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A good friend of mine has asked me to build him a PC. He will mainly be using it for light office work, some low-end video editing (think dumping old VHS home videos and cleaning them up) and later on, maybe some gaming. Total budget is $800-$1000 for the hardware, which I told him was probably too much. He gave me a 2 month window to buy everything so I've been picking stuff up when it goes on sale. So far I have:
Case - Fractal Design Define S ($50 on sale)
Power Supply - Seasonic FOCUS 550w Gold ($40 AR)
SSD - WD Blue 500GB ($120 on sale)
Total: $210
What I need now is a CPU, MOBO and RAM. I'm going to budget $150 later on for the GPU, which would put us at $360 right now. He wanted me to use a $350 Amazon gift card he's had lying around forever so I figured I would grab the rest with it. I haven't seen a decent deal on any of these on Amazon since I've been looking and I have a week to get the rest of the stuff. He lives out of town and we're meeting up next Saturday.
I'm eyeing the i3-8100 ($120) with it's 4-cores. I could step up to the i5-8400 ($180) but am doubtful he will ever use the other 2 cores. Thoughts?
I'd like to get a motherboard for around $100. His case will take a full ATX so any size will work. I've had mediocre luck with MSI and Gigabyte in the past and have used a lot of ASRock and ASUS boards recently. Any recommendations?
Lastly, since DDR4 is obscenely expensive now I told him he would be best off getting a 2x4GB pair for now and, if later on feeling the need for 16GB, grab another 2x4GB matched set. Recommendations?
Thanks in advance for any input!
Case - Fractal Design Define S ($50 on sale)
Power Supply - Seasonic FOCUS 550w Gold ($40 AR)
SSD - WD Blue 500GB ($120 on sale)
Total: $210
What I need now is a CPU, MOBO and RAM. I'm going to budget $150 later on for the GPU, which would put us at $360 right now. He wanted me to use a $350 Amazon gift card he's had lying around forever so I figured I would grab the rest with it. I haven't seen a decent deal on any of these on Amazon since I've been looking and I have a week to get the rest of the stuff. He lives out of town and we're meeting up next Saturday.
I'm eyeing the i3-8100 ($120) with it's 4-cores. I could step up to the i5-8400 ($180) but am doubtful he will ever use the other 2 cores. Thoughts?
I'd like to get a motherboard for around $100. His case will take a full ATX so any size will work. I've had mediocre luck with MSI and Gigabyte in the past and have used a lot of ASRock and ASUS boards recently. Any recommendations?
Lastly, since DDR4 is obscenely expensive now I told him he would be best off getting a 2x4GB pair for now and, if later on feeling the need for 16GB, grab another 2x4GB matched set. Recommendations?
Thanks in advance for any input!