Gaming spec check

[Casterina]

My mate wants a gaming PC with a max budget of £900, he has SSD, hard drives, DVD drive and OS, also he will be overclocking in the future so I have spec him this, is there any changes to improve the build?

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Alpenföhn Matterhorn Black CPU Cooler= £39.95
• 1 x MSI Z170A-G43 Plus Intel Z170 (Socket 1151) DDR4 ATX Motherboard= £101.99
• 1 x Kingston Fury Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 PC4-19200C15 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black (HX424C15FBK2/8)= £28.99
• 1 x Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz (Skylake) Socket LGA1151 Processor - OEM= £281.99
• 1 x NZXT Source 340 Midi-Tower Case - Blue Window= £54.95
• 1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 390 8192MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Backplate (11244-01-20G)= £289.99
• 1 x Super Flower Leadex GOLD 650W Fully Modular "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black= £87.95

Total: £885.81
(includes shipping: £0.00)
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[ExRayTed]

Looks good. You could easily drop down to the 550w version of the PSU and with the savings get 16gb of RAM

 

[heartburnron]

Nothing wrong with that if he's gaming at 1080p? Anything over that and he'll have to lower some of the settings in the newer games to get 40 - 60FPS. Also for the sake of an extra £20, 16GB is more of the standard RAM for modern gaming builds.

Some would argue that an i5 6600K would be ample for gaming and you could put the £100 saved compared to an i7 into a better graphics card although if/when all future games start using Windows 10 Direct X12 then the extra threads in the i7 may be significant (it could be another 1-2 years before those benefits are realised though). It's a tough call but certainly buying the i5 and an better GPU will give the most performance boost as things stand right now. The i7 is a bit more future proof though and it's much easier to swap out a graphics card than a CPU further down the line.

There's also the fact that new graphics cards are being released from both AMD and Nvidia in the next 1-2 months which may give better performance for the same price and/or reduce the price of current graphics cards. Depends if your mate is patient or not...

 

[mickyflinn]

Would get this moterboard as it has better audio and supports SLI and Xfire fully at x8 x8 .

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x MSI Z170A-SLI Plus Intel Z170 (Socket 1151) DDR4 ATX Motherboard= £107.99

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Review .

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10236/the-msi-z170a-sli-plus-review

 

[mahius]

The i7 seems like overkill, especially considering only 8GB RAM. I'd bump that up to 16GB and perhaps choose the i5 instead.