High Settings Gaming PC for £600

FX8350 \ Seasonic PSU \ HD7950 \ EVO Cooler for the CPU.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor (£112.79 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£23.98 @ Scan.co.uk)
Motherboard: Asus M5A97 R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard (£59.00 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LP 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-2133 Memory (£53.49 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£46.42 @ CCL Computers)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 XT 2GB Video Card (£189.09 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Zalman Z12 Plus ATX Mid Tower Case (£57.05 @ Aria PC)
Power Supply: Antec High Current Gamer 620W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£67.49 @ Amazon UK)
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-04 DVD/CD Writer (£13.18 @ Scan.co.uk)
Total: £622.49
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-11-25 18:58 GMT+0000)

The FX8320 is a pretty good value CPU, you can step down to a FX6300 or step up to an FX8350, but it offers a nice medium.
16Gb of ram is basically wasted on gaming, you can get it if you want, but it's not a great place to spend extra.
The 270X is a rehashed HD7870, solid enough, but if your budget doesn't need an OS, you can do a lot better.

If you want to overclock then spending a bit more on the motherboard and a CPU cooler is a good idea. If its something you aren't interested in, then you can afford to spend more on graphics.
A 280X is perhaps slightly overkill, but stuff like BF4 is pretty demanding.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor (£112.79 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI 970A-G43 ATX AM3+ Motherboard (£50.36 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: Patriot Intel Extreme Master, Limited Ed 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£53.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£42.50 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon R9 280X 3GB Video Card (£228.43 @ Aria PC)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case (£46.98 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: XFX 650W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£70.39 @ Aria PC)
Total: £605.44
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-11-25 19:28 GMT+0000)
That does assume you don't need an OS. If you do, then I'd suggest dropping to an FX6300 and HD7950.



HD7870 and HD7870XT are quite different, despite the name. The XT is really a HD7950 lite, and is closer to its performance.


To keep this answer simple, not hugely important, you are correct that the CPU and GPU are going to make the most difference.
A good motherboard is important if you want to do things like overclock, or take advantage of more advanced features like SLI/Xfire. In general cheap motherboards also cut back on connectors and modern features that you would assume are standard. In terms of gaming, a CPU in a cheap motherboard (to the main part) runs as quick as it does in an expensive one (overclocking aside).
Memory is important to a degree, but most benchmarks seem to show fairly small gains from higher speed memory. These days 1600Mhz is effectively the standard, and most modern cpus/motherboards support this.
An SSD will decrease loading times for games, and your system boot time. Its a nice addition but on a budget it's not really worth it.

If you have a preference towards Nvidia, then yeah you could go with a GTX760. I think in general the HD7950 and R9 280X probably offer better value in that area, and the GTX770 is a bit more expensive. Nothing wrong with any of the above though.

SLI and Crossfire are names for Nvidia and AMDs systems for running multiple graphics cards in unison. To be honest, if you don't know what it is, you probably don't need it. It just means that you can use two (or more) graphics cards to increase performance. It has uses, but to the main part it is pretty specialised and uneconomical.

You don't have to match anything, so it's really just a case of what it costs and what you get for that cost.

Ultimately, all cards of the same range (for example an R9 280X at 850Mhz vs 1Ghz) are going to be fairly similar in ultimate gaming performance, though obviously if you can get a faster one for a similar price, it might well be worth the cost.
There are a lot of factors to consider; clock speed, memory speed, memory size, cooler style, cooler effectiveness, noise levels and bundled freebies but cost will be the most significant of all.

Singling out the GTX760 as its one you mentioned, but the method applies to any model of graphics card really. Here is a list of GTX760s on sale in the UK, sorted by price.
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/parts/video-card/#sort=a6&qq=1&c=142
At a glance, the MSI one at the top of the list is £10 cheaper than anything else, and has a respectably average clock speed. It would seem like a good buy, and it is.
The potential downside is that it comes with a "reference" cooler, a basic design which Nvidia employs, not a bespoke one from the manufacturer. Unlike a lot of cards where normal fans sit on top and blow air onto the board, this type sucks air in at the end, and pushes it through and out of the back of your case. It's quite efficient, and beneficial in smaller cases, but its fairly cheap and can mean cards run hotter and noisier.
The cheapest card with a bespoke cooler is the Asus one, at £195. Its £15 more expensive than the MSI, and no faster on paper, but from the reviews I've read, that cooler is both effective and quiet.
Whether or not you feel that (potentially) spending extra on something like that is worth it is up to you really, in some cases the price difference won't be that big.
As a general rule I'd advise shopping nearer the bottom of the price window than the top, as it's just not giving you value for money, but checking out reviews of any card that interests you is well worth a few minutes of your time.






Nothing is future proof, it's kinda a myth. Comparisons to consoles are tricky as they often have limited framerates, resolutions and detail levels (no Antialiasing, that kind of thing) so PC games will always be more demanding and look better. The PS3 lasted 7 years until it was replaced, the Xbox360 8. Nobody can predict how long the PS4 gen will last, or how a PC will measure up to it. A gaming PC is always on a declining scale, so you can't expect that in X amount of years it will be equally effective as it is today, but the types of machines listed above will still be perfectly capable gaming machines for 2-3years minimum. Much further than that is a lot of guesswork, I'd assume that even 5years or so down the line you'll be able to run modern games at lowered settings (I have an old Core 2 Quad Q6600 paired with an 8800GT both of which launched in 2007, its not my gaming machine but there aren't many things it literally cannot run, though that list is rapidly increasing now)

It doesn't really work like that. Console games are highly optimised, as they know exactly what resources are available at any point, with PCs you never know. This generation of consoles is far more PC based, so it should offer slightly more commonality, but they will still employ the same types of things to keep games running longer than they would do on a comparable PC.

As an example, I'm a PC guy, but I got an Xbox360 as a present. For my birthday my girlfriend bought me GTA V, which is great. Thing is, if that were a PC game, we'd be calling it borderline unplayable. The framerate in heavy traffic at speed is atrocious, and remember that's only running at 720P with none of the fancy PC effects. Admittedly, this is an extreme example, as its more or less the last big game of the previous console generation, but it shows the different standards each group expects.

If you want easy compatibility and stuff, consoles are fantastic value really, but PCs will always offer a superior experience. If the PS4 does last the best part of a decade, you'll almost undoubtedly have to replace a PC at least once in that lifetime to keep playing modern games.

Its an understandable predicament, but not one that has a real answer. As you say PCs do a lot more than consoles, and with platforms like Steam, games can be bought incredibly cheaply. If you intend on having a laptop for uni, then a PC is of less value to you than it would be otherwise.

8 years is a big ask for a gaming PC, its pretty unrealistic. Ignoring the potential of upgrades, you are more likely to want to replace it every 3-5years, depending on your needs and your budget.
Right now, the PS4/XboxOne are already pretty mediocre PCs, in terms of their specs, but every year the minimum requirements for PCs games will creep upwards, and the console bar will remain the same, it's unavoidable. Predicting when your PC drops below that point, is impossible, but like I said before something like 2 years is very realistic for maintaining the "top end" performance (if not quite maximum), and by 5-6years you'll probably be struggling to run things.

If you look back 8 years from today, the best gaming machine you could buy was probably a "Prescott" Pentium 4 and something like an Nvidia 6****GT or 7****GT. These days you have more chance of gaming on your toaster.