Lee989

Thanks for the feedback, I'll check the PSU tier list, I think I just threw in that PSU based on a build recommendation for someone else on here. Thanks for the advice on the mp510 i'll check that out (I knew splitting storage would save a little money but I hadn't a clue which cheap SSD to use if I did that). Currently thinking either an rx5600xt or rtx 1660 super for the GPU. Both seem to be solid 1080p GPU's. The 1660S looks to be £40+ cheaper and doesn't seem that far behind the 5600xt on performance so unless the BF deals change that I think i'll be buying my first Nvidia card in 15 years. I did consider dropping down to the 2600x with 3200mhz but not sure if the ~£60 saving is worth it. I'd be removing most of the upgrade headroom if she ever wanted to upgrade to a 5700xt or possibly even better in future. One thing is certain, spending someone else's money makes me strangely more anxious than spending my own!

Budget (including currency): £800 (possibly up to £900) Country: UK Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Overwatch, Detroit become human, cyberpunk 2077, ark survival evolved. Other details Upgrading from a Phenom II X4 965 and a Radeon HD 5770 Trying to put together a budget build for my sister. Everything she has is over a decade old. I've started by throwing in some components that I used in my own build along with a cheap(ish) case and couple of extra budget fans, to get an idea of how much money I have left for the GPU (list is below sans GPU). But I might be doing that backwards, maybe I should be adding a GPU and seeing what I have left for the CPU since she'll mostly be using it for gaming? Storage I just went with the same thing I have in my PC. Might be able to save £30 or so there with a 256 nvme for the OS and a 1tb 7200rpm for game library. In terms of expected performance, she's never had "gaming PC" so average will do. 1080p @ 60fps on medium to high quality settings maybe depending on which game it is? (I'm not really a gamer so please tell me what you think is reasonable). Here's the kicker though. The monitor she has is an old 22" Samsung BX2235. 2ms response, 60hz refresh, might be OK until she saves up again to replace it? but it only has DVI input, no HDMI. So I either factor a new monitor into this build. or I think I can get a HDMI->DVI adapter. She also has a PS2 mouse and keyboard! But I'll just buy those myself for her as an early xmas present. She has saved £800 for it, but I think I can risk planning for a little higher in the hope some good deals drop over black friday period. If i'm wrong, i'll have to find a cardboard box and cut some fan holes into it PCPartPicker Part List Type Item Price CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor £180.00 @ Currys PC World Motherboard MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard £89.99 @ Amazon UK Memory Crucial Ballistix 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory £69.59 @ Amazon UK Storage ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive £116.85 @ Amazon UK Case Fractal Design Define S ATX Mid Tower Case £54.97 @ Laptops Direct Power Supply Corsair TXM Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply £78.99 @ AWD-IT Case Fan be quiet! Pure Wings 2 61.2 CFM 140 mm Fan £10.49 @ Amazon UK Case Fan be quiet! Pure Wings 2 61.2 CFM 140 mm Fan £10.49 @ Amazon UK Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts Total £611.37 Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-11-18 11:55 GMT+0000

So my sister's asked me to plan a new PC for Christmas as the 10+ year old one I left behind surprisingly doesn't play modern games. I recently built myself a PC with your guys help (Ryzen 3600 + 5700XT) and since i'm not a gamer and I don't really have a deep understanding of hardware and comparing them, I thought it best to get some help since it's not my money i'm spending. My current plan is to put together a build that's in budget today, then wait for the cyber monday / xmas deals to drop and buy it piece by piece. Either get it a bit cheaper or have an idea of potential upgrades on standby to get more for her money (as you can tell from her current rig, it won't be upgraded for many years once built). Budget (including currency): £1000 (max - she's raiding the penny jar at this point) Country: UK Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: "Modern games" was the original brief but I got a starting list of games she would like to start playing - Phasmophobia, Overwatch, Detroit become human, cyberpunk 2077, ark survival evolved. So we're talking online co-op games mostly I think? (excuse my ignorance) Other details Ideally need monitor, kb/mouse. Existing ones are ancient, think the monitor is DVI not HDMI and the KB i'm sure is PS2! Doesn't need to be anything fancy, maybe if we can save £300 of the budget for such extras that should be enough?... Resolution & refresh rate... No idea. What's considered a decent experience by the average gamer? 1080 @ 60 ? In-game graphics quality likewise whatever is decent. It's a lot of money for her so I want her to be happy with it, but I've also warned her she's probably not going to be running her games on ultra-extreme-high-quality settings either. My current thinking based on looking as similar threads in this budget is a Ryzen 3600 + an RX 580 or 1660 and 16GB of 3200 or 3600 ram. Maybe with a view to a slightly better GPU if the xmas deals are in our favour. So what would you guys recommend? And what would you recommend keeping an eye out for in the deals?

