Which to choose

[TheIllusive Man]

Sorry if this topic is already on this site, but as my pc recently died completely im limited to using my phone at the moment, and id rather not read possibly dozens of pages on my little screen.

Anyway im looking to build a new pc, which I have done in the past but never with playing games (1080p at least a while before I upgrade monitor) and watching movies on my tv as the main focus, so need some advice on which cpu to go for and I should be ok to manage from there.

Personally I prefer AMD, but I know they are a bit behind and I cant afford to wait but the ones that ive been looking into are the i5-6600k,4690k, Xeon E3-1231 v3 and the FX9590.

As I said never built a media pc before so not sure if it matters that much from the cpu point, but ideally im trying to build as small a pc as possible just a preference of mine.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated, thank you

 

[Kelt]

Having owned a hexcore for a few months now, if I had to buy a new PC now, it would be a 5820K all the way.

Quadcore is so yesterday.

 

[Gabbatek]

what is your budget?

 

[eddiew]

For size, Skylake might help you since you can get a nice 2x16GB memory kit for a little ITX board. Don't think you'd be able to say the same for a Haswell or hex-core build

Although if what you want to do is watch movies... perhaps a stupid question, but considered a compute stick? Should be perfectly good for a media centre, and is so small you'll forget it's there ^^

 

[TheIllusive Man]

Well I was caught a bit off guard as tests I ran indicated my pc should have been good or atleast usable for a while longer, but I will ballpark budget at around £800 but im sure I could stretch a bit if necessary. Although one component I should be able to carry over to a new build is my SSD as its only a matter of months old so that should be fine

I'd never heard of a compute stick, but even after doing a quick google around I dont think it suits as I need to build a new pc for games anyway, so it seems to make sense to just worry about getting one new machine to suit my needs.

 

[eddiew]

Ah, ok, sorry, I hadn't realised you were wanting to make a gaming build. Mention of a media pc confused me ^^;

Maybe check out the Small Form Factor forum? Should be some folks who can suggest how to fit some decent hardware into a small case (and your budget)

 

[Rainmaker]

Definitely don't get the FX9590 if your goal is a small form factor. It's... toasty.

 

[TheIllusive Man]

Ah, ok, sorry, I hadn't realised you were wanting to make a gaming build. Mention of a media pc confused me ^^;

Maybe check out the Small Form Factor forum? Should be some folks who can suggest how to fit some decent hardware into a small case (and your budget)

I may yet do that, but the reason I came here first is that im fairly confident in putting the rest of a build together with no real issue and have done so much reading around im pretty set on getting an r9 390 graphics card however since ive never built a pc like this before the cpu is the one component I need some assistance with. I have done some reading around on this front too, but none of them seem to be clear "winners" so hopefully asking specifically for my needs someone can point me in the right direction