~350 dollar AMD Gaming/General Use Tower.

[Internetlad]

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My brother in law recently showed interest in getting me to build him a PC on a very limited budget. I've done some looking around and want to get a second opinion on the parts i've chosen.

Now right off the bat let me say that i'm not an AMD guy, so this build is both foreign and pretty interesting to me. I'm looking forward to seeing how AMD's A series performs in-game.

Prices, as always, are in flux so I won't include direct pricing, but the actual number falls somewhere around what we want. Parts will be bought through the supplier of the store I work at, newegg or Amazon depending on which is the best for shipping, cost and timeframe.


CPU- AMD A10-5800K-Good graphics performance, but little upgrade potential as this is the highest AM2 socket processor, as I understand. Price recently jumped 10 bucks on newegg, much to my displeasure. Hopefully it will drop a bit after the holidays.

HDD- WD Caviar Black 500 or 1TB drive- I can get these through our supplier for $70 or $87 bucks respectively, a nice discount from what Newegg is offering. This may seem unbalanced to the rest of the build so let me explain. This is a "foot in the door" build, he's hoping to do upgrades in the future as well as use it for storing family documents. I've had a hard drive crash, not pretty. If he can continue to use this drive either as a storage or cold data drive if/when he upgrades to an SSD he'll appreciate the extra 20 bucks spent in the long term. If not the blacks give a small speed boost over comparable offerings from seagate.

RAM- 8GB kit of whatever is best for the money at the time. Prime candidates include G.SKILL Ripjaws, Kingston RAM or Corsair RAM, all generally running around 30-40 bucks depending on clock speeds and current sales.

MOBO- GIGABYTE GA-F2A85XM-D3H Comboed on newegg for a 30 dollar savings. I've seen a lot of people suggesting ASRock motherboards. . . but for some reason the brand doesn't sit well with me, I don't know why. I had an ASRock, and as far as I remember it worked fine, but it just screams "bad brand" to me. I'd much rather go with an Asus but they are beyond our budget. Other contenders include similar MSI boards

Case/PSU- here i'm torn. I have an old case, it's ATX standard, but it is pretty beat up. Good solid steel construction but no room for 120 mm fans (he is hoping for it to be fairly quiet.) If I went this route I could splurge on an antec VP-450 PSU and make sure he's got good power. Alternative is go with a new case including power supply. One with a 400W supply should work in the short term.

Note that for this unit we are NOT using a video card in the short term, it wouldn't fit into the budget and that's why I was considering the A10. I'd like to get a cooler to help with the sound and possibly do a light OC but it seems all the good ones are ~50 bucks. In the short term, stock would work but if anybody knows of a good,cheap AM2 cooler, shout it out.

The hard drive is basically set in stone but feel free to make suggestions for any other part. We probably won't be buying until into the new year so don't let current deals sway your opinion of what to buy "today" just go by reliability and personal preference.

Thanks!

EDIT: Almost forgot, we'll be running Windows 7 x64 on it. That is easily the least cost effective part, but what are you gonna do? He doesn't know linux and can't be bothered to learn it, not that most games will run un-tweaked on linux. We might install 7 for the trial period and i'll jut get him to buy a key when the month is up. Can't do that with 8.

[Turbo Slaab]

Case/PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147099

Ram: AMD's APU's LOOOOVE high clocked RAM. The processor and gpu will thank you.

MB: Biostar is pretty good for the price....

Everything else looks pretty good. I would HIGHLY recommend a ssd. Even if it's a small one just for the OS. Your brother-in-law will be impressed!

[Internetlad]

I would HIGHLY recommend a ssd. Even if it's a small one just for the OS. Your brother-in-law will be impressed!

As much as I would love to fit an SSD into this build, I think that is better left for the future. We can migrate the Black to a cold data storage drive and get a 120-240 as cost allows when he's ready to upgrade.