Not something I would do personally, but if you really want to fill those slots then go for the cheaper option. At the end of the day you're not buying fake RAM sticks, you're buying an RGB lighting strip that has a RAM style connector. Plenty of £££ are put into aesthetics. If you want that particularly look and are happy to spend the money then go for it.

There are two M.2 slots. M.2_1 (top) and M.2_2 (bottom). M.2_1 will disable SATA port 1 if you use a SATA M.2 device (because it needs to use the bandwidth from that port, all other SATA ports remain usable). The Samsung 970 Evo is an NVMe device, so it will NOT disable SATA port 1. M.2_2 I believe disables SATA ports 5 & 6 in order to run at full speed for NVMe devices. Ports 1 - 4 remain usable (unless you also have a SATA device in M.2_1 in which case ports 2-4 remain usable) TLDR; Plug your Samsung Evo into the top M.2 slot, plug your Barracuda into any SATA port. Won't be a problem

@LogicalDrm Thanks. Last time I looked at a BIOS screen myself was nearly 10 years ago. Once I get all the parts ordered and assembled I'll be able to take a look. I'm sure it's obvious when you look at it, I just over-prepare for everything

Thanks @Mira Yurizaki So since I can mix, better off going for the PWM ones anyway as they can spin down slower. Then I guess I try out the 2 x 120mm's that are non-PWM and see how loud they are on their slowest setting and if they are too loud I switch those out for PWM also to get them even slower/quieter. And If i want to use all 4 fans with the 3 mobo fan headers, I will use a PWM fan splitter on the 2 front intakes. Hopefully I understood you correctly Thank you for your reply

Sorry in advance for any stupid questions! Just trying to avoid doing anything wrong I've just ordered a Fractal Design Meshify C Mini for my build, it includes two 120mm fans that have 3-pin connectors (so they must be DC controlled right?). I've read a lot of reviews and it seems common to swap the included intake for 2 x 140mm fans to either get better airflow and/or reduce noise (be quite pure wings 2 are very popular). Oddly the PWM variants of these are slightly cheaper in the UK than the DC variants. I haven't bought a mobo yet, but i'm planning on the MSI B450 Mortar Max. In the manual I see it supports both DC and PWM fan types and supposedly does "automatic detection" but you can also manually set the mode in the BIOS. So on to my questions: 1. Should I be mixing PWM and DC fans? 2. If not, should I throw out both pre-installed DC fans and go PWM, or keep the pre-installed and get 2 new 140mm DC? 3. If "automatic detection" doesn't work for some reason, can I set the PWM/DC setting for each header, or is it a single setting for all headers? 4. Assuming I keep the pre-installed fans, I'd have 2 x 140mm intake, 1 x 120mm rear exhaust. Would you use the remaining 120mm as a bottom intake or put it at the top rear (or top center) to help exhaust? (or don't use it at all?). 4a. Guessing I'd need to get a fan splitter for the 2 front intakes as I only have 3 headers? 5. Is there a strong argument to leave it "stock" and see what the temps are like? I guess I could wait and see if I need any extra fans? By the way, the case will be sat on my desk close to me, so whilst i'm not expecting to get a "silent" build, I am trying to keep fan noise down as much as possible within reasonable costs. Thanks in advance

I lost out on so many deals lately that I was worried I might regret not getting it. So for better or for worse, i've bought it! Hoping I see some CPU discounts in the next few days now. I guess this means i'm not backing out of building this rig now... ?

Just found an offer on a PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card which with code PARTYTIME drops to £315. However the offer is only valid until midnight tonight. I've not made a final decision on my build specs, but I was wondering should I buy this now and build around it. It seems like a good saving and a decent quality card? The GPU's I had bookmarked as potentials on PCPartPicker are: "PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 8 GB RED DRAGON Video Card" costing £330 "Zotac GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB GAMING Video Card" costing £300 So I feel like getting an XT version right in the middle price-wise is a good idea? Or should I wait until I know exactly the build I want before hunting around for discounts (I missed out on the sabrant rocket discount ?). For context, the build is for something to play games on like Civ 5/6, Age of empires e.c.t. Just in case that influences GPU decisions.

