Spec me a budget build/upgrade please

robfosters

robfosters

robfosters

Caporegime
Joined
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Location
Welling, London
The time is coming for me to definitely upgrade now. I also want to downsize, so am looking for a MATX/ITX or other small form factor build. My budget would ideally be £500-600.

I already have a nice 850W superflower PSU, 4K LG freesync monitor and a GTX970. What I would like is:

Case
Mobo
CPU
RAM
If possible, I wouldn’t mind an M2 drive for my OS/boot drive as well. I also expect in the future maybe to add the next gen of cards, probably the next AMD cards. Navi I think they’re called.
 
If you already have SATA SSD then with that kind budget better save that money to other things.
And in case of not having SSD at all, it's waste of small budget to go for notably more expensive NVMe SSD.
Though SATA SSDs are also available in M.2 form factor.

Anyway month from now there should be lot better bang per buck in CPUs with Zen2 Ryzens released.
 
EsaT said:
If you already have SATA SSD then with that kind budget better save that money to other things.
And in case of not having SSD at all, it's waste of small budget to go for notably more expensive NVMe SSD.
Though SATA SSDs are also available in M.2 form factor.

Anyway month from now there should be lot better bang per buck in CPUs with Zen2 Ryzens released.
Click to expand...
I already have 2X120GB SSD’s and 2XHDD’s, but I really want to lose the mechanical storage.

The SSD’s are quite old though. What’s the best way of checking that their performance and health is still good?
 
The new AMD 3000 series CPUs and X570 motherboards to support them have just been announced so it would be worth waiting for benchmarks and reviews.

In addition to ITX you might also look at Mini-DTX - Asus have an interesting Mini-DTX motherboard.
 
SSD makers have their own diagnostics and testing softwares for checking condition.
Those are certainly such small SSDs and likely old that newer SSD would make sense.

1TB SATA SSDs of both Crucial MX500 and WD Blue 3D serie can be gotten for £120.
Half TB for £55
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/wd-b...-solid-state-drive-wds500g2b0b-hd-54m-wd.html
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/wd-b...-solid-state-drive-wds500g2b0a-hd-54h-wd.html

If you're happy with three year warranty there are some cheaper ones.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...gbps-3d-nand-solid-state-drive-hd-005-tg.html
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...gbps-3d-nand-solid-state-drive-hd-006-tg.html

Intel 660P and Samsung 860 QVO use QLC Flash, which is pretty much analog storage needing to differentiate between 16 charge states to avoid errors.
Wouldn't myself trust those untill after couple years of real world beta testing.
Remember Samsung's problems with planar TLC drives like 840 EVO... which needed to differentiate just 8 charge levels, but ended up needing duct tape fix rewriting data regularly to keep bits from evaporating.
 
Bit of a change to my situation. I now no longer want MATX, normal ATX is fine. I don't use the LG monitor any more and have replaced it with the Gigabyte Aorus. I'm still waiting for Zen 2, but want to get a few components now, namely case, RAM and SSD, so I'm all ready and wont be caught out by any stock shortages.

I basically just want to ask if these three are good components for a budget build, or if there are better alternatives.

wPll3Gch.png.jpg
 
just a quick ITX build, this is the only ITX board in this range available at the moment, but as already stated, the next generation of RyZen is 3 weeks away, id wait:

I chose that case as it will house your standard size PSU just fine, you do need to be careful of some ITX cases as they will only hold SFF PSU's

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £560.21 (includes shipping: £12.30)
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