computer help

[Xen]

A friend wants a computer. He's had a pre-built garbage computer for a long time. He wants to get into casual gaming, so it should be able to the newest games at at least minimal settings.

- The budget is 500 EUR, not more, preferably less
- The old computer doesn't have any parts that could be recycled
- Must be an intel CPU
- 8 GB of RAM

So, we'll probably have to spend 200 on the case, PSU, Mainboard and RAM. That'd leave us with 300 EUR for the CPU and GPU. What's the best combination for that money these days?

I am not sure what to do with the OS as of now. Feels like a waste of money, honestly... Might give him my win7 key, I was going to switch to Linux anyway.

[wetlioN]

A friend

like you got one

500€ budget?
again, get used parts

[Winter]

again, get used parts

And here I was trying to close my post with "Ladies and gentlemen, for our talk on second hand parts, please give a warm welcome to Veitilein."


When I think cheap CPU I think G3258 (pentium anniversary thingy), though it was a few years ago people loved getting that thing and OCing it rather well for a €70ish CPU. This was a few years ago though and there might be alternatives out there.

Raises the question though, how much of an option is overclocking?


On a side note, if you're not going for second hand parts on this I'd say it's right around the limit where getting something pre-build could be worth it. Simply because those manufacturers buy in bulk, their (relatively) cheaper stuff can be hard to match with separate parts even though you might not get the best quality.


Edit: Even though I'm not the biggest fan of it myself, at that budget and with the requirement of playing the latest games at minimum that's going to need a GTX 660 at the very least. So I'd say buying a second hand GPU might be the best way of getting that done within budget.

[Xen]

no used parts, no overclocking (he's a noob with Pcs...)

[Winter]

This is what I got to after fiddling about a bit.

Important notes:
-No windows, you'd have to provide that W7 copy.
-No peripherals (mouse/keyboard/screen/sound)
-No SSD, could go for a 250GB one for about €20 more or even a smaller HDD to save a bit more money.
* 250GB SSD +€20
* 500GB HDD -€10
* 320GB HDD -€15

-No separate CPU cooler, 6100 does have a stock cooler included.
-6100 is Dual Core, but should be better value for money in current games than a quad core.
-Yes I pretty much took the build in the other thread and made it cheaper (same store: https://www.mindfactory.de/).

-Like I said in the other thread, there's a lot of personal preference in cases, colour/design even the cheaper ones have options for that, so see it as a placeholder. Having just said that, maybe a case that includes a decent PSU could be a good, cheap option, but I'll be honest, if I have to look at that website any more today my eyes might start to bleed.

[Xen]

Oh, I forgot about the HDD, lol. 250 bucks for CPU and GPU makes it even more difficult. RIP. But that seems like a relatively good build for the money. It's definitely better than the prebuilt shit, lmao. At that price range, unless playing shitty games liek WoT, how do AMD CPUs actually compare to intel CPUs? I guess they're still not worth it over an older intel dual core CPU?

[H311fi5h]

Take a GTX 750 Ti for 108 €: http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info. ... 57898.html
That card eats only about 75 Watts, so we can save on the PSU: http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info. ... 82960.html
Now you get a used case on Ebay for 10€
= 70€ left in the budget
Either save and be happy or invest into SSD

[Winter]

Just realised I forgot a dvd drive, don't want to have a complete noob make a bootable usb drive me thinks.

Anyway, should be matched to case and 10-15 euros.


Lower watt PSU is easily possible with a 950 as well, this corsair one was just on sale.

Not sure how the 750ti compares to the 950 and latest games on minimum though. Will have a less sleepy look tomorrow.

[Xen]

Oh, yeh I forgot about the dvd drive, too. Should be able to take that from the old computer.

[Winter]

What colour is the old dvd drive, so we can match the new case to it, please don't be beige..

The 750 ti actually seems to do surprisingly well. Checked some other reviews that were basically running everything on max and it was usually doing a little under 30 on most games, probably with a better CPU but it shouldn't have a problem at least running everything currently available.

About buying the case second hand, while there is pretty much nothing you can break on a case, that would probably cause issues in assembly by the store.


As for going really cheap on the PSU, it always worries me, because if anything goes wrong there you have a really high chance of frying everything because of the lack of protection.

Not to mention the way this thing is marketed for example: http://www.hardwareinsights.com/wp/xile ... 6-preview/

If you look at the description it actually appears to be listed as a 400W PSU or so the name would suggest, I don't think this is an error. Just a really scummy manufacturer using peak output in it's product number.


The actual manufacturer of a specific PSU can be a pain to find, mostly been using this list for tiers this time around.