Thanks @RodrigoRS . I did see some people say the 3600 isn't balanced against the 5x0 GPUs, but then I also knew sim games were often CPU hungry especially in late game turns. I'll be honest I don't understand this enough to make an educated decision so i'm very much reliant on the forum for info. Your build would probably mean sticking to the Q300L case as I don't think I could justify going above £800 for what i'm using it for. So I guess I have to make the decision between a better case or a more balanced build... I hate making decisions ?

Great feedback @RodrigoRS. I definitely think the larger single nvme for everything will be better. I've got 32TB free space on my NAS for general storage so I shouldn't have to much non-app/non-game clutter taking up space such as videos/photos/docs/e.c.t. Heard Linus mention Cities Skylines on a couple of videos and thought it looked interesting. I'll have to check it out when I'm all setup! I'm really happy with the build @boggy77 put up for me. Just need to make my decision on the case then I should be pretty much there.

@boggy77 Thanks for the revision. That certainly seems better. The GPU was a big concern, not really sure how I missed that Powercolor one! There is headroom in the budget (assuming I don't change my case - see below) for a 1660 @ £200 but maybe thats overkill for my use. @GER_T4IGA This seems like quite a polarising case. Some really hate it and i've seen that video posted as proof lots of times. But then people that like it and have used it do rate it decent enough and point out the GN review is a different case and the PSU placement makes a big difference... I'm not against changing the case of course. I did just take another look and i've found 2 alternatives (albeit much more expensive): Themaltake Level 20 VT is a decent looking but would need at least 1 additional fan. Still not the best airflow according to a GN review but too my newb eyes the temps seem reasonable (I don't plan on watching it do torture tests for fun after all). NZXT H400i will just about fit in the space I have if I overhang the desk an inch. Comes with 3 fans pre-installed so if I can get it at a good price (without the blue strip preferably) I could make that work. Looks like I wasn't as far off as I thought though. Making a decision on the case is probably my job for this evening... Edit: Looking more into mini towers there may be more choice than I thought. The In Win 301 case height is quite low too. Guess i'll have to open them all up and check the heights. Maybe a vertical PC will work if I can find the right tower case...

Hi Guys. Been trying to put together a build for the past 2 days and my eyes are glazing over. So much research to do on stuff I don't yet understand. I thought i'd just post up where I am at to get some initial feedback and get some questions answered. I don't want to waste anyone's time at this stage so feel free to respond with broad advice. I can always come back again when i've got a more finalised plan to share. Budget?! £700 - £800 (United Kingdom) Much higher and I may never get around to doing it. Cheaper it is, the easier it would be to justify spending the money. Why am I doing this? I don't own a PC, my daily driver is a 2013 macbook I use for work but it's terrible for any games I've tried to run on it (it struggles just powering my external monitors!). So I'd like a cheapish PC to stick on the side of my desk for a bit of light gaming when i'm bored of work. What does it need to do? Currently I have 1 purpose. To run Civ 5 with some DLC's and maybe Civ 6 and Age of Empires 4 when it comes out. Strategy / Sim styles games tend to be my go to. Other than that I have no idea, Rocket League looks fun...? Honestly, i'm not a gamer. I haven't played a game on a PC in 15 years and I touch my PS4 once a quarter to watch it updating. This build is either going to open up a world of gaming to me, or it'll gather dust in the corner. I may also use it to run some VM's, or some other basic tasks to free up my main workhorse, but to start with it will be switched on to play a game then turned off again. I have no intention at this stage of overclocking, watercooling or doing anything too fancy. Buy the parts, stick them in the tin and forget about it. What have I got already?.. Nothing! I'm not even sure I have a spare plug socket. Might need to go buy a power strip... I do have a spare HDMI or mDP port on my secondary/ternary DELL P2415Q monitor which i'm planning to hook it up too (just swap input sources when I want to use it). No idea if it's a good monitor, but I probably don't need a 144hz 4k beast for sim games. I also need a keyboard & mouse but i'll see what funds are left at the end, I may just start with a cheap £30 combo set off amazon. Get on with your build already! PCPartPicker Part List Type Item Price CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor £175.98 @ Aria PC Motherboard MSI B450M MORTAR MAX Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard £92.99 @ Overclockers.co.uk Memory Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory £79.91 @ More Computers Storage ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro 256 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive £37.43 @ CCL Computers Storage Seagate BarraCuda 1 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive £34.99 @ Overclockers.co.uk Video Card MSI Radeon RX 590 8 GB ARMOR OC Video Card £169.98 @ Box Limited Case Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L MicroATX Mini Tower Case £32.78 @ Amazon UK Power Supply Corsair TXM Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply £72.97 @ Laptops Direct Wireless Network Adapter Asus PCE-AC51 PCIe x1 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi Adapter £27.95 @ Amazon UK Case Fan be quiet! Pure Wings 2 140 PWM 61.2 CFM 140 mm Fan £9.98 @ Amazon UK Case Fan be quiet! Pure Wings 2 140 PWM 61.2 CFM 140 mm Fan £9.98 @ Amazon UK Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts Total £744.94 Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-12-05 17:08 GMT+0000 Notes & Questions: I chose the Q300L case because of height restrictions (can be used horizontally like a htpc) and avoiding ITX tax. I explain more here Motherboard was just picked due to popularly and is >£20 more than many others. Wondering if I can save some cash here? I went for a 256gb nvme for Windows/Apps and a 1TB HDD for game installs. Seems cheaper than a 1TB ssd (my first thought) but maybe I picked cheap/bad drives? Some kind of Wi-Fi card is a must as I have no wired connection. 2 fans to use as front intakes. I just picked the most popular 140mm under £10, no idea if they any good. GPU I think has really bad cooling, so I expect that will need changing. I expect there's some cost saving that could be done here either to get a better cpu/gpu combo, or to just bring the price down for the sake of making it an easier purchase.

