Please review my spec: Building a budget PC

[iamjokerface]

Hello all,

I recently moved out of my home country for university so I had to part with my PC. I've been thinking of building a new budget PC to use while I am a student.

Could you please check my specs, see if anything is missing, or make any suggestions?

Thank you.

Case: Corsair Carbide Spec-01
CPU: AMD FX6300 Black Edition
RAM: HyperX Fury 16gb DDR3
Motherboard: Gigabyte 970A-UD3P
Cooling: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
GPU: EVGA GTX 750TI
HD: Seagate 3.5in 1TB Hybrid Internal Solid State Drive
Power: Corsair CS450M
Other: Generic Samsung DVD writer, TP-LINK TL-WN822N 300MBPS High Gain Wireless N USB Adapter

 

[utgotye]

I assume that you mean FX6300. Otherwise, it looks fine other than the crummy power supply. Stick with Antec, EVGA, Seasonic or XFX.

 

[geofelt]

The cm hyper212 is 160mm tall, the carbide spec says 150mm max.
I suggest a cryorig H7 which is 145mm tall.

Past that, you will function ok.

Here are my suggestions:

1. I will never again build without a ssd for the "C" drive. It makes everything you do much quicker.
120gb is minimum, it will hold the os and a handful of games. If you can go 240gb, you may never need a hard drive.

I would defer on the hard drive unless you need to store large files such as video's.
It is easy to add a hard drive later.
Samsung EVO is a good choice.
Intel 730 is OK too.
The hybrid drives are a niche product that I would avoid.
The nand cache is not really large enough to keep what you need most of the time.

2. The FX-6300 is a reasonable and cheap processor. It is good if you will be running multithreaded apps.
More likely, you will be running something like matlab which is single threaded.
For that, a G3258 with a nice overclock would perform better.
The G3258 is no slouch in games either.
http://www.techspot.com/review/1017-best-budget-gaming-cpu/
The nice thing about a G3258 is that the same lga1150 motherboard can later support a processor upgrade to i3/i5/i7.

3. The Corsair CS/CX units have a poor reputation that I think is a bit unfounded. Yes, they might fail, but Corsair will replace one very nicely.
That said, I would spend a bit more for a quality unit from Seasonic, xfx, or antec.
300w is sufficient, but I would overprovision a bit to 500-550w in anticipation that you might in the future install a stronger gaming card.

 

[sadams04]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor ($96.89 @ OutletPC)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.99 @ Directron)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-970A-D3P ATX AM3+/AM3 Motherboard ($76.89 @ OutletPC)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($78.89 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($50.89 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card ($112.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Case: Deepcool TESSERACT SW ATX Mid Tower Case ($43.98 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: XFX 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($55.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24F1ST DVD/CD Writer ($12.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $559.50