I'm giving him an old monitor and a KB/M i have NIB sitting around (simple kengsington stuff) so I think that the monitor will be the first thing he'll want to upgrade, from there he may want a 6670 to compliment the APU, or overhaul the whole machine. This is just to get him started so he can start playing real PC games (he's addicted to Runescape right now lol)

I picked him up the HAAAB (THQ HB) so he's got a couple games to get him off the ground and the xmas sale is coming up very soon on steam.

Ram: AMD's APU's LOOOOVE high clocked RAM. The processor and gpu will thank you.

Is that referring to specifically the clock speed or do the timings make a big difference as well? I think I was looking at some 1600 ghz G.Skill stuff but i could bump up to 1866 if it really matters. As an intel build rarely cares about clock speeds (1 or 2 fps here and there)

EDIT:

Looks like this is the best price on 1866 atm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460

50 bones for RAM? could save an easy 15 bucks going with this kit

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313080

decisions decisions.

[fohat.digs]

I know that a lot of people love Gigabyte motherboards, but I have tried them a couple of times and been extremely disappointed. I wasted a week trying to get one running, and Micro Center let me bring at least 2 back for replacement, free of charge, but it still did not work.

I generally use Asus, but I have even had good luck with a couple of Elite mobos, which many people think are bad.

Hard to imagine that no video card is better than a cheap one. Prices for "starter" cards have come way down, but I don't have one to recommend.

Last, why not go with Windows 8? Isn't it a good deal cheaper than 7, and faster? I don't really feel the need to move forward, personally, but in your position I might be inclined to spend less now, rather than more one month from now.

[alaricljs]

Every issue I've had with Gigabyte boards has boiled down to other hardware.  yay.   PSU, SSD, RAM... blech

[Turbo Slaab]

1600 should be good. And I'd go with name-brand RAM, even if it is a little bit more.

[IvanIvanovich]

If you're using the onboard apu graphics, you should be looking at ddr3-2400 and boards that will support it as they love that extra bandwidth. For case, there is the NZXT source 210 which is really well made for a value case.

[TheProfosist]

I was just going to be selling a complete build of one of these but for more that your wiling to spend

[alaricljs]

I prefer black, but I do have a Source 210 and it's pretty good.  Rather good for the discounted price

[Internetlad]

Hard to imagine that no video card is better than a cheap one. Prices for "starter" cards have come way down, but I don't have one to recommend.

Last, why not go with Windows 8? Isn't it a good deal cheaper than 7, and faster? I don't really feel the need to move forward, personally, but in your position I might be inclined to spend less now, rather than more one month from now.

I was surprised too. originally it was to be a 500 dollar build and I was going to fit a 7850 and i3 3220 into it. When he dropped the price I looked into AMD APUs. They have fairly basic, but capable, and extremely cost effective graphical capability. Basically it's 120 bucks for the processor and a 6670 which, while not a card I would be happy with, is really all I can fit in for the price.

Hell, it runs the game smooth at what appears to be decent settings, all while handling Fraps. I'm game.
You can always toss in a 6670 GPU and "crossfire" the two, from what i've been told, if you want to handle games at high

Windows 8 OEM and Windows 7 OEM are the same price, if we're going completely legit. 99 bucks. Technically one *could* falsify that they had bought a new computer with windows 7 on it to get an 8 "upgrade key" then just do a fresh install, but if you're going by hard facts, they're the same price now. The only reason i'd go with 7 over 8 is that it would buy us a month to use it with no key. Sleazy, yeah, but we can always re-install with 8 later if we want to move up.

1600 should be good. And I'd go with name-brand RAM, even if it is a little bit more.

Is Team Elite not name brand? It's got Iron Egg and good reviews. It's not Patriot or Corsair but so long as the warranty is good what's the difference.

Either way, I've always held to the idea that similarly spec'd ram is pretty much the same across manufacturers since it all uses basically the same chips with a different colour heatsink on top and different warranty.


And to people offering used parts/systems,  my brother in law specifically wants new, warrantiable parts. His wife is all paranoid about building a computer because her family got a home-built computer that "never worked right" years back. (stupid, I know, but whatever, i've no problem with new parts either way) so thanks for the offer but we can't go that route.

