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First time building a gaming computer

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  • Gaming
  • Computers
  • Systems
Last response: in Systems
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January 4, 2014 2:30:43 PM

Hey guys/girls, want to build a gaming computer for under £500 but its my 1st time. I think I have everything that I need.

Could you look over it and just see if there are better options and if I have everything I need please?
Computer Case: CiT Vantage Midi Mesh Gaming Case with HD Audio, 4 Fans, Card Reader and No PSU - Black (Amazon) - £37.49
Graphics Card: GIGABYTE R9 270X 2048 MB GDDR5 OC PCI-E 3.0 256 bit Dual Link DVI-I HDMI Display Port Windforce 3x Active (Amazon) - £166.68
Motherboard: MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 AMD FM2 Micro ATX Motherboard (Socket FM2) (Amazon) - £57.99
Power Supply: Corsair Builder Series 500CX 500W 80+ Bronze PC Power Supply PSU - CP-9020047-UK (Ebay) - £48.06
Processor: AMD Athlon II X4 750K Black Quad Core 3.4GHz FM2 CPU Processor - AD750KWOHJBOX (Ebay) - £63.79
Memory: Corsair CMZ8GX3M1A1600C10B (8 GB, DDR3 SDRAM, 1600 MHz, DIMM 240-pin) RAM Module (Ebay) - £55.00
Hard Drive:
New Western Digital WD Green 1.5TB HