New Build Advice <£750

gaz1185

gaz1185

gaz1185

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Joined
21 Mar 2016
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2
Hey all,

New face here looking for a bit of help on my new build. It's been around 4-5 years since I built my last PC, so I'm looking at a new one with a max spend of around £700-750. I just need a decent gaming PC (nothing ridiculous) that will also moonlight as a Creative Suite workstation. I currently have this set-up clocking in at £658, any stand out changes?

Intel Core i5 6500, S 1151, Skylake, Quad Core, 3.2GHz, 3.6GHz Turbo, CPU Retail
Gigabyte Z170 Gaming K3 Motherboard
Corsair 8GB DDR4 Vengeance LPX 2133MHz Memory Kit (CMK8GX4M2A2133C13)
4GB EVGA GTX 960 SSC GAMING ACX 2.0+ (04G-P4-3967-KR)
Corsair VS550 550W PSU
1TB WD Blue SATA III 6GB/s 7200rpm 64MB Cache 8ms OEM HDD (WD10EZEX)
SanDisk 256GB Z400s, M.2 SATA High Speed SSD/Solid State Drive (SD8SNAT-256G-1122)
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (RR-212E-16PK-R1)
Silverstone Precision Mid Tower Case (SST-PS05B USB3.0)

I was looking at including a Intel i5 6600k, Asus Z170-A Motherboard and a Corsair 8GB Vengeance LPX DDR4 2800MHz Memory Kit, but that was clocking in at £750+. I'm not massively in need to overclock, so I decided to replace these parts with the above. Bad decision?

Any advice welcome :D
 
Go for the 6600K. Your average Skylake is clocking higher than Haswell. And they run much cooler.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £750.79
(includes shipping: £0.00)
​


​

Case with more modern interior (PSU at bottom etc) and which fits ATX.

Faster GPU.

Slightly better PSU than the VS range.

Better SSD.

Faster HDD.

The Gaming K3 mobo is nice and easy to overclock so good choice. Messed with one over the weekend. Clocked an i7-6700K just by changing the turbo multis, to 4.7GHz (and cache to 4.4). No voltage tweaks.
 
Cheers for the help guys, surprised I ignored the size of the case on that one.

@Danny75 the Tower you suggested looks great for the price, I'm not after anything amazing, just something you throw a few fans in - so that fits the bill perfectly.

Regarding the GPU, would either of these be a better choice:

[*] 1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380X 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Backplate (11250-01-20G)= £199.99

[*] 1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Backplate (11242-13-20G)= £179.99

The Nitro 380 seems a great card for the price, but it has slightly less core clock speed and stream processors than the 380x.

Great news on the Z170-Gaming K3, I was a little unsure on this choice of motherboard, but that feedback is definitely reassuring.

Also, wouldn't a M.2 SSD provide better read / write speeds than the SATA SSD? That was my thinking behind the M.2 choice.

Thanks again!
 
If you can afford to it get the 380x its faster, and m2 is faster but probably wont notice it in day to day tasks compared to an SSD.
 
gaz1185 said:
Regarding the GPU, would either of these be a better choice:

[*] 1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380X 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Backplate (11250-01-20G)= £199.99

[*] 1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Backplate (11242-13-20G)= £179.99

The Nitro 380 seems a great card for the price, but it has slightly less core clock speed and stream processors than the 380x.
Click to expand...

380X, whether Gigabyte (3 year warranty) or Sapphire (2 years).



gaz1185 said:
Also, wouldn't a M.2 SSD provide better read / write speeds than the SATA SSD? That was my thinking behind the M.2 choice.

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

Sorry, I saw "Sandisk" and didn't know OcUK where stocking Sandisk M.2's. Didn't read the rest of that line carefully enough and assumed it was a regular SSD. My bad.

But what Micky said. They are more useful for rendering purposes for example.

Used the newer F2 BIOS for the motherboard. The default voltages were set fairly high but I just took advantage of that to set speed as high as possible instead of lowering voltages.
 
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