Well I'm pretty much gonna start you over on this build. However I'm a little bias towards Intel and Nvidia. What I recommend it just finding a solid build, and downgrading it to what your budget is. Since you said 400-450, you're somewhat limited but there's definitely still some hope. Honestly I'd recommend trying to save up a little more (Around 700) and then you can get a pretty decent gaming rig. But if this is your budget, there's a few things you'll need. I would say you should get an i5 at minimum. An i7 is a bit of a luxury but the i5 will totally get the job done. Also, you'll need 8gb of RAM. 4 is just kinda skimpy. You don't really need to spend a whole ton on RAM, as it really doesn't differ much from brand to brand. It's all pretty much the same besides the speed, which you can easily choose. You can find a decent motherboard that's not to expensive. Definitely doesn't need to be gaming-grade if you don't want to pay extra. I recommend MSI. And as for the GPU, like I said I'd go with Nvidia. I'm not to up to date on the prices but I think something in the GTX 600 series should be okay for your budget and still get you some much better gameplay. I'd recommend MSi, EVGA, os ASUS. And that's pretty much it. You can figure out how much power that would need and get a power supply, and as for the case - if you don't really care about style then you can get away with something pretty cheap for that. If you have another computer and a USB drive then you don't really need to worry about an optical drive for the time being. And you said you already have a hard drive. So I hope this sorta helped. I know AMD can be a little cheaper so you could also go for that, but this is my recommendation from the Nvidia/intel side of things. Hope I sorta-kinda helped lol.
In my defense, I'm in no ways an expert. That was a very amateur overview of my opinions towards the build. I honestly haven't done much research with AMD products so I'm not exactly sure what the best choice is. My list was probably way over budget anyways lol. But thanks.
So momentarily hijacking thread here. MSI are totally cool peeps for me to be buying motherboards from? Edit of sorts, ok, bluescreens post wasnt there when I hit reply but is now visible in previous posts underneath this message. I shall have to consult the interwebz on whether or not MSI sucks balls or should be worshipped. Although 4690K getting 2 fps over 4790K shows the suckiness that is hyperthreading at high load. Must say, I agree that 8gb is a good idea, if its absolutely out of budget, buy a single 4gb stick and make note of exactly what stick it is so you can buy another in future. Even just playing skyrim unmodded I've run into pagefile.
Some people say AMD cards are unreliable, I've always had AMD and I've never had any problems at all. (My next card will probably be Nvidia though, might be a 970. Or maybe next gen. I'm not changing GPU anytime soon anyway.) Some brands are unreliable, I've always has Sapphire and XFX and they're good.
I've never owned an Nvidia card. Some of my friends do and they've never had any problems either, except for one who got a broken cooler once but that's the manufacturer's fault. I think it was Gigabyte or MSI, not sure.
The argument of being unreliable is just not valid. It is purely based on experience, so different people will just tell you AMD or Nvidia is best based on their experience. I think AMD has improved a lot, although this last generation has let me down a little, selling rebranded HD 7950/70 as R280/X, and then super high end cards that need a power plant for themselves. BUT, I think it's just a matter of time until AMD has the majority of the market. Nvidia has released their new cards. I'd wait to see the new AMD cards and then decide.
