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Hi guys how is it going, my name is Pixel5 and today we are going to be talking through a cheap, but powerful PC for under £500. This beast is capable of running a lot of triple A titles at 60 fps at 1080p as well as running a majority of them at 1440p at around 30 fps making this a great bang for the buck build.
Intro
CPU So lets get right into it. A lot of PC gamers tend to be strapped for cash and so are looking for cheap but very fast and powerful computers to build. With this in mind, the Intel vs AMD war was decided by the general price to performance ratio. With that said, for this build I have chosen the FX-4350 Quad Core processor which clocks at 4.2ghz stock. For £80, you cannot go wrong. With a lot of games depending on the number of cores in a pc this little beauty supplies four cores which is enough to manage a lot of tasks simultaneously while doing so very fast with its high clock speeds. Unfortunatley, the CPU is rated at 125W which is a huge amount of power so if you are trying to keep your electricity bill low you might want to go for the cheaper, less power demanding but less powerful FX-4300 at £60. CPU Cooler Along side our super hot CPU I decided to invest some money into the cooler. This is optional, however having an aftermarket cooler will keep the temperatures and noise down and so it might be worth the extra couple of pounds. The cooler of my choice is the highly respected Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO sitting at a bit high £25. You can of course go with a all in one water cooler for double the price or cut back a little for less effective cooling. Personally, I believe this is a sweet spot between performance and price. The noise level is around 9 to 32 decibels under load, while the four direct contact pipes transfer the heat efficiently to the fins and the fan.
Motherboard For our motherboard, I have chosen MSI with their 970 Gaming ATX board which boasts 4 RAM slots to hold up to 32GB of ram, SLI and Crossfire Supports for future upgrades and 6 6GB/s sata ports. For only £80, this is the best AM3+ socket board you can get around this price. We could have easily chosen cheaper boards, but with so many great features built in this board is the best for budget builds due to its huge upgradability potential if you choose to do so. I have to mention that the black board has some amazing red accents which would look absolutely incredible in our case which we will talk about later.
RAM Next up is RAM. Kingston HyperX Fury Black kit for £37 will give us two sticks of 4GB DDR3 RAM clocked at 1600MhZ which is very good for gaming. The black goes very nicely with our board, and there is also a red version of these if you are interested in that. I must add that if you want more RAM you can use 2 more sticks as our board supports up to 4 and so it will be super easy to upgrade.
Storage For storage, we are not going to have an SSD for our operating system or game storage. However, with 6 sata ports you can easily change this and add more Hard drives or SSD if you want to do so. My choice for the hard drive is Seagate Barracuda 1TB hard drive at 7200RPM. This is enough storage for an operating system, games, files and whatever else you wish. Data transfer will also be much faster as it is able to use the 6GB/s ports on our motherboard. For £37, this is a bargain.
GPU Going along with our Red and Black colour scheme, I have decided to go with MSI yet again. We are going for the R9 380 Graphics card which boasts 4GB GDDR5 memory, 970MhZ clock speeds and Crossfire support. This graphics card has a really efficient cooler with good quality and quiet fans which kick in when temperatures reach a certain level. This also comes with MSI’s afterburner software which allows you to adjust when the fans begin to work, and to help you overclock this £180 beast.
Case Nothing special in the case department. I decided to go for the sleek Bitfenix Comrade ATX Mid Tower Case for £30 as it is functional and suits our colour scheme. The windowed version is slightly pricier but you will be able to show off the great components in your case. With 3 5.25 Inch bays, 3 3.5 Inch bays and 3 2.25 Inch bays you have room for loads of storage and other stuff that you might like there. Cable management is said not to be the greatest, so you might have to bare that in mind if you are going for a very sleek and clean look on the inside.
Power Supply So our system so far is running at 424W and so I decided that a 500W power supply will be enough. Of course, if you are planning to do a lot of overclocking you might want to consider 600W or more. My choice is the EVGA 500W 80+ Certified Power Supply. £40, has all the connections we need and is really reliable. One thing to not is that this is not a modular power supply, so again bare that in mind if cables is something you dread.
Conclusion
So here we are guys, that was our sub £500 Budget Gaming PC build. Our total is exactly £496.56, so we just managed to fit under the budget. But this beast is certainly worth all the money you put into it.
