice silence is until you have a big noisy box next to you. *Cough* Palit GTX 460 and Antec 902 *Cough*

Thought that would be a good idea since you wouldn't notice a small performance boost because it's not going to lag anyway.

EDIT: Forgot to add, it's awesome for upgradability too.