Building another PC for a friend

Hi guys and girls,

Another one of my friends (I'm not really that popular, honest!) wants me to build a PC as I am the only one who actually knows a decent amount about computers and here I am again because I know you are a lot smarter than I am

He plays a lot of Garry's mod, CS:GO and will be playing a lot of GTA V when I bloody comes out for PC (sometime in the next never) and I was wondering what sort of PC I will build him.

It sort of comes to the age old question: red vs blue. He does light editing and rendering but nothing that intense. He has a £500-£700 budget and wants a 2TB HDD and 16GB of RAM. I tried to convince him that neither of those were necessary but he hasn't listened. I have been trying to fit a 970 into the builds I have been doing, but I am struggling slightly. I am pretty sure that Nvidia is the way but should I go for a 290? I'm not sure, hence why I came here.

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

You won't really need a super high end card for those games, unless gta 5 is optimized the same way they did 4.

 

Get a used 290 for $100
Anyone who makes their friend build them a computer doesn't deserve overclocking, so go H97

so...
i5 4690
H97 board - go cheap
used r9 290
600 watt psu - don't go cheap here
budget case
2 tb hdd
16 gb of ram
ssd if budget permits

seems around the $800 mark in Canada so that's around £500

 

I never buy used. I just never do. In Canada I know there are shops there that do full re-furbed cards but over here they're uncommon. And where would you even buy a 290 for the equivalent of £60? Maybe a broken one or a cooler for a 290 but no-where near a full card.

- - - Updated - - -

I know but he's probably going to be using this computer for a good 4-5 years so I may as well get him a decent card to last him that long for games.

 

Just darted to Craiglist and saw a used 290 by XFX for $180 in box.

290s are cheap here because crypto mining boomed and then crashed, and power is expensive. I think Luke (linustechtips) bought a used 290 for $200 in Vancouver area, so...

You could go for a 660 / 660 ti for $250 NEW, that would run GTA V (it's the recommended spec)

 

I don't think we have Craiglist over here, and if we do then he would have to do something about it, I ain't driving 50 odd miles to get a graphics card. He's my friend but come on!

Anyway, in Canada (fucking great country and I will live there someday) the tech prices are cheaper i.e $200 for a Nexus 7 in Future Shop when in the UK it is £200, about a £70 difference! Also, I loved that video they did with the cheap PCs, that was bloody awesome. All I saw at the end of the first video is everyone going "Linus, why would you get a water cooled card on a $300 stupid person", if you aren't aware he was going to buy a water cooler GTX 580.

I might go for a 960 and a i5, just because he will be getting a GPU upgrade before a CPU upgrade.

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/bluescreen1985/saved/hP8mP6 for future upgrades

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/bluescreen1985/saved/QzXZxr for a more future proof but harder to upgrade system

 

OK here is what I have come up with and the prices on Amazon UK:



AMD FX 8320- £109
Hyper 212 Evo- £25.50
ASUS M5A97 R2.0- £70
Corsair Vengence 16GB (2x8GB)-£101
Samsung 850 Evo 120GB- £58
Western Digital 1TB Blue- £43
MSI GTX 960 Twin Frozr V- £168
Corsair CX500W- £46

He wants 16GB RAM (he says 8GB bugs him which is perfectly fine for me but oh well) and I got an SSD just for the hell of it. Any input on this would be great, thanks.

 

Good build. By removing the SSD and buying 8GB of a cheaper RAM you might be able to fit a 970 in the budget though.

 

I would love to, but he is instant on the 16GB RAM, I can't persuade him otherwise. I've told him that nothing he would do would really use 16GB RAM, I play games at ultra with 20 or so tabs on Google Chrome and still don't use the entire 8GB. The SSD might be changing and is it worth taking the SSD out and getting a R9 290?

 

Right, after a couple of days, this is what I can get with his 16GB RAM 'need':

Nevermind! This is the one with the upgraded PSU, I posted the wrong one :/ http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/qKF4hM

Any suggestions?

 

Rather close to my build IMO. Good build.

 

That either says you picked your parts wrong or I'm building mine right, I hope for both parties' sake the later

 

I got one with an intel CPU and a slightly better (IMO) 290.
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/BkWBJx

If he doesn't mind breaking 700 by a bit to 717 he can upgrade to a 4690k (the k is faster than the non-k by a couple hundred mhz and only 3 pounds more)

 

Good build, one problem: Cheap ASrock boards are crap. I'd go with a G3258 and ASUS/MSI/GB Z97 board for future upgrades, or an i3-4160 and ASUS/MSI/GB H97 if upgrades aren't planned.

 

I was under the impression the anniversary was one of the better ones. Anyway, swap it out for the z97-G41 MSI PCmate (which I have, it works fine) and it's only $2 more.

 

I've learned not to trust ASrock at all for sub-$100 boards. I still wouldn't touch a high-end board from them, but that's just me.

 

One problem however, thanks to his computer only selling for £350 instead of his planned £450 (I did tell him it wouldn't sell for £450 but he didn't listen) so the budget has now gone down to £600 and now he is willing to accept 8GB RAM

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/VsbwZL

 

CPU really isn't all that impressive someing FX-8320-8350 is a better solution and most modern games will have little to no difference between them and even mid range i7's. 290 is a real beast of a card and will Max just about anything so overall with a better CPU that rig should run everything no problem.

 

Make it blatently obvious to them that they can either have 16gb of ram with a gpu that has 2gb of vram or they can have 8gb of ram with a gpu that has 4gb of vram (3.5gb of useable ram doesn't sound so good ) . If that flawed logic doesn't sort things out mention that its 16gb of ram vs frame rates about 10fps higher than with all the ram.