I think something cheap-ish that's still quite reliable would be this 400W Antec for €35,93.

[Dr__Kiwi]

, please don't be beige..

What? I don't even... this shit color exists for cases?

[Winter]

Well it's what I would call that slightly off-white colour all the cases in the 90s were, kinda like this one:

Spoiler:

[Xen]

lol dont worry his computer isnt THAT old. The optical drive is black. thanks for your effort so far.

[Winter]

http://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Geha ... /211/10841

Was just kinda browsing that, would sort by black but that would eliminate anything with a colour accent on it as well.

Few somewhat random picks from the first couple of pages:
Closed black, with a mesh front
Very basic, prolly about as cheap as it gets, black looks a bit weird in the pics though
Similar to above, with a window
Window and an orange (yay) accent on it, has a door covering dvd drive slots
Bit more expensive but from a quick google this came up a few times as one of the better budget cases
I'd say ugly, but some people might like it and the coloured LED fan


Browsing the top link should only give cases that fit the motherboard and aren't overly big, I'd say especially for cheap cases, the more is on it (LEDs/window/etc) the more they can fuck up. Not looking at top build quality for most of these, so it could be nice to not have a poorly fitted window constantly making vibration noise.


Thought I'd make another screenshot of a cart as a summary... Antec PSU I found out of stock and seems like it's not coming back..

Edit: Made one again

Spoiler:

I added a 1TB HDD and pretty much the most expensive case I realistically see for a build like this, can probably shave off another €25 there. I'd rather adjust down than surprise with a tiny increase every time.

Reason I took a slightly more expensive 750 Ti is that the cheapest ones are low profile ones, which seem to have really tiny fan(s) which tend to make more noise than bigger ones. Then I went for EVGA because their warranty/fan quality is good. (you could save another €5 here by going for a cheaper brand)



PS this

[Xen]

Winter, you're bae. The CPU just has 2 cores. is that going to cause any trouble with modern games? Or is the GPU still going to be the bottleneck? What about shitty games like Wot? I assume it'd be enough to play WoT maxed out for instance? Are there any old i5s that are better for the same money as that i3?

[Winter]

Very, very few games have proper multi-core support. So then it comes down to single core speeds.

Could have a look at older i5s the problem is that unless you buy second hand, parts have a tendency to barely go down in price, even up a little at the end due to limited stock and then just disappear.

And the old MB/DDR3 ram is about the same price atm so that doesn't really make a difference.


Edit: here's a 6100 review including avg FPS compared to other current intel CPUs

Notes:
-They compare 2 different memory speeds, the one I currently put in the cart is in-between those at 2400
-They attempted to remove the GPU bottleneck by putting something silly in there so don't expect this kind of performance with this build


Anyway, it should mean that the CPU is easily going to be bottlenecked by the 750 ti


Edit #2: actually just checked and the MB doesn't seem to support RAM that's that fast, so that would drop the FPS by a bit and might need to search for some different ram.

Either way, need some food now and may I suggest doing what Kiwi proposed in the other thread and go to sth like r/buildapc to see what they have to say about a budget build.

Quite confident about the CPU being good, it's just that RAM/motherboard combo that's hard to figure out without some serious digging. People on those kind of boards usually have some sort of go-to budget build. (maybe a few different ones depending on whether or not someone wants intel/amd)

[Xen]

well, my friend is a PC noob, so he doesn't care if its intel or AMD, but obv I want to go with intel. Fuck AMD CPUs. Also, he's russian, so maybe he'll be into tenks. Ayyyy.

[Winter]

As for RAM, this suits that MB better: http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info. ... 12124.html


Checked the old i5s and besides the likely decrease in gaming performance (not checked), the minimum price for a quad core is €167 (or €160 w/o a fan), while saving about €23 on MB/memory. So imho not worth it and the old dual cores seem to be so much slower than the 6100 that it's kinda bad value.

[Xen]

What if you get ram that is too quick for the MB? Will it only work at the fastest speed the mobo can handle or are they entirely incompatible?

[Winter]

It should work but like you said only at the fastest speed the MB can handle, might as well take the slightly slower memory, sometimes they are actually better at those lower speeds.

Edit: checked and they are better, you could manually fix this but all things considered it's just easier to get the ram that's running at the right speed.




Final edit before this thread is dead to me:

Here's a GTX 950 review with the 750 Ti in it, keep in mind these are high/ultra settings so tweaking settings can get decent performance out of the 750 Ti as well. This would probably be the single biggest improvement that could still be made without changing anything else, while still withing budget.

This should pretty much be the direct upgrade to the 750 Ti that I included before: http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info. ... 61212.html