Hi guys how is it going, my name is Pixel5 and today we are going to be talking through a cheap, but powerful PC for under £500. This beast is capable of running a lot of triple A titles at 60 fps at 1080p as well as running a majority of them at 1440p at around 30 fps making this a great bang for the buck build.
Intro
CPU So lets get right into it. A lot of PC gamers tend to be strapped for cash and so are looking for cheap but very fast and powerful computers to build. With this in mind, the Intel vs AMD war was decided by the general price to performance ratio. With that said, for this build I have chosen the FX-4350 Quad Core processor which clocks at 4.2ghz stock. For £80, you cannot go wrong. With a lot of games depending on the number of cores in a pc this little beauty supplies four cores which is enough to manage a lot of tasks simultaneously while doing so very fast with its high clock speeds. Unfortunatley, the CPU is rated at 125W which is a huge amount of power so if you are trying to keep your electricity bill low you might want to go for the cheaper, less power demanding but less powerful FX-4300 at £60. CPU Cooler Along side our super hot CPU I decided to invest some money into the cooler. This is optional, however having an aftermarket cooler will keep the temperatures and noise down and so it might be worth the extra couple of pounds. The cooler of my choice is the highly respected Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO sitting at a bit high £25. You can of course go with a all in one water cooler for double the price or cut back a little for less effective cooling. Personally, I believe this is a sweet spot between performance and price. The noise level is around 9 to 32 decibels under load, while the four direct contact pipes transfer the heat efficiently to the fins and the fan.
Motherboard For our motherboard, I have chosen MSI with their 970 Gaming ATX board which boasts 4 RAM slots to hold up to 32GB of ram, SLI and Crossfire Supports for future upgrades and 6 6GB/s sata ports. For only £80, this is the best AM3+ socket board you can get around this price. We could have easily chosen cheaper boards, but with so many great features built in this board is the best for budget builds due to its huge upgradability potential if you choose to do so. I have to mention that the black board has some amazing red accents which would look absolutely incredible in our case which we will talk about later.
RAM Next up is RAM. Kingston HyperX Fury Black kit for £37 will give us two sticks of 4GB DDR3 RAM clocked at 1600MhZ which is very good for gaming. The black goes very nicely with our board, and there is also a red version of these if you are interested in that. I must add that if you want more RAM you can use 2 more sticks as our board supports up to 4 and so it will be super easy to upgrade.
Storage For storage, we are not going to have an SSD for our operating system or game storage. However, with 6 sata ports you can easily change this and add more Hard drives or SSD if you want to do so. My choice for the hard drive is Seagate Barracuda 1TB hard drive at 7200RPM. This is enough storage for an operating system, games, files and whatever else you wish. Data transfer will also be much faster as it is able to use the 6GB/s ports on our motherboard. For £37, this is a bargain.
GPU Going along with our Red and Black colour scheme, I have decided to go with MSI yet again. We are going for the R9 380 Graphics card which boasts 4GB GDDR5 memory, 970MhZ clock speeds and Crossfire support. This graphics card has a really efficient cooler with good quality and quiet fans which kick in when temperatures reach a certain level. This also comes with MSI’s afterburner software which allows you to adjust when the fans begin to work, and to help you overclock this £180 beast.
Case Nothing special in the case department. I decided to go for the sleek Bitfenix Comrade ATX Mid Tower Case for £30 as it is functional and suits our colour scheme. The windowed version is slightly pricier but you will be able to show off the great components in your case. With 3 5.25 Inch bays, 3 3.5 Inch bays and 3 2.25 Inch bays you have room for loads of storage and other stuff that you might like there. Cable management is said not to be the greatest, so you might have to bare that in mind if you are going for a very sleek and clean look on the inside.
Power Supply So our system so far is running at 424W and so I decided that a 500W power supply will be enough. Of course, if you are planning to do a lot of overclocking you might want to consider 600W or more. My choice is the EVGA 500W 80+ Certified Power Supply. £40, has all the connections we need and is really reliable. One thing to not is that this is not a modular power supply, so again bare that in mind if cables is something you dread.
Conclusion
So here we are guys, that was our sub £500 Budget Gaming PC build. Our total is exactly £496.56, so we just managed to fit under the budget. But this beast is certainly worth all the money you put into it.