zantian

after doing some research, this build fits my budget and my plan almost perfectly. I will probably check back in a month or two, seeing as im going to be getting the parts closer to Christmas time, but this is actually a nearly perfect build. my only real nitpick would be the 62 cents, ruining the perfect 500 dollar price point... other than my obsession with round numbers this build was extremely helpful, and much more powerfull than my original thoughts. Thank you very much

thanks for the quick help, I have heard that running a dual core like this would be more powerful, but I was concerned with the trend of games not running unless you have a quad core, though I will probably go with this suggestion since I have only heard of one or two games limiting the hardware like that. as for this, the peripherals and os are budgeted separately, she already owns many of the peripherals, and she is opening a business with her mother, and they bought a copy of windows that says it will install on a few devices, and we will upgrade those as we go.

thanks for the quick help, I have heard that running a dual core like this would be more powerful, but I was concerned with the trend of games not running unless you have a quad core, though I will probably go with this suggestion since I have only heard of one or two games limiting the hardware like that. as for this, the peripherals and os are budgeted separately, she already owns many of the peripherals, and she is opening a business with her mother, and they bought a copy of windows that says it will install on a few devices, and we will upgrade those as we go.

I am looking into buying some parts to build my girlfriend a new gaming rig, we both currently use our old laptops to do some gaming together, but I wanted to get her something better. I was thinking of getting her a ps4, but I believe I can get better performance out of a pc for a similar price. For the rig, aesthetics and noise are not really a factor, it would be nice to improve on both, but performance per dollar is the most important thing about this build, and second most is the ability to do some upgrading in the future, hopefully ill be able to upgrade by adding parts without removing old parts, just to keep the price low on future upgrade-ability, but this is not terribly important This build will most likely need to be up and running a touch before Christmas. I plan to do no overclocking, though I may overclock some parts slightly, this is more for the longevity of the pc than anything else. as time passes, and game requirements spike, I may overclock parts in the future, so it is a plus if I can, but if it is something that will make the build suffer in other areas, I would rather spend the money on better equipment at stock clock speeds. the aesthetics are of little to no concern, mainly due to the cost, I want to put all the money I can into the performance. my os will be windows 8 or 10, depending on price, and Is budgeted seperately. I live in the us, and I have a budget of somewhere between 400 - 500 dollars, though I can stretch it slightly, if the performance per dollar will increase by doing so. I am looking primarily into more affordable parts that will out perform a ps4. I have a few things I have found on new egg that fit the general price point of the overall build, however, I am very new to this, and most of my experience with computers has been on the software side, so I am completely open to suggestions for video cards I have looked at two, I have heard I should look into the r9 280 and r9 290, but both where out of stock when I did most of my research PNY GeForc GTX 960 DirectX 12 VCGGTX9602XPB-XE-OC 2GB 128-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0x16 SLI Support XLR8 Elite OC Video Card core clock 1304 mhz boost clock 1367 mhz 1024 cuda cores pci express 3.0x 16 price point: 180$ EVGA GeForce GTX 960 DirectX 12 02G-P4-2968-RX 2GB 128-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support FTW ACX 2.0+ Video Card - Certified Refurbished core clock 1304 mhz boost clock 1367 mhz 1024 cuda cores pci express 3.0x 16 price point: 150$ for a processor, I found one of the most powerful I could at a 100 dollar price point, if there are any suggestions, I am looking for something with 4 or more cores, since games requireing a higher core count are becoming more common. AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core 3.5 GHz (4.1 GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W FD6300WMHKBOX Desktop Processor price point: 100$ for the mother board, to be completely honest, I was a little baffled by this, mainly due to the number of options, and compatibility issues. I have no idea what is a good value. for this part, I am hoping to have some upgrade-ability, I want two or more slots for ram, and I would prefer two gpu slots with 24 - 32 pci or pcie lanes, though this is more of a desire than a necessity, and if the price would suffer then 16 pci lanes on a single slot will do fine. I also wanted some general ability to upgrade in the future, without throwing the current parts out of the build, being able to set up the old card and a new one using crossfire or sli, would be nice, and being able to put ram in without taking old ram out would be wonderful, but if the build has to be more static to save money that is also acceptable. the other parts are rather generic. any appropriate power supply, a bit of overhead is good, noise is not much of an issue 8-16 gb of ram in a single stick to open up room to upgrade in the future. an ssd isn't necessary and would be expensive, so I would opt for the much cheaper 1tb hdd by seagate for 20 dollars the case would be anything that fits the parts, again, the performance per dollar is much more important than appearance, though if i can make it look good on a budget that wouldn't be so bad. in terms of cooling, I am going with a set of three fans, noise is not an issue, as the rig will be used with noise cancelling headphones, though I am willing to pay extra to keep the heat down, so cooling is extremely important, noise, not so much. if there is anything I am missing, or a better way to put this build together, any input would be great, thank you for taking the time to read this, I am sure that what I am looking at is somehow woefully inadequate, and I apologize, but again, this is my first build.