Building a PC for my cousin. Which one shall I go for?

[PlymouthJoseph]

Okay, my cousin's birthday is coming up soon (End of next month) and I'm building him a PC... I already have some hardware which I've used from previous builds... All I am stuck on now is wither to go with AMD or Intel.

My budget is no more than £260, and all I really need is a motherboard, CPU and maybe a cooler.

I've currently got:

RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury 4x4GB DDR3
GPU: EVGA GTX 960 SSC ACX 2.0
Case: Aerocool X-Worrior
SSD: Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SSD
HDD: Western Digital 1TB HDD
PSU: EVGA SuperNova G2 750watt PSU

I have come up with 2 options...

AMD FX-8350 with the MSI 990FXA (£257)

--------------- OR ---------------

Intel i5 6500 with ASRock H110M-HDV and HyperX Fury 1x8GB (£251)

He will be playing games, along with recording, editing and rendering videos and just general PC use.

Also, please no Intel FanBoys... I want real world answers of which would be better...

- Joe

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

Real difficulty here. For general use the i5 is far better, but the FX still kills the i5 at rendering. If possible, maybe you could stretch and get a Xeon E3-1231v3 and H81 motherboard for the best of both.

 

[PlymouthJoseph]

Real difficulty here. For general use the i5 is far better, but the FX still kills the i5 at rendering. If possible, maybe you could stretch and get a Xeon E3-1231v3 and H81 motherboard for the best of both.

Okay, that is another GREAT idea... So now there is 3 ideas...

AMD FX-8350 with MSI 990FXA and 4x4GB 1600MHz RAM

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Intel I5-6500 with ASRock H110M-HDV and 1x8GB 2133MHz RAM

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Intel Xeon Processor E3-1231 v3 with Asus H81M-PLUS and 2x4GB 1600MHz RAM

 

[Redneck5439]

As stated the Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 at stock speeds is the best choice. In rendering it will be nearly equal with the FX 8350 at stock and will have nearly the same gaming performance as the i5 6500. However the Xeon can't be overclocked and an FX 8350 over 4.3Ghz will still render better (most FX 8350 can be overclocked to 4.8Ghz+). For pure gaming the nod would have to go with the i5-6500. The Intel processors both have better IPC then the FX 8350 so in heavily CPU dependent games will perform better. The i5 6500 has slightly better IPC than the Xeon so it will run most games slightly better, however the Xeon will render far better than the i5 6500. Of course the FX 8350 can overclock and have better multi-threaded performance than either the i5 6500 or Xeon (neither of which can be overclocked). It really comes down to what the computer is going to be used for.