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$600 build - Suggestions please

PBSoldier
By PBSoldier
in New Builds and Planning
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Hi guys,

I'm hoping to build my first PC in the next 3 months or so. I have parts picked out, and I would like to get some suggestions from the veterans out there.

Here are the parts I have picked out and their price (Newegg) at the time of this post:

CPU: Intel i5 3350P (Quad-Core, 3.1GHz) - $180

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-S1 (Micro-ATX) - $45

GPU: Gigabyte GTX 660 2GB - $190

PSU: Corsair CX600M (600W) - $70

RAM: 4GB Corsair - $55

HDD: 250GB WD Blue - $55 (Not much storage, I know - but I currently have a 500GB HD that I've used 100GB of)

Case: Cougar MG100 - $30

 

It's main purpose is gaming, but I'd like to get more into game development with it. I already have a monitor and other necessary peripherals, so I haven't a need for them.

It comes to a total of around $630. If you see anything wrong (or any way to shave a few bucks off the price), please tell me.

 

 

Another question, in order to have enough money to buy these parts I would have to sell my current computer. It's a laptop, about 2 years old, $430 when I got it. I'm hoping to get $200 back from it.

Here are it's specs:

CPU: AMD Dual-Core 2.4 GHz

GPU: ATI 4250m (shared memory)

RAM: 8GB G.Skill (Gaming-grade RAM. It had 3GB when I bought it, don't know if that matters)

HDD: 500GB WD Black

OS: Windows 7 64-bit

Display: 15.6" 1366x768

It's a nice laptop, pretty full of features and handles games well. I figure only a casual user would want to buy it.

 

Is $200 too much (or too little) to ask for it? If so, what would be a more reasonable price?

 

Thank you for your time and answers :)

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For the lower end gaming builds, AMD would be your best bet I believe.  Better price to performance ratio.
Ill leave this here.  Logan knows his stuff more than I do so this could be of use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EnOMhXkKqI
 

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For the lower end gaming builds, AMD would be your best bet I believe.  Better price to performance ratio.

Ill leave this here.  Logan knows his stuff more than I do so this could be of use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EnOMhXkKqI

 

I've had bad luck with AMD in the past. They always seem to have overheating issues and I've had them die very suddenly. Have they improved on these problems in the last few years?

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I've had bad luck with AMD in the past. They always seem to have overheating issues and I've had them die very suddenly. Have they improved on these problems in the last few years?

Depends on who you ask i guess I'm have been running a 6950 in my gaming rig for the last 18 months or so and its been cool quite and issue free my dads been using a pair of Athlon II quad cores for the last 3.5 years and apart from a dead hard drive they have been issue free. On the other hand i have a laptop with a phenom tricore in it and a 5650m and its run hot from day one when i play games on it temps reach 90c but i think thats more an issue with the fact that the oem skimped out of the cooling solution then any thing amd did. That said there reference gpu coolers suck and you will want one designed by the board partner.

 

Here is what i threw together in about 30 minutes.

 

 
CPU:  AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor  ($116.97 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard:  MSI 970A-G43 ATX AM3+ Motherboard  ($59.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage:  Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($59.98 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card:  PowerColor Radeon R9 270X 2GB Video Card  ($205.91 @ Newegg) 
Total: $605.82
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)

(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-12-27 22:46 EST-0500)

 

I i picked parts with the option of running crossfire in the future its a full atx build as there aren't much in the way of micro atx AM3+ motherboards. I know you don't think you will need the space but look at how little price difference there is between your 250gb dive and the 1 tb drive i picked if you want to get into pc gaming you will probably need the space pc games are mainly digital distribution at this point in the last 3 years or so my steam library has grown to over 500gb in size and cross platform games are expected to balloon in size with both the xbone and the ps4 having a bluray dive and we aren't limited by the 360's dvd drive.

 

I don't fell that 4gb of ram is enough these days there have been times when i have run out at 8gb and with both consoles having now large pools of fast ram I expect usage for games to increase in the near future. The 270X is a faster card then the 660 and similarly priced. Wasn't anything wrong with the case you chose as far as i can tell i just needed a bigger one for this build. You chose a solid power supply i saw no reason to change it. As for the motherboard i just chose what looked good it supports crossfire, overclocking, usb 3.0, 4 ram dimms and has 4 eggs on newegg with about 150 reviews. As for the cpu the i5 is faster in general but the 6300 is no slouch and is overclockable with the addition of a better cooler.

 

If you want to go with a nvidia card i'm reasonably sure we could find the money with your budget to get a gtx 760.

 

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^ Wow you blew my system out of the water O_o

I have concerns with the hard disk and the graphics card. I don't trust Seagate, I've had two of their drives fail in the laptop I mentioned before I got the WD I have now. It's probably a non-issue (and I know I'm being picky about brands :P) but I'm not sure. Also, I've never heard of PowerColor. Can you confirm that their card would run about equal-performance to a more mainstream brand like Gigabyte or EVGA?

