Budget gaming PC Base unit, help needed....

Little*Freak

Little*Freak

Little*Freak

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31 Jan 2014
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Hiya, the best I've been able to come up with is an Intel Dual Core (Haswell), with 8GB of Ram (single stick), 1 TB HDD, GTX 960 4GB & a DVD Drive + Case + PSU for approx £392....

Can get either an AMD 4 Core with (FM2+) for £396 or a Skylake i3 with same other components for approx £450. Can anyone do better? All from OcUK.

This is a present for a friend, for Christmas, must have a DVD drive too.

Would appreciate some help please as i'm a bit surprised that i can't come up with a cheaper system. Monitor, K/B+Mouse, Speakers or O/S not needed.


Many thanks in advance :)
 
Sounds about right for current prices.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £438.58
(includes shipping: £11.70)
​


​


£426.88 if you're eligible for free shipping.
 
The crash of the pound and no competition from AMD has made the competent "budget" builds of the past obsolete.

Sure, you can build "budget" now but it will not be that good.

You need £400-£500 now for anything competent.
 
^Exactly. Same catastrophe has befallen us in Canada. If you think you're getting screwed in the UK, come to Canada. Or if you want to see people REALLLY get screwed, check out Australian prices. $1300 for a GTX 1080. And don't think wages are high to compensate, either.

Americans still get the best PC part prices in the western world in terms of parts prices vs avg salaries.
 
Little*Freak said:
Hiya, the best I've been able to come up with is an Intel Dual Core (Haswell), with 8GB of Ram (single stick), 1 TB HDD, GTX 960 4GB & a DVD Drive + Case + PSU for approx £392....

Can get either an AMD 4 Core with (FM2+) for £396 or a Skylake i3 with same other components for approx £450. Can anyone do better? All from OcUK.

This is a present for a friend, for Christmas, must have a DVD drive too.

Would appreciate some help please as i'm a bit surprised that i can't come up with a cheaper system. Monitor, K/B+Mouse, Speakers or O/S not needed.


Many thanks in advance :)
Click to expand...

You would be able to build a great little cheap general purpose PC for less than £400.....to which a mainstream graphics card could be added at some point down the line.

I built this very PC some time ago for a friend. I done it back then for around 300 GBP, but as has been mentioned, the GBP has tumbled against USD, which has pushed import prices right up for UK consumer.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £395.04
(includes shipping: £11.10)
​


The above setup, with a decent GPU shoved in, would do ok for PC gaming in the meantime, and would beat console performance in most games, or hammer console performance depending on the GPU.....or at least it would for now. Whilst both consoles are based upon a weak as **** AMD APU, games on consoles are heavily optimised to run on that specific hardware, which doesn't have any operating system getting between the hardware and the performance. Those weak console AMD APU's, also happen to be 8 core devices. With DX12 being said to be all about bringing multi-core efficiency to gaming, I think it is a pretty safe bet that games will be increasingly designed for multicore/threaded systems, which could leave a i3, and even with the passage of time, an i5 CPU sorely lacking required punch, especially since many games devs will completely neglect to optimise the PC versions of their titles for lower core/thread count CPUs, even if they have much faster IPCs than their console counterparts.

I know this is being bought as a gift for someone, and that you probs want a mate to accompany you on some online gaming adventures, but for anyone on a budget, PC gaming just not make sense.....unless of course someone already had a cheap but nippy PC (such as the example above), for other purposes, and the choice was then to fork out on a console, or a decent GPU.
 
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