£600 gaming spec

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Looking to help a friend of mine build a cheap gaming pc, it'll be his first build so I'm helping him out. I'm coming up with a build now but I'm curious to see what other people would suggest, my builds to date have been a bit more costly so I'm not too sure where to cut money from.

£600. Needs everything except OS. upgrading from ancient macbook.

Any help and advice appreciated, will post my spec when complete. cheers
 
I would stick with the Gigabyte board as it has dual BIOS and a UK based RMA center, also faster RAM too such as I what I specced.

The NEOS has better airflow than the Comrade case.
 
Gigabyte board is out of stock at the moment and that case brings it under £600. If there's some leeway or he qualifies for free shipping then exceptions can be made
 
Board back instock soon.

Who cares if its a bit over? (thats because I included a DVD RW) its not like I've blown the budget out the park.
 
Thanks for the specs guys. I get free shipping so we will be using that :)

You guys wouldn't recommend nvidia at this price range then? I've been using nvidia since I started building PC's and am a bit wary of AMD GPU's due to friends having driver issues in the past.

Also, does that Pentium not have a reasonable stock cooler? Couldn't see anything about it in the specs. I remember my first build was a core2duo and I had a stable 40~% overclock on it with the stock cooler which I used for around 4 years.
 
There's nothing from Nvidia that competes with AMD at equal price ranges, they are always more expensive.

The Pentium does include a free cooler, but to overclock it you will benefit from the aftermarket heatsink to help reduce temps+noise.
 
Gold version?

Also would it be worth making some sacrifices in order to get an i3/i5 for multithreading?

He personally wanted an i5 after I gave a light explanation about cores/threads, but i don't see him utilising more cores/threads.

The rig will only be used for gaming and watching tv/movies with some internet browsing. I imagine multithreading would only help with certain games but I'ts not something I know a lot about. I don't see him using any other software other than games that's cpu intensive
 
Stick a i5 in it later on in a year or so, the Z97 will also supposedly be compatible with Broadwell whenever thats released.

Seems a shame to cut it down any further. I was actually thinking its half decent for £600, the monitor is good and even the peripherals are decent.
 
Yeah, this spec is seeming quite nice, was just considering a short term upgrade path, like 3 months or so. I had briefly considered sticking the i5 in there and using integrated gpu temporarily and get a nicer GPU later, but apparently even with an i7(mobile version) the integrated cant run most games in a playable state >.<

Forbes reference

Edit: from what I read broadwell will need a new mobo due to new PSU requirements. =/ disregard, that must have been before z/h97 were released.
 
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You are right, most inbuilt GFX are pants.

Kaveri 7850K is the best and even that struggles at 1080P and games like BF4 with anything over medium settings.
 
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