Speccing a new system for gaming/recording/editing £600 budget

LazierBandit

LazierBandit

LazierBandit

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Joined
23 Mar 2014
Posts
21
Location
UK
Hey guys.

I'm looking to upgrade my current system, which I've had for going on about six or seven years now. My current specs are:

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E7300 @2.66GHz (2 CPUS), 2.7GHz
2GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4600

It's served me well over the past few years, but it's looking like time to upgrade. My budget is unfortunately fairly low for a new build, looking at £600 at the top end.

In practice, I'll be using the build to:
- Play games (duh!)
- Record games for my YouTube channel (both using screen capture software and a PVR)... a hefty-sized hard-drive is probably going to be a good idea because of this, but not absolutely essential.
- Edit videos in Adobe Premiere / Sony Vegas. This is something I've been really limited on using my current machine. It's not powerful enough, meaning editing is a laborious process in which the preview videos stutter and rendering takes an absolute age, roughly 4 or 5 times the length of the video itself.

In addition, I'd also be using the computer to do things like writing and photoshop, but my thinking is if it can do the above tasks, it will manage other programs with ease :)

I already have great speakers, monitors, microphone etc so I don't need to put any budget towards that - it's all going on the machine itself.

Unfortunately, I will need to use some of the budget up on getting an OS.

I'd love for this build to be long-lasting (ie, I won't HAVE to upgrade within the next 2 years or so), but also it would be nice to have the potential to upgrade. My current motherboard is pretty old, and it means that if I wanted to upgrade a single part, I'd in fact have to upgrade the entire motherboard itself... avoiding that problem on this build would be cool :)

I've been out of the computer scene for quite a long time, so I'm not really sure if this build is possible for ~£600, but if it is, that would be awesome :D

Thanks a lot for your help guys.
 
Can you give more details about what parts you have?

Specifically the case, PSU and any drives you have.

Or would you rather start again from scratch?
 
Sorry for the confusion - I'll be going for a new build so that my girlfriend can have the old rig.

Edit: Also, I don't need any peripherals at all such as mouse, keyboard, screen, speakers :)
 
Last edited:
YOUR BASKET
1 x Sapphire Radeon R9 270 "BF4 Edition" 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £139.99
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-8 Eight Core 8320 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £119.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite Black 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED316GM1600HC11DC01) £109.99
1 x Gigabyte 970A-UD3P AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £71.99
1 x BeQuiet Pure Power L8 600W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply - With 120mm Silent Wing Fan Built in £55.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD £43.99
1 x Zalman Z3-Plus Midi-Tower - Black £39.95
1 x Deepcool GAMMAXX S40 CPU-Cooler - 120mm £19.99
1 x Pioneer 24x Internal DVR-221LBK DVD Rewriter - OEM £17.99
Total : £629.47 (includes shipping : £8.00).



You can get a free 3month trial of Win8.1 to then allow you to buy later.
 
 
Thanks for the pointers guys, really helpful to be pointed in the right direction!

If I were to go down the pre-build route, as I've never built a PC before (weighing up the options between pre build and DIY at the moment,) can you suggest a good base to work these parts in to?

Thanks again for your help, really appreciate you helping out a newbie such as myself!
 
With DIY there's nothing to be scared of honestly, plenty of tutorials out there and if you run into problems you can always ask here.

OCUK can also build a system for you for a certain cost, post in the customer services section to get a quote.

There doesn't seem to be a good base you can use from the Online System Configurator :p Another reason to go DIY ;)
 
You need a heatsink with these FX chips.

The stock AMD item is pants and loud.

So Decades build becomes £665-670;)

And he only went for 8GB, this is a poor choice for the work you want to do:D
 
How is 8GB a poor choice? I use the software OP mentioned without problem with 8GB ;)

Also you don't "need" an after market cooler either ;)
 
It is poor when these programs and rendering videos etc can easily use over 8GB, ive done it too.

In fact just Google searching and reading other peoples opinions on the whole 8 vs 16GB for video editing question shows a lot of recommendations for more is better.

Too little RAM and then the system is hammering the slow HDD for Virtual memory.

Everyone knows the AMD heatsinks and small pathetic extremely noisy little things and an aftermarket cooler will help pass air over the VRM heatsinks.

Lastly the board will downclock the RAM to 2000Mhz so the speed is wasted, AMD FX dont benefit from fast RAM, the only AMD chips that do are APU's.
 
Thanks for the pointers, chaps... from what I've read in my own research, the more RAM option does sound good for what I want to do - and considering it's cheaper, can't really argue!
 
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