500€ PC for a friend

mucitel1 · February 20, 2015

I'm building a PC for a friend of mine, which will be mostly focused towards gaming and office work. Since I am from Slovenia, I will be ordering all of the parts from Germany (hardwareversand), because it's about 30% cheaper than buying it in my country plus I've used their service before and had absolutely no issues.

Below is a picture of the parts I was thinking of ordering and the explanation for all of them. If ya'll think I should swap something out, I'll consider it. Keep in mind I'm taking Intel CPU, but I'm flexible on the GPU side. Please keep in mind that prices on this site might be a lot different then you might be used from sites such pcpartpicker.

Parts explanation:

- CPU: As I stated earlier, I'm going with intel. I chose the i3 because it's the most expensive thing I can take at this price point. I'd gladly go with i5, but that would add about 70€ for 4460.

- MoBo: B85?! Yes, the main reason I took this is because of its very low price. It still gives all the features that are required, including 6 SATA ports.

- RAM: Pretty much the cheapest 8GB stick I could find and it's from Crucial, which I have been buying for all my builds so far. I went with single stick over 2x4GB kit because it's much cheaper.

- PSU: ~~I think 400W PSU will be enough for Intel CPU and Nvidia card..~~ Took Johannes's recommendation into play. 500W PSU, which was actually only 3€ more but I missed it...

- GPU: ~~960 seems like a good idea, it's about as powerful as 770, which is already a really good card for 1080p gaming. 280X also came across my mind, but it's about 30€ more, so I kept this.~~ 280 seems a better deal than 960 at the moment.

- HDD: 1TB 7200rpm, not much to talk about this. Some might argue between Seagate and WD, I've used both brands over the years and both of them failed as much as the other, so for here it just came down to the price. I would love to include a SSD, but after talking to my friend we came to the conclusion that he will get it a few months later when he saves up some more cash.

- Case: He will reuse his old case, which is still perfectly fine. It's not really anything fancy, but with these components, I believe the heat wont be much of a problem.

I would be glad to hear from you all. What would you change?

Edit: Changed 2 components.

Johannes_Lazor · February 20, 2015

Id rather recommend the R9 280 than the GTX 960, Games Will use more Vram in the future, And 2gb is pretty much on the edge now so the R9 280 would probably hold on for a little longer.

And a 500w PSU would also be good, You never know what he will do in the future.

Otherwise that rig looks good.

mucitel1 · February 20, 2015

Id rather recommend the R9 280 than the GTX 960, Games Will use more Vram in the future, And 2gb is pretty much on the edge now so the R9 280 would probably hold on for a little longer.

And a 500w PSU would also be good, You never know what he will do in the future.

Otherwise that rig looks good.

Thank you for the input. I've checked out some benchmarks and it seems R9 280 and GTX 960 are pretty much tied. I just noticed a Sapphire 280 for about 10€ less, which will be enough to cover 500W PSU.