first budget build £400

alex crossland · 4 Jul 2017 at 16:55

Hi everyone, first post ever so here goes.

Right, first off, I know that everyone who is reading this is thinking the same thing. "you cant build a gaming PC for £400. im gonna tell him how much he needs to spend". if this is you, please don't!

This is going to be my first build and i am not 100% sure of myself so i want to build something for a budget that i am comfortable with first, so i can test the water. I am aware this will not be a gaming monster, and will likely be relegated to a work machine if it goes well and i decide to move on. having said that some capacity for upgrade would be good in case i decide to keep going with it!

SO my current spec that i have been looking at is:
Chip: Intel Pentium G4560
Motherboard: Gigabyte B250M-DS3H (Socket-1151, 4x DDR4, Micro-ATX)
Case: AvP Viper Mini Tower Black USB 3.0 case
GPU: Asus Radeon R5 230 2GB DDR3 VGA DVI HDMI PCI-E Graphics Card
RAM: Crucial 8GB DDR4-2133 UDIMM
SSD: APACER 120GB SSD AST280 M.2
Hard disk: Toshiba P300 1TB 3.5'' SATA High-Performance Hard Drive (OEM)
PSU: Ace Black 120mm Fan 500W Fully Wired Efficient Power Supply
Wireless adapter: TP-Link TL-WN881ND 300mbps Wireless N Pci Express Adapter
DVD drive: Asus DRW-24D5MT 24X Internal DVD Writer

If anyone has any advice on this, or any clues as to what is good or bad on this list and any alternatives it would be gratefully received. also if there is anywhere where it would be a good idea to look at a better second hand unit, and likewise anywhere that I should definitely avoid second hand, this would be helpful too.

Ta very much!

alex crossland · 5 Jul 2017 at 10:33

Having read up on it a bit more I have decided to upgrade the graphics card a bit to a geforce gtx 1050 ti, and remove the do lid state hard drive for now.

alex crossland · 5 Jul 2017 at 14:49

Now the psu is somewhere that I would really like some guidance. The calculators that I have used seem to suggest I'll only need 300-400 watt but what else should I look for?
P.s. I could have spent weeks changing my mind on the gpu so I've made a decision and bought it already! No going back now!

alex crossland · 5 Jul 2017 at 21:10

The budget is as ltitle as possible, but having said that I really don't want to end up with a psu that won't power the system and ends up damaging my components. Part of the reason that I've gone for a home build os that I can do it in stages so I don't have to pay out the whole lot in one go. If I have to spend £50 then so be it. It will just add a little time to the build.
Thanks for the advice. I would never have thought to do the maths. You see 500w and take it as red. I'll look a bit further now.

alex crossland · 5 Jul 2017 at 22:38

How's about an antec vp450p? A few places are knocking them out for £40 odd

alex crossland · 7 Jul 2017 at 10:06

The price has crept up to £450 ish but the current list is:

Gigabyte b250m-ds3h motherboard)
£68.99
Intel pentium g4560 chip
£64.99
Evga nvidia geforce gtx 1050ti ssc gaming GPU
£149.99
Toshiba p300 1tb hard drive
38.99
Evga 430w PSU
33.99
kingston hyperx fury 8gb ddr4 RAM
£61.99
tp-link tl-wnd881nd wireless adapter
£12.49
Asus dvrw drive
£13.99
AvP viper mini tower case
£17.49

I think I'm pretty happy with it and have ordered the chip and the gpu already but anything else is able to be swapped out if you have any ideas or horror stories! I'm definitely not married to the case, if there's something else available at a reasonable price!

alex crossland · 7 Jul 2017 at 11:58

Yeah I think the dvd is just because I'm an old Fart and I'm living in the past. Probably something that can wait til later anyway. Ram wise, I'm going to ask the same thing as everyone else on their first build.
Is there any advantage to dual channel or am I better off taking a single stick of 8 and looking for a matching stick to upgrade to 16 in the future?

alex crossland · 7 Jul 2017 at 18:24

Yeah, I've seen that same test on a video. It seems that you do get a bit of a boost using dual channel but definitely not enough to make a huge difference. Given that I have 4 ram slots on the board though I can theoretically take 2 sticks of 4 and then add 2 more later. Either that or go for a single stick then match it later. Either way i end up on 16gb...

alex crossland · 20 Jul 2017 at 20:00

So I have a dilemma... I ordered all my parts and they have arrived but the psu that I ordered was an evga 430w. What I was sent was an evga 450bv. So the question is, should I be upset or pleased? Am I gonna send it back or stick it in the case asap?

alex crossland · 24 Jul 2017 at 08:41

So over the weekend I put it together (with a small ssd for the operating system and room for 1 or 2 games), got it all working and started looking at benchmarks. So far I'm really pleased with everything. Running smooth and fast. The only thing I would change if I was to do it again is I would definitely spend more time and money on the case. I just thought "it's somewhere to stick the bits so go as cheap as possible with the correct form factor", and it worked... but it would have been nice to be working with something that had had some thought put into the design, and more than the absolute minimum spent on materials! Next time... next time...