Spec me £500

danewesley · 12 Mar 2014 at 22:16

Got £500 to spend on a gaming system, i already have windows, 1000w evga psu a case, hdd's and 4gb memory that will do until i can buy more.

What do you recommend?

Danny75 · 12 Mar 2014 at 22:28

What case is it? Memory is DDR3?

danewesley · 12 Mar 2014 at 22:38

i have a corsair 650d and a silverstone raven rv03, memory is ddr3 corsair xms3

Danny75 · 12 Mar 2014 at 23:15

You have a lot of options, these are a few.

Intel i5 with a 270X:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £167.99
1 x MSI Radeon R9 270X Gaming Edition OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £157.99
1 x Gigabyte Z87-HD3 Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £82.99
1 x Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 120GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SH103S3/120G) £65.99
1 x Deepcool GAMMAXX S40 CPU-Cooler - 120mm £19.99
Total : £504.55 (includes shipping : £8.00).

AMD 8-core with a 280:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 280 Dual-X 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £199.99
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-8 Eight Core 8320 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £119.99
1 x Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0 AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £74.99
1 x Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 120GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SH103S3/120G) £65.99
1 x Alpenföhn Matterhorn Pure Edition CPU Cooler £29.99
Total : £500.54 (includes shipping : £8.00).

AMD 8-core, no SSD, and a 280X:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte Radeon R9 280X Rev2.0 WindForce 3X OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £251.99
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-8 Eight Core 8320 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £119.99
1 x Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0 AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £74.99
1 x Alpenföhn K2 Mount Doom CPU Cooler £49.99
Total : £506.56 (includes shipping : £8.00).

The AMD's provide the best bang for buck, the Intel has the better processor for gaming right now but would require a card better than a 270X in future to surpass the AMD builds in gaming performance. Having said that, if your favourite games happen to be CPU-intensive, then the Intel should be better from the start.