Best PC for £800

Lokken86 · 21 Oct 2013 at 07:37

Hi,

A friend of mine is buying the components of a gaming PC for his son for Christmas and he is to assemble it on the day. (lucky bugger right).
His budget would be approximately £800 which is for the base unit only as he already has a monitor and speakers etc.

I'm thinking along the lines of I5/280? or maybe an AMD cpu setup?
Basically whatever would give him the best performance for minimum cost... His son is 14 and used to playing on xbox, he's never even seen a PC game in action so my plan is to show him what PC can do.

A little help would be much appreciated.

Saitex · 21 Oct 2013 at 07:58

Quick build, quite a bit of stuff to opt out and change to suit your preference, no idea why you would want to go with a 280 though considering it's a fairly old card.

Lokken86 · 21 Oct 2013 at 09:03

Cheers .

Might even be able to squeeze an ssd in with a fiddle around.

The reason for the 280 is that nothing offers the same performance for the same money as a 280. The numbers don't lie.. it might be old but it still performs well.

nicnik · 21 Oct 2013 at 09:40

I'd also slap a half decent cpu cooler on there as well.
IF 280x is too much of a stretch, go with a 7950 AMD.

gtx 280 is far too old, it is a 2008/2009 card. I used a heavily overclocked gtx 260 recently due to my gtx580 blowing, it plays at low to medium only for recent games.

rpggamesplayer · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:00

he is not talking about a gtx 280 lol

rpggamesplayer · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:00

he's on about getting amd new 280x that replaces the 7970ghz

RogerMesenseless · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:20

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Edition OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £229.99
1 x Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £179.99
1 x Gigabyte Z87X-D3H Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £119.99
1 x Corsair Builder Series CX 600w Modular '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (CP-9020060-UK) £62.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 32MB Cache - OEM (ST31000524AS) HDD £52.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED38GM1600HC11DC01) £47.99
1 x NZXT Source 210 Elite Midi Tower Case - Black £39.95
1 x Corsair Hydro H80 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler *Manufacturer Refurbished Unit - 90 Day Guarantee £37.55
Total : £785.53 (includes shipping : £11.75).

Refurbished H80 with 90 Day guarantee. Allows for a bit of overclocking room on the 4650k.
Motherboard has SLI and Crossfire-X support (8x/8x) for future upgrades.

RogerMesenseless · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:22

Double Post.

Lokken86 · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:26

Sorry yea course. I meant the R9 280x. I've gone back and edited to save confusion.

fowler002 · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:27

SoundDoctor said:
YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Edition OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £229.99
1 x Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £179.99
1 x Gigabyte Z87X-D3H Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £119.99
1 x Corsair Builder Series CX 600w Modular '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (CP-9020060-UK) £62.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 32MB Cache - OEM (ST31000524AS) HDD £52.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED38GM1600HC11DC01) £47.99
1 x NZXT Source 210 Elite Midi Tower Case - Black £39.95
1 x Corsair Hydro H80 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler *Manufacturer Refurbished Unit - 90 Day Guarantee £37.55
Total : £785.53 (includes shipping : £11.75).

Refurbished H80 with 90 Day guarantee. Allows for a bit of overclocking room on the 4650k.
Motherboard has SLI and Crossfire-X support (8x/8x) for future upgrades.

The motherboard may have sli/xfire support but the PSU wouldn't handle it, if going xfire will want 750w PSU. Xfire or not I'd say antech or seasonic rather than the corsair PSU speced.

alias86 · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:30

is it not worth holding out a short while (aweek or so) for a deal on the 7970s? i know the new AMD stuff has some better sound?

fowler002 · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:32

alias86 said:
is it not worth holding out a short while (aweek or so) for a deal on the 7970s? i know the new AMD stuff has some better sound?

Where have you been? There has been a load of deals on the 7970s, unlikely to be any better since most places wouldn't have much stock left.

RogerMesenseless · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:46

fowler002 said:
The motherboard may have sli/xfire support but the PSU wouldn't handle it, if going xfire will want 750w PSU. Xfire or not I'd say antech or seasonic rather than the corsair PSU speced.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Antec High Current Gamer 750W Modular '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (0-761345-06223-7) £99.95
Total : £108.65 (includes shipping : £7.25).

Thanks! Would have missed that otherwise.

Pushes budget the up a bit will allow for upgrades as said above.

pieman109 · 21 Oct 2013 at 10:58

Don't forget the operating system, (win 7 64bit or win 8.1 64bit) if you haven't already got that sorted.

CptSwagSauce · 21 Oct 2013 at 13:18

Hopefully a bit of food for thought with the below. Unlike the above recommendations it doesn't have much/any overclocking potential, but I've shuffled bits around to include an SSD and 8GB of RAM.

Feel free to remove the cooler and re-invest elsewhere, but I thought for the price it was a nice luxury!

fowler002 · 21 Oct 2013 at 15:52

CptSwagSauce said:
Hopefully a bit of food for thought with the below. Unlike the above recommendations it doesn't have much/any overclocking potential, but I've shuffled bits around to include an SSD and 8GB of RAM.

Feel free to remove the cooler and re-invest elsewhere, but I thought for the price it was a nice luxury!

Why invest in old tech("dead' socket)? The haswell can be had for similar price, for the ssd prob worth the little extra going for the evo model.

stulid · 21 Oct 2013 at 16:02

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Edition OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £229.99
1 x Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £179.99
1 x Gigabyte Z87-D3HP Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £109.99
1 x Toshiba SSD HDTS212EZSTA 9.5mm 128GB Solid State Hard Drive - Retail £67.99
1 x Antec High Current Gamer 520W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply £59.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED38GM1600HC11DC01) £47.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD £44.99
1 x NZXT Source 210 Elite Midi Tower Case - Black £39.95
1 x OcUK 20x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £11.99
Total : £807.86 (includes shipping : £12.50).

The D3HP comes with a heatsink.

trickynickyuk · 21 Oct 2013 at 18:00

half tempted on this when my money comes through what are the toshiba SSDs like

stulid · 21 Oct 2013 at 18:26

trickynickyuk said:
half tempted on this when my money comes through what are the toshiba SSDs like

It's a new product so no reviews, but their HG5D Series has good reviews and it cant be any worse than OCZ right?

trickynickyuk · 21 Oct 2013 at 20:33

Lol true wouldnt touch OCZ might see what i can find