Second opinion on a build for a friend

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chizrah

chizrah

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Jun 25, 2016
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Hi all, I just anted a second pair of eyes in case I overlooked anything.
Firstly the budget is about 800 GBP. He needs everything (OS, Monitor, Tower etc.) except for a keyboard and mouse.
He wants to play at 1440p, but he doesn't mind turning down the texture qualities.
He will not be overclocking the CPU, but I;m going to try get a decent overclock on his GPU.
He will be playing stuff like DayZ, Overwatch and BF1 when it comes out.
He is willing to buy preowned stuff.
Here's what I got:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-4160 3.6GHz Dual-Core Processor (£89.99 @ Novatech)
Motherboard: MSI Z97 PC MATE ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£64.99 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston HyperX FURY 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£28.49 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Kingston SSDNow KC300 60GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£28.48 @ Novatech)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£39.00 @ Amazon UK)
Case: BitFenix Nova ATX Mid Tower Case (£28.99 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 620W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£58.30 @ CCL Computers)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit (£40.00)
Monitor: Asus VX24AH 24.0" 60Hz Monitor (£199.98 @ Amazon UK)
Other: GTX 1060 (£240.00)
Total: £818.22
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-14 09:48 BST+0100
 
Solution
A


You should be able to get a used 970 for the same price. The performance is pretty close but the 970 is overall newer tech, and so my recommendation would be go with the 970 over the 780 Ti if you want to budget 180ish for a used card. Overall though, I think i3-6xxxx or i5-4xxxx paired with a gtx 1060 might be a similar value, owing to the performance increase that goes with the cost increase. Not having seen benchmarks, I can't say that with 100% guarantee, but it seems reasonable given 1070 and 1080 performance.
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This should handle most things at 1440p

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (£178.61 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£108.46 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory (£55.00 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£72.99 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon R9 390X 8GB Nitro Video Card (£251.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£74.99 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £742.04
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-14 10:04 BST+0100

Your other options are add a GTX 1070 or GTX 980Ti but that will bump price up.
 
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Yeah, but even if you don't install games on it, you need to constantly worry about running out of space.
If I remember right, my 120GB SSD is a bit over half full with no games on it.
 
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Just realized that I didn't make it clear. OS, monitor and case are needed, I typed it in a funny way. Sorry.
 
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In that case he could buy a preowned one? I've seen 120 gigs going for about £35 at my local pawn shop. This budget is really tight.
 
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I know it isn't ideal at all but he just wants a better experience than his Xbox One. I've been looking at i5s on eBay but I can't find anything decent.
 
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Battlefield alone will fill up a 60GB ssd. My 120GB ssd only has 30ish GB free on it. All I have on it is Windows, Visual Studio, Office, and Kerbal Space Program.


  • ■ Windows takes 20ish GB minimum. Usually, becuase it stores old updates and whatnot, it ends up taking 30GB and you have to use disk cleanup to clear out the excess.
    ■ Standard office programs (Office, chrome/firefox, etc) take another 10ish GB
    ■ Modern Games are at least 10GB each.
    ■ Pagefile/Swapfile/Hiberfile take up 8-16GB depending on RAM size. (Though, you can do away with hiberfil and cut out most of this if you don't care about hibernation)
    ■ AppData will be 5-10ish GB.
    ■ ProgramData (configuration data and whatnot for programs) will take anywhere form 10-30GB depending on which programs you have installed on your computer (this is aside from the space taken up by programs in their installation directory. ProgramData is a special folder for storing configuration type things).

You can see how a 60GB SSD would fill up real quick. Given that SSDs are getting cheaper by the day, I would either get an SSD >120GB or just deal with the slow load times and unresponsive behavior that comes with an HDD and get an SSD when you can afford it. Constantly policing your drive use is not fun.



