help me build a pc for my daughter

[H3RBSKI]

its my daughters birthday in a few weeks and shes asked for a pc.
she plays games like shovel knight, gang beasts, starwhals and speed runners etc when she plays on mine so nothing very demanding.
already have a spare monitor, mouse and keyboard so just need the pc.
any suggestions welcome

 

[bremen1874]

You could at least provide a target budget.

 

[H3RBSKI]

yeah sorry, about £300 as doesnt need to be a power house

 

[bremen1874]

If you're after a basic pc in that sort of price range I'd buy off the shelf. I'd actually probably buy a laptop as it's likely to useful for longer.

 

[Benjamham]

Something like this could work well, graphics may be a bit overkill tho

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Fractal Design Core 1000 Case & Super Flower 450W FX 80 Plus Bronze Power Supply Bundle= £53.99
• 1 x PowerColor Radeon RX 460 Red Dragon 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card= £99.95
• 1 x Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258 Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail= £59.99
• 1 x Asus H81M-K Intel H81 (Socket 1150) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard= £42.95
• 1 x Team Group Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TPKD38G1600HC11DC01)= £29.99
• 1 x WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache HDD - OEM (WD10EZEX)= £42.95

Total: £329.82
(includes shipping: £0.00)
​

​

otherwise something like this would be good too just using the onboard graphics



My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Fractal Design Core 1000 Case & Super Flower 450W FX 80 Plus Bronze Power Supply Bundle= £53.99
• 1 x WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache HDD - OEM (WD10EZEX)= £42.95
• 1 x Asus A88XM-PLUS AMD A88X (Socket FM2+) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard= £58.99
• 1 x Kingston HyperX Savage Red 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit (HX324C11SRK2/8)= £41.99
• 1 x AMD Kaveri A8-7650K 10 Compute Core APU w/ Radeon R7 Graphics (4 CPU + 6 GPU Compute Cores) - Retail= £74.99

Total: £284.61
(includes shipping: £11.70)
​

​

 

[mistersprinkles]

Both of the above are good builds. The Pentium G3258 needs to be overclocked to achieve decent performance. The same could be said of the APU build, which would be my choice for a kid's build at this point.

I believe (but am not sure) that Intel had OEM's disable H81 overclocking for the G3258 CPU quite some time ago. Whether or not they backtracked on that I do not know, but buyer beware and definitely do research if you plan to go that route. A nice alternative to the G3258 system would be an Athlon 860 based system which is essentially an A10 APU with no GPU cores available. Pair that with the RX460. That will give you better performance for about the same price vs the APU option so that might not be a bad way to go. Again, you want to overclock the Athlon. Pretty much any CPU you're going to get into at this price point requires overclocking to achieve "desirable" (depending on who's desires we're talking about) performance.

Nobody has asked btw-- does 300 GBP include the Windows license or do you have a source for that? If you need a machine for 300 WITH windows you're going to get a scum box.

 

[H3RBSKI]

we have a windows license, might go with the first build and just get a lower end card. thanks for the info

 

[H3RBSKI]

hmm just thought, i have my old i5 2500k upstairs sitting on a dead mobo...
think it would be worth getting a motherboard for it and using that instead? could save myself £60 that way

 

[Rannoch]

If you can use the 2500k go that route.

 

[Kurgen]

use the 2500k and use the saving to add an SSD

 

[Lemin]

You can buy a new AsRock H61M-DGS Motherboard, for £44, that 2500k is still a great cpu.

 

[subbytna]

Oh god yeah the 2500 is still a cracking chip

 

[Benjamham]

as the above users have suggested, use the 2500k. perhaps drop in an rx460 or a cheap used graphics card (if required of course).

I would suggest getting an overclockable motherboard for the 2500k to extract the most out of it and should last a few more years

 

[pandem0nium]

There are quite a lot of H81 boards that do support pentium overclocking but the H81M-K is definitely one that doesn't support it.

I had the H81M-C and was able to get 4.4 @1.3v. One gotcha was that I needed to use manual voltage. Using offset wouldn't allow overclocking at all.

 

[ExoMale]

I don't know what those games are, but people's suggestions are good, but too overkill.

If you can't use the performance then don't waste the money, plenty of APU systems from the lower range would do as would haswell/skylake Intel graphics. I assume it has to be new items?.


FYI I don't have the 270x in my sig anymore so I'm using hd 4400 graphics and while I've had to lower the settings a fair bit I can run titanfall smoothly just have to play it with Xbox 360 graphics