Amazing. Not as bad as I was imagining then. I get overwhelmed by the number of options so I'm glad it's not a dead end. No parts lying around so I'll just add a half decent fan to the build plan ?

I have a particular space I'd to put my new build into on my desk which is height restricted (I could remodel my office setup, but that's not a preferred option). I was going for a mini-ITX build, but they cost more, require more research into cooling and quite frankly I'm probably too much of a build newb to do a decent job of it anyway. I then found the Coolermaster Q300L case is designed to sit horizontally, which would increase the footprint (which should be fine) but keeps the height down. Plus I can switch to a vertical config later on if I do change my office. But there's some concerns about restrictive cooling... Question 1, the case comes with 1 rear fan. If I add some additional fans to it, will it keep things adequately cool? Any suggestions on which fans, number of them and where to put them welcome. Question 2, will doing that just push the price up so high I may as well get a different case or go back to an ITX build plan? Question 3, is there a better case that I can put horizontally? Or maybe I get something with front power buttons and glue some rubber feet on the side panel to lie it down on? Hardware wise my current plan (pending review) is an R5 3600 with an RX 570/580/590. Stock coolers, no overclocking. I'd love some feedback from others with this case that aren't trying to overclock or do other fancy things.

Thanks for the advice. I remember watching that video now you've quoted it. So when you talk about adequate airflow, you're primarily looking at where the air vents are in the case and where fans can be mounted in relation to them. I think even I can just about understand that Going to start putting together some builds today so I'll be putting the advice into action. We'll see if I really understood it when I post asking for feedback before purchase