I will always advise against preowned storage. Maybe if it's manufacturer refurbished, and you plan on using it in some multiply redundant array, RAID 1, 5, 6, 10, etc. It's not that the lifespan of the SSD is shortened so much by the previous user (assuming a couple years of average use and generally good care) that the SSD won't last you another couple years, I just like peace of mind with my data. You can never guarantee that they didn't absolutely wreak havoc on the storage. There's no real way to check how much the previous owner used the disk until you plug it into your computer. And SSDs do show very evident signs of wear and tear once they start getting old, starting with reduced capacity and data just kind of disappearing.
 
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The following is a slight tweaking of your build, when buying new, skylake is almost the same cost as Haswell, and it's a newer platform with better features and tech. Dropped the SSD and upped the size of the HDD cuz if you can't afford a >120GB SSD, don't buy one at all.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor (£98.99 @ Novatech)
Motherboard: Asus H110M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£53.99 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: *G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory (£32.87 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£57.54 @ CCL Computers)
Case: BitFenix Nova ATX Mid Tower Case (£28.99 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 620W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£58.30 @ CCL Computers)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit (£40.00)
Monitor: Asus VX24AH 24.0" 60Hz Monitor (£199.98 @ Amazon UK)
Other: GTX 1060 (£240.00)
Total: £810.66
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-14 11:00 BST+0100

If you wanna try for used parts, I wouldn't buy any storage devices used, but you should be able to do this same build, swapping out the cpu and mobo for an i5-4460 (or similar) and an H97 or Z87 board. 4th Gen i5 will beat a 6th gen i3 in pretty much every benchmark. All you lose are a few new tech advancements in peripheral and add in card connection (number and speed).
For Example:
i5-4570
Asus H97-E/CSM or Gigabyte Z87X-D3h
 
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Thank you. Also it just occurred to me that another friend of mine is selling an old PC for about £80 with an i7 860 and 8GB of RAM. He could just buy that, and get all the other stuff separately. Would that CPU bottleneck say, a GTX 1070?
 
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PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 2.7GHz Quad-Core Processor (£155.98 @ Novatech)
Motherboard: MSI Z170-A PRO ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£71.72 @ CCL Computers)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory (£32.87 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: OCZ TRION 150 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£58.23 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon R9 390X 8GB Nitro Video Card (£251.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Zalman Z1 Neo ATX Mid Tower Case (£32.79 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: Super Flower Golden Green HX 550W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply (£60.59 @ CCL Computers)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 OEM 64-bit (£55.00 @ Amazon UK)
Monitor: Samsung S22C300H 21.5" Monitor
Total: £719.17
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-14 11:53 BST+0100

This is just slightly over budget but it gives you an i5 processor and a GPU that will give good performance at 1440p. It does not have Windows 10 but you can upgrade Windows 8 to 10 before the 29th July. You may notice that the mobo I suggested is a Z170 which is suited to CPU overclocking but I did not give you a CPU that could be overclocked. The reason for this was that it was the same price as the non OC motherboards. This will give your friend better upgrade options in the future. There was no price for this monitor but can get it for around £100 elsewhere online.
 
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That PC won't be of any good to your friend as there is nothing worth harvesting in it at that price.

 
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i7-860 will have worse gaming performance, maybe even worse general performance than a modern i3. You have to remember, that's an 8 year old CPU. I would say with confidence that in an i7 860 + GTX 1070 build, the i7 is the weak link. That's completely ignoring how outdated all of the peripheral links on the 8 year old platform will be. The budget allows for an equivalent CPU and a newer platform, brand new.
 
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That's a 1080p monitor, OP is looking for 1440p. You generally don't see them that cheap, new or used. Now if OP is fine stepping down to 1080p, the cost of monitor would be halved and the money could be put into other components, like in your suggested build.
 
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Well spotted, forgot about that :S
 
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You should be able to get a used 970 for the same price. The performance is pretty close but the 970 is overall newer tech, and so my recommendation would be go with the 970 over the 780 Ti if you want to budget 180ish for a used card. Overall though, I think i3-6xxxx or i5-4xxxx paired with a gtx 1060 might be a similar value, owing to the performance increase that goes with the cost increase. Not having seen benchmarks, I can't say that with 100% guarantee, but it seems reasonable given 1070 and 1080 performance.
 
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