Basic gaming PC for £350?

Soldato
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Hi all.

My nephew has saved up £350 to get a new pc base unit with keyboard and mouse and my brother has asked me for advice. My problem is trying to find a practica balance at that budget when I struggle with anything remotely mid range, so I hoped some of you wonderful OCers might help point me in the right direction.

After a bit of discussion I have found it boils down to a high chance of being used for Minecraft and possibly WoW and then maybe other stuff later on (as he has a 360 too).

My advice for that budget was to perhaps just get a semi decent cpu/igpu based system to cover Minecraft and general pc/homework use and add a dedicated gpu later.

To which end I was thinking along the lines of a H/B chipset 1150 board with i3 processor, 8gb memory, a decent 450w psu, Bitfenix Merc case or similar, 1Tb WD Blue, dvd-rw and a basic Gigabyte Kb&mouse set.

I haven't ruled out AMD but I am not really sure where the best starting point would be. Thankfully a monitor and OS isn't needed. Any advice welcome, thanks.
 
Here is my try for £11 over budget and using your OCUK free delivery.

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I opted for a 4GB machine with a decent AMD piledriver quad core CPU and a decent 900 series board that can accommodate an 8 core in future. The GTX 750 is a realtively cheap card - but if you look here it does pretty well in games.
 
Your i3 build idea sounds fine, and it will just about fit into the budget.

You could also fish around on the Members Market if he doesn't second hand components.
 
The members market is a good shout, picking up a well loved i7 920 + X58 bundle for £100 and a HD 7850 card for £70 will make for the basis of a cracking system within budget.
 
Cheers guys, some good suggestions here. I will bounce some of the ideas back with my brother and see what he thinks.

I have steared clear of 2nd hand for the build as the PC will be some distance away with my nephew's mother and that could add to any support problems.
 
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