£500 gaming build

spoony77

spoony77

spoony77

Associate
Joined
10 Aug 2005
Posts
387
Hi people
Looking to build a PC for gaming at 1080p 60hz, just the tower and OS no need for monitor or peripherals...
Is this do-able with a budget of £500?
Any advice appreciated.
 
How about £500 for the tower, download/install Windows for free, and then you have one month to look out for the best Windows 10 deal you can find, before you need to activate it.
 
If you do the above you can get (for example):

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £537.23
(includes shipping: £12.30)
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And the MSI RX 470 4GB has a 20% cashback if you buy before 2nd December. https://uk.msi.com/Promotion/radeon_cashback_q4_2016

As long as you already have a USB stick to download and install Windows 10 on. Or borrow a DVD drive.

A HDD instead of SSD brings the cost down further by £30 or so, but it's nice to start off with a faster SSD then add a larger HDD later.
 
spoony77 said:
Thanks for that looks excellent :)
Will this play modern games OK at 60fps like GTA V and Arms 3?
Thanks again.
Click to expand...

Never played Arma 3 but heard even better hardware struggles with it due to poor optimization.

You'll get your 60-ish fps in GTA V along the lines of everything mostly Very High (some stuff Ultra), Grass normal, MSAA x2. That's good enough for it to look very decent and be very playable, imo. Borderless windowed mode or windowed mode itself prevents the tearing most monitor displays show on Fullscreen without some form of Vsync/Freesync/Gsync etc.

What tends to happen with an i3 instead of i5 is that whenever there is a brief yet noticeable dip in fps (a lot of action/particles etc), it's more noticeable with i3. But for the majority of the time, it's not an issue.

You can always go with an i5 instead and find a used GTX 970 or similar for £100-ish. On my overclocked 970 I can go with everything Ultra, Grass normal, MSAA x4. This might be better in the long run as you won't feel a need to possibly upgrade the CPU in the near future, and can just upgrade the video card when time comes. But if you want everything new then i3.

Just to confuse you, here's another build with HDD instead of SSD, and an RX 480:

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £493.23
(includes shipping: £12.30)
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You get faster gaming performance, in exchange for slower boot/game loading times/general snappiness.

Or say to hell with it, and spend extra and get SSD and RX 480:

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £526.23
(includes shipping: £12.30)
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