Critique This $550 Micro-ATX Budget Gaming Build

prne10

prne10

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 26, 2005
Messages
217
Backstory:

I am building a budget gaming rig for a friend who lives in California. She occasionally games (league of legends, over watch, etc) and watches tons of anime. I'm looking for advice on optimizing the dollar to performance here. Thanks in advance

1) What will you be doing with this PC?

Gaming / Anime

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

This is for a friend, and I'd like to keep it under $600 shipped to California.

3) Which country do you live in?

USA

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget?

See build below

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing?

N/A

6) Will you be overclocking?

No.

7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?

Considering buying friend a 23" IPS panel for 1920x1080

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?

Buying within a week

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? UEFI? etc.

None specifically. Just need a decent budget gaming build with only slight expansion capability (i.e. extra hard drive space, extra ram slot)

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license?

No.


Build (priced to ~$550.00 sans monitor):

Case ---> DIYPC Cuboid-G
Motherboard ---> Gigabyte AM3+ AMD DDR3 1333 760G Micro ATX GA-78LMT
Video Card ---> EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti SC 2GB GDDR5
CPU ---> AMD FX-6300 6-Core Processor Black Edition
Ram ---> Crucial 8GB Single DDR3
Hard Drive ---> Seagate 1TB Desktop HDD
DVD Drive ---> Asus 24x DVD-RW Serial-ATA Internal OEM Optical Drive
Power supply ---> EVGA 500 W1 80+, 500W
O/S ---> Windows 8.1

------

Monitor ---> AOC i2367Fh 23-Inch IPS Frameless LED-Lit Monitor

Questions:

1. Is the CPU overkill for the 750ti?

2. Is the PSU overkill for the CPU/GPU combo?
 
One way to save money, assuming that $550 price tag includes the $100 or so for Win 8.1, would be to buy one of the win7 keys available in the FS section for $10 to $12.

If you install during the "free upgrade to Win10" period (ending July 1, maybe?), you could go ahead and install win7, and then upgrade to Win10.

And I'd definitely get a GTX 950, rather than a 750 ti. You can pick up a 950 after rebate for $120.

Now, just get ready for the flood of "i3 vs FX" messages you're about to get :)
 
AMD chips are all trash, blah blah blah.

Sadly true, but I'm not going to bother with that fight.

Do not go with a single stick of RAM, ever. Modern systems are set up for dual channel or quad, not single, and halving your memory bandwidth is a terrible, terrible idea. Either get a 2x4GB kit and replace it when and if you need more, or pay a bit more now and go to 16GB.

There are regularly EVGA B-stock 970s for around $200 with 1 year warranty. With the new cards around the corner people are selling 970s for around that with even longer remaining warranties pretty regularly. I'd strongly recommend coming up with the extra cash there, as it will be a night and day difference in terms of performance and last you far longer. The 750ti / 950 are both really weak cards by today's standards, not suitable for even 1080P in many titles.

Do you need an optical drive? I know it's like $20, but with a budget this limited that's $20 that could be better spent elsewhere unless you intend to watch DVDs on this machine. I personally haven't had a need for an optical drive in like... 5+ years.

I do agree with Waderunner that a cheap Win 7 key is the way to go. Sure, it's OEM, so if you get new hardware you'll have to get a new key... but it's hard to argue with $10.
 
waderunner said:
One way to save money, assuming that $550 price tag includes the $100 or so for Win 8.1, would be to buy one of the win7 keys available in the FS section for $10 to $12.

If you install during the "free upgrade to Win10" period (ending July 1, maybe?), you could go ahead and install win7, and then upgrade to Win10.

And I'd definitely get a GTX 950, rather than a 750 ti. You can pick up a 950 after rebate for $120.

Now, just get ready for the flood of "i3 vs FX" messages you're about to get :)
Click to expand...


I thought about the windows issue, and I had a terrible experience with windows 10 myself. I guess windows 7 isn't too bad, though.
 
prne10 said:
I thought about the windows issue, and I had a terrible experience with windows 10 myself. I guess windows 7 isn't too bad, though.
Click to expand...

Windows 10 on reasonably modern hardware is really problem free in my experience. What was this "terrible experience"?
 
silent-circuit said:
Windows 10 on reasonably modern hardware is really problem free in my experience. What was this "terrible experience"?
Click to expand...

I had terrible micro stuttering when I tried to upgrade from windows 8.1 to 10 on a machine I built December 2014. I figure it was some type of driver issue but it drove me nuts trying to figure it out so I downgraded to 8.1.
 
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