 

Sorry to be picky, but it's my first build and I want to make sure I do it right. Thank you :)

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Power color is a brand i have seen come up a lot in past searches for gpu's i don't have any data on that card in particular but they have been making amd and ati cards for a longtime they aren't a no name brand. It looks like it has a decent cooler on it the 270x isn't particularly power hungry or hard to cool even when used for gpu compute its also got a slight factory overclock on it. Its definitely midrange as far boards go but that mainly comes down to overclocking headroom i would expect it to run well at its stock speeds but i have no idea how it will over clock. If you want a WD drive get one a 1tb blue is only about 5 bucks more http://pcpartpicker.com/part/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd10ezex. I suggest looking for reviews from hardware sites on that motherboard it looks like a decent board but I didn't dig all that deeply into it and maybe spend some time on pcpartpicker looking at cases i just chose what i knew was a decent budget case things to look for are the use of 120mm and 140mm fans a cutout in the motherboard tray behind the CPU so you can mount the back-plate for an aftermarket cpu cooler with out removing the mother board  and space behind the motherboard tray for cable routing. Nice but not must have features are thumb screws for the side panels tool less drive bays and dust filters on the air intakes. I don't think you will be able to do much better then the core 3000 its a really nice case at 50 dollars but i didn't spend much time looking.

 

EDIT: I knew I had seen that mother board somewhere http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-fx-6300-overclocking,3617.html tomshardware used one in there last system builder marthon for the 650 dollar budget pc you should read that article it compairs the 6300 to a simarly priced ivybridge based i3 I also noticed that while that motherboard supports crossfire in its in a 16x and 4x configureation which isn't a good idea its still a decent motherboard but the idea of crossfire in the future goes out the window.

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Depends on who you ask i guess I'm have been running a 6950 in my gaming rig for the last 18 months or so and its been cool quite and issue free my dads been using a pair of Athlon II quad cores for the last 3.5 years and apart from a dead hard drive they have been issue free. On the other hand i have a laptop with a phenom tricore in it and a 5650m and its run hot from day one when i play games on it temps reach 90c but i think thats more an issue with the fact that the oem skimped out of the cooling solution then any thing amd did. That said there reference gpu coolers suck and you will want one designed by the board partner.

 

Here is what i threw together in about 30 minutes.

 

 
CPU:  AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor  ($116.97 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard:  MSI 970A-G43 ATX AM3+ Motherboard  ($59.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage:  Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($59.98 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card:  PowerColor Radeon R9 270X 2GB Video Card  ($205.91 @ Newegg) 
Total: $605.82
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)

(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-12-27 22:46 EST-0500)

 

I i picked parts with the option of running crossfire in the future its a full atx build as there aren't much in the way of micro atx AM3+ motherboards. I know you don't think you will need the space but look at how little price difference there is between your 250gb dive and the 1 tb drive i picked if you want to get into pc gaming you will probably need the space pc games are mainly digital distribution at this point in the last 3 years or so my steam library has grown to over 500gb in size and cross platform games are expected to balloon in size with both the xbone and the ps4 having a bluray dive and we aren't limited by the 360's dvd drive.

 

I don't fell that 4gb of ram is enough these days there have been times when i have run out at 8gb and with both consoles having now large pools of fast ram I expect usage for games to increase in the near future. The 270X is a faster card then the 660 and similarly priced. Wasn't anything wrong with the case you chose as far as i can tell i just needed a bigger one for this build. You chose a solid power supply i saw no reason to change it. As for the motherboard i just chose what looked good it supports crossfire, overclocking, usb 3.0, 4 ram dimms and has 4 eggs on newegg with about 150 reviews. As for the cpu the i5 is faster in general but the 6300 is no slouch and is overclockable with the addition of a better cooler.

 

If you want to go with a nvidia card i'm reasonably sure we could find the money with your budget to get a gtx 760.

 

 

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If you want to get a gtx 760, go fm2 and pick up an amd athlon ii x4 750k. Amazing cpu for only $80. Can handle most midrange graphics cards, except u wont have much upgradability :/

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If you want to get a gtx 760, go fm2 and pick up an amd athlon ii x4 750k. Amazing cpu for only $80. Can handle most midrange graphics cards, except u wont have much upgradability :/

I thought about suggesting that but i think we could squeeze the 30 to 40 dollars need out of the build without going that far probably from the psu, case, and motherboard but I like the way its balanced currently.

 

Edit: question for PBSolder are you lucky enough to live near a microcenter? If you do that might change things.

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^ Wow you blew my system out of the water O_o

I have concerns with the hard disk and the graphics card. I don't trust Seagate, I've had two of their drives fail in the laptop I mentioned before I got the WD I have now. It's probably a non-issue (and I know I'm being picky about brands :P) but I'm not sure. Also, I've never heard of PowerColor. Can you confirm that their card would run about equal-performance to a more mainstream brand like Gigabyte or EVGA?

 

Sorry to be picky, but it's my first build and I want to make sure I do it right. Thank you :)

You need to quote a post or tag a member or else they won't get a notification you replied to them.

 

Seagate and WD are equally reliable. 

Powercolor is fine. Also, brand generally doesn't change performance much since the gpu is the same. 

If you ever need help with a build, read the following before posting: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/3061-build-plan-thread-recommendations-please-read-before-posting/
Also, make sure to quote a post or tag a member when replying or else they won't get a notification that you replied to them.

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