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What part should i get for a pc around £500?

paap15

Honorable
Sep 14, 2012
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10,510
I want to make a gaming pc for around £500. Can somebody suggest some parts like CPU (amd) motherboard and graphic card. It would really help as im not good at buying parts. thanx. :)
 

Meaning that all the other components will be cheap.
 
Causing a massive bottleneck issue? 250 quid will buy a monster of a card not needed in a £500 quid rig. There's been a price drop recently on the amd 6870 e'g £115, You should keep all the parts at a similar price/performance range. Although making sure you buy a good mid range Motherboard and PUS making it easy if you plan to Upgrade You CPU/GPU Etc in the future.
 
I'm saying if he spends £250 on a GPU he has no money left for anything else, also a lot of games these days are very CPU intensive Skyrim For example. Also the 6870 isn't amazing but it's Solid in it's price range

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32521-4.html

I believe at the price range he as in mind it's better to invest in a good motherboard PSU and case. I'm pretty sure most people will agree with that. But I would like to see you provide me with an example of a £500 computer where £250 is spent on the GPU with competitive benchmarks with today's most popular games . Also if he hasn't already got Win 7 64 bit he'll have to included that in to his budget.
 



Hi :)

The main problem here is that £500 is not enough for a decent gaming machine....

In my shops as an example, our cheapest is £699 and go up to many thousands....

All the best Brett :)
 
So in your £699 build 50% of that is on the card alone? so around £350? So something like a Nvidia 670? I'm quite interested to see the specifications of your £699 example?
 



Hi :)

Sorry but my own machines are my own business, but I will say that on a £699 machine we spend between £200 to £300 (TRADE) on the card, on average, sometimes more depending on what the customer wants, as we build Custom machines... we do NOT buy in...

All the best Brett :)
 
That's all well and good.

But it's not really helping this guy build a £500 rig or answering my question about spending half your budget on a GPU is worth while because if this is a better way of building a machine I would be quite interested in seeing the performance I'll get from a rig built focusing half my cash on a GPU and surrounding it with Cheaper parts, Compared to Build at a same price where the card isn't worth half of the machine
 
Why not spend the entire money on a gpu :)!
Just get a 680, other parts are useless :kaola:.
No but really putting half your money on a gpu is ridiculous. I think it's better to get higher quality parts overall and get a better/second gpu later.
 



Hi :)

You want your question answering , you do the research...or even run computer shops for well over 20 years...that will give you the answer...

Or look at it this way..its MEANT to be a GAMING machine... you DONT spend all your money on a cpu and mobo.... the PRIORITY has to be the GPU....

For £500 hes got to forget Intel as an example...too expensive in this case...so an AMD Quad etc...

All the best Brett :)



 
Brett, most computer businesses don't hide system specs from potential customers 🙂 Unless you sell only to a select clientele?

Anyway, £500 could set you up with a decent system... check out scan.co.uk for:

£90 i3 2120 CPU
£65 Z77 motherboard
£16 4GB 1600MHz DDR3
£31 450w Antec PSU
£12 cheapass case
£170 GeForce GTX660
£43 500GB Seagate hard disk
£12 DVD
£70 Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
£509 total

Done ;-) You could stick another £55 on there and get a 120GB OCZ Solid 3 SSD too for much faster boot times, software/game load times, new area/save loading in games etc.
 
Well, there is trinity now. I think my new computer is going to be trinity, personally.

There are ways to make a truly cheap computer and with the APU you can have a more rounded cheap computer.

But if you want a better machine you might want to save up till you have $700 dollars or so.

You can get the A-10 5800 apu on the FM2 type slot AMD motherboards. (k if you want to OC) Average Cpu with good 720p gameplay and 1080p videos.

: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113281


A good $100 ish intel chip is:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115078
A
I you want a graphics card I found two around $100 at new egg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130625 (currently $144)

and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102969 (currentyly $109)

Just those two together is over $200 dollars though. 1 A10 series APU is $120-130. You should get better performance out of the $200 intel +graphic card combination though; because I think the graphics are better on those cards then in the APU itself.

And that particular intel cpu isn't that much different from the APU's computing ability either..
But yeah that is just a beginning. Adding windows is a different story, do you have a CD for that? ~lol


I guess since newegg only ships in US (I think) You would have to find equivalent stores that sell those products lol
____~
btw £ is different than $ right? 500 euros should be more money than $500 dollars, in dollars. (but I guess not in the UK where you have to use euros)
 
Don't just look at Scan by the way. Although it's probably your best bet if you buy it all from one company, Aria, eBuyer, Novatech and Dabs are also well worth a look. Find which is cheapest in total (including shipping) and consider buying from a few places to get the best prices on each component as long as there's at least a £5 or so saving (to offset the additional shipping costs of ordering from more than one retailer). Novatech and eBuyer offer free delivery, and sometimes Dabs too.
 
I think it's one of those things that just because something makes sense in theory doesn't mean it's a good idea in practice. I know a lot of people with gaming PCs but not one of them uses it exclusively for gaming.

Vaguely on topic, £500 is a solid budget. I reckon he could go the intel way if he wanted, but he already said he wants AMD.

For my money I'd go for something like

Phenom X4 965 £70
ASRock Extreme 3 £65
Radeon HD7850 £155

which leaves a sensible amount left for whatever storage/case/memory you want, even a cheap SSD.

Might not be the greatest gaming performance for £500 but it'll do everything fine and give you plenty of future options too.
 


$700 would actually be around £525 interms of the hardware you can buy (multiply by .75 roughly). That ratio doesn't correspond with exchange rates since hardware is much more heavily taxed here in the UK than in the States (or most other non-European countries for that matter). Not sure if Newegg are any use for us Brits though, we use Scan, Aria, Novatech, Dabs, eBuyer and if we're certain we won't have to deal with their after-sales support, Overclockers 🙂