Hi everyone! Since i've just started to look into building a budget rig a whole decade after I last built a PC I thought i'd share in my little nostalgia trip. Please note all these images were taken on a dirt cheap Fuji digital camera or worse a mobile phone (don't forget it was 2006). They are pretty bad quality, small and i've had to crop some of them heavily (I never took them with the intention of sharing online). Just to set the scene, I was fresh out of school, working 12 hour factory shifts for £3/hr saving what I could to build myself my first PC. It took me months of saving up but I eventually had enough to place my parts order. I'd never spent so much money in one go and I still remember spending literally hours staring at the checkout cart convincing myself to press the buy button. Obviously I did it in the end, otherwise this would be a very boring post indeed. There's some additional parts I bought from other vendors like a CPU cooler, cables and a fan controller, but only this vendor would show me my order history going so far back. I believe the total build cost was around the £600 mark. Parts delivered, I was clearly too excited to take a bundle shot, but I did find a shot of the CPU and Mobo. I still have all the boxes for this build in my parents attic. So what are we putting all this gear into you might be wondering? A Thermaltake Soprano? A Coolermaster Storm?! Possibly one of those aluminium Lian-Li cases that were super light weight?... None of those! I had this Of course I wasn't going to leave it like that. I didn't really know what I was going to turn it into, but I was young, had zero DIY skills, no workshop, and the key's to my dads toolbox. Who wouldn't decide to wing it on a custom case modding project! My rough idea was to flatten the side panels, put in a window, add some lights and transfer a decal of space gas cloud I had an odd obsession with at the time. So let's get started! Step 1 was to flatten the right side panel. This should have been the easiest job. Fill it, sand it and paint it. Because the impression was only a couple millimeters deep I decided to opt for a spray on filler. That was an absolutely stupid idea. A couple of millimeters might not sound like a lot, but it took 1 and half tins of spray on filler and 2 days of spraying and drying cycles to build it up. Oh and to top it off, it never turned fully solid for sanding. It kept this rubbery texture. I assume the spray can fillers are meant for scratch filling... Anyway, after trying to sand it down and the filler just clogging the sand paper or coming off in chunks. I grabbed a metal scraper and removed the lot. Car body filler it is! Filled and sanded down that was one panel complete. It was far from perfect, but by this point i'd spend days on one panel and I just wanted to move on. A few of the perforated air holes in the bottom right corner do show in the final product, but it wasn't too noticeable. Next up we have the left side panel. Didn't get too many images of this, must have been too busy playing with power tools. So unfortunately this action shot is all you're getting. Finally we have the front face. I decided I wanted to swap the power buttons for some light up push to make switches, so back out comes the filler so we can flatten everything off. This time I'd learned from my mistakes, so I used the car body filler to do the majority of the filling, then a light coat of the spray to fill in some imperfections after i'd done the first pass of sanding. I knew airflow was a thing, so I knew I had to make some holes for some front intake fans. I decided to just follow the contours of the front panel and settled on a pair of eyes. Back out with the Dremel and we're all done and ready for the paint. Now the original idea was to place a decal on the right panel. I'd purchased some transfer paper, and printed out a test sheet to make sure I had it sized perfectly. I'd edited the image to remove the black background (since the case was black) so you have to imagine the white paper would be transparent. As it turned out, the image didn't really work. The blues and greens were very dull when printed and I scraped the idea. The right side wouldn't be on show anyway, i'd had my parts for over a week and it was itching to get this thing up and running. So the case get's reassembled, parts put in and booted up. Unfortunately I didn't get any images of putting the parts in the case. I was probably too worried about messing it all up at this stage, which I did do very spectacularly when on first switch on the case filled with smoke and I poo'd myself. Whilst funny looking back now, you can imagine the horror when I thought I'd somehow blew up my components. As it turned out, I stupidly didn't insulate the bare wire power cables for the button led's on the front which must have caused some arcing as the plastic had melted on the back of the switches. Luckily no serious problems, the led's were gone (and I never got around to fixing them) but pulled the power cables off and it booted up fine. So here's the final result. Far from refined, loads of imperfections and not very good at cable management but none of that mattered to me. It looked awesome, blew my old PC out the water and lasted me many years. I don't remember ever throwing it away so it's probably buried in my parents attic somewhere. Be interesting to dig it out and see if it still works.

Thanks for all the replies. So it seems the general consensus is very much along the lines of what I was expecting with the addition of airflow (which i'm not sure how you decide on that, but i'm guessing somewhere to get cables out of the way and front/rear fan mounts... But i'm sure a forum search will yield some advice on that). My final decision will probably be based on popularity of the case. I can see £20 cases and £150 cases that seem to pass those checks with the biggest difference (for me) being the amount of plastic (cheaper) vs metal (more expensive) used. So might be time to look at a bunch of similar build plans and note down the cases used and go from there. I do like that case. And when I started looking at doing this I was thinking of trying to get as small as reasonable as it's got to sit on my desk. I keep flipping between an ITX build and a Mid-Tower ATX build. So maybe I just need to do a pcpartpicker build for both options and go from there.

For some context... been over a decade since I last built a PC. I fancy building something to pass a few hours on games like Civilization. Apart from getting into LTT videos earlier this year i'm completely out of touch with modern hardware. Based on reading these forums, my current plan is a budget friendly R5 3600 + RX570/580/590 build. I'd like to go small but mini-ITX adds £££'s and micro-atx doesn't seem to offer much space saving over a mid-tower, so i'll probably go for a mid-tower. So the question is... How do you guys filter down the list of available cases? There's the obvious filters: Form factor Does the GPU fit? Can you afford it? Do you like the look of it? Unfortunately, applying these filters to the list of available cases still leaves me with lots of options. I'm not planning on water cooling, over clocking, OTT RGB so it seems like nearly every single ATX case fits my needs at the moment. I'm currently being swayed towards the Corsair Carbide 275R or the Cooler Master MasterBox Q500L. Not sure why, maybe I recognise them from other peoples builds. Or because they have the most stars on the product pages. So are there any other things I need to think about when picking a case? Or do I just accept they're all just metal tins and buy the one that's been hammered into a design I like?