[nullstring]

• I wouldn't cheap out on the PSU. If you buy a decent product, it will last for 5+ years and be the last thing that needs to be replaced. (Instead of the first thing...). Good: corsair CX430; Better: Rosewill Capstone; Best: Seasonic X series;
• I like Antec Three hundred v2. The NZXT Source 210 looks ok, but it has front to back drive mounts, which are annoying and can block longer graphics card. But you might be able to live with it.
• You will be able to get a better deal by going with older phenom processor and discrete graphics. That 7660D is not all that fast... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html 8800GT is faster... and that came out 6 years ago
  

You should also think about going for a ivy bridge build. They honestly are not that much more expensive if built on the cheap... especially if you have a microcenter near by
Rosewill Capstone: $60
Cheap case: $30
Misc HDD: $80
Memory: $30
Cheaper Z75 motherboard:$100
3570K: $190 (or G540: $40)
Graphics: $50 to $100

The other thing you could do is by all these parts, except for the processor. Get a G540 or G630 instead.
Your final price will come in at about $400, and when you want to upgrade, you can get a unlocked processor for ~$150, overclock it, and have a machine thats way faster than the A10 could ever hope to be.

[Internetlad]

As I said, the original plan was to go with an intel proc (G860 or i3 3220) and discrete graphics solution (7770 or 7850) but the small budget shoe-horned us into an A10 build to consolidate the price of graphics and CPU.

Actually it was an A8 that was suggested but the A10 is only 10 bucks more.

Either way, as far as upgradability goes, I do see the downside with the AMD build as the A10 is basically the ceiling, upgrade-wise. The thing is, I don't know when he's going to be upgrading, if ever, and for ~350 bucks that is the best build for right now that I can see. We can always flip the board and chip on fleabay for ~100 bucks, lose 60-80 dollars  and put that money into a better intel chip and board when the time comes.

The thing is, this is sort of a proof-of-concept, and if we deliver a low end celeron processor and spend money on the HDD, and PSU, he may not WANT to put money into it.

Even with the build you proposed, assuming we went with the G540 (which, for the money, is a very solid processor) and spent 70 bucks on a 6770, we'd be in the same boat where we're going to be replacing both of those parts anyways, and i'm not sure if we'd see an appreciable increase in performance going that route. The big downside is that the 6670 is theoretically more capable, but would it be bottlenecked by the G540? I daresay the A10 is more capable outside of gaming at almost all levels. Consider it a stop-gap until we can get him something more capable like a 7850, which would, of course, blow the A10 out of the water gaming-wise, but you still have a (power hungry) quad core processor.

I can present both options to him. Certainly the intel build would be more upgradable, but really the only part we'd be keeping at that point is the motherboard, so it doesn't matter much either way if we sell a chip and a card or a chip and board.

TL;DR If he is willing to increase the price, it would drastically change the build, but i'd rather tell him "it isn't great at gaming. . .yet" than "it isn't a very good computer. . . yet".   The A10 is a capable CPU, and i'm willing to give it a try.

[TheProfosist]

the A10 will be more powefull than the low end intel for the most part.

[Internetlad]

He's going to be gaming on a 17" square monitor for the first while, so far reduced resolutions will help for a while. I'll probably heavily suggest that be the first thing he upgrade, but I used it for years and it's manageable.

He's not introduced to the "high end" ecosystem yet. If this is all he knows, he'll be happy with it. He's playing Runescape on one of those acer mini-itx cases so ANYTHING is an upgrade at this point.

[TheProfosist]

The A8 and A10 are powerhungry because they just glued radeon core to a standard cpu....

[Internetlad]

The A8 and A10 are powerhungry because they just glued radeon core to a standard cpu....

Most likely used duct tape.

[TheProfosist]

The A8 and A10 are powerhungry because they just glued radeon core to a standard cpu....

Most likely used duct tape.

i prefer gaffers tape or gorilla tape. One comes off nice and easy and one doesnt come off.