Dude I spoke to in maplin said they had a much higher return rate on AMD based designs than they did NVidia. Got mates who have had AMD based cards DOA or fail within weeks of purchase. NVidia don't seem to break things every other driver release (particularly linux, AMD linux drivers are absolutely terrible, NVidia may release them as binaries rather than source but they do have proper decent drivers and have also released documentation to a team of guys working on their own open source drivers). Now I don't know if its just a case of companies like EVGA that typically make NVidia cards doing a much better job of it than companies that typically only make AMD cards or what, but my experience has been to never have a single issue with NVidia which can be blamed on the card or drivers (instead it was a mate that called me over having fitted a 660 himself, I had no idea 250W power supplies existed, thankfully once he ordered a power supply (he went full hog 750W, that recommendation *did not* come from me) the machine powered on just fine and nothing appeared damaged) and yet I have been near too many dodgy AMD systems. As far as I am concerned, I am entirely happy to pay more for a rock solid solution, hence why I happily paid £15 for a genuine FTDI FT232RL USB to serial adapter in the UK when there are cheaper alternatives, the FTDI works first time every time, prolific's PL2303s do not (urgh baud drift on legit functioning devices, crap drivers from OEM and a vast collection of DOA chinese fakes on ebay - although some of the ebay fake USB to serial adapters are as low as £2.50 and some of those even work on occasion when the moons are in alignment). - - - Updated - - - I've never owned hardware by either manufacturer, are these 2 guys to avoid?
The 270 and 280 are nice cards, slightly improved over the 7000 series equivalent but then again there wasn't too much to change. Then there's the 295x2. AMD dropped the price to $1000 as a limited time offer once, if they do it again it's a beast of a card for 4K games and much cheaper than buying 2 780Ti's or even 2 290X's. - - - Updated - - - Not as far as I know. MSI cards are known for being extremely silent, although not the best at actually cooling the GPU they do a good job. I know people with MSI cards and they're fine. Although I'd avoid MSI motherboards judging by Newegg/Amazon reviews. Gigabyte has some nice coolers (Windforce), with average noise levels and pretty good cooling. Not notorious for quality issues either. Still, I stick to Sapphire for AMD cards, and if I bought an Nvidia card I'd go with EVGA. Sapphire's Dual-X and Tri-X coolers are nice, VaporX is noisy as fuck though. And EVGA's cooler for the 700 series GPUs is great.
its just one motherboard I was looking at getting was MSI and another was gigabyte Neither were reviewed poorly (quite the opposite) but I'd rather have a general idea of how they do motherboards in general. Currently I run an EVGA GTX460 SC on some sort of budget ASUS motherboard of some sort (seriously, forgotten model, but its a microATX AM3+ socket on the 760G chipset I think, PCIe 2.0 only, no 3.0's here, no USB 3.0 or SATAIII either, still has parallel and RS232 connections on the back and cost me a whopping £30 new) with an AMD Athlon II X3 460 at 3.4ghz. It is powerful enough to physically run any game I like, it certainly isn't maxing anything though but thankfully I'm not quite at the point where I need to drop settings to minimum. My case is physically damaged and I want to move to something smaller still, somebody was going to sell me a bitfenix prodigy for £10 but thats actually bigger than my current case which is just utterly bizarre for a mini-ITX system so I'm still on the fence about that, ultimately it seems the best case for me would have to be a custom one but I dont have resources for that otherwise I'd do it in a heartbeat (got it pictured). Regardless. Its upgrade time. - - - Updated - - - Wahey. Found a case I like. However my wallet really doesnt. EVGA Hadron, shame I dont have £110 for one.
Gonna bring up the hyperthreading thing again, I actually *did* test it out and got a rather significant MBeam/s gain in BananaBench.
hello sorry i havent replied in a while but i did raise my budget to $600 and heres my specs FX 6300 8 gigs of 1600 mhz ram OC'D to 1866 Mhz Sapphire R9 270 OC'D edition. ASUS MA97 r 2.0 NZXT source 210 case HX 650 80+ gold i couldnt afford intel at micro center so this was $716 with tax and 2 year warranty's on every thing except a case. i also bought Windows 8.1 making a $100 more its nice and cool. so 1050p i max everything out and get 75 Fps.
Cheers in the build! I'll just add that my current mobo is the lowest end z87 they make and beside a bit of lockdown on voltage (stops at 1.3 which I can't cool anyways.) it's a nice board. I've also never had an exceptional problem with either GPU manufacture. My one nvidia was fine and the only AMD card I've had a problem with that wasn't caused by me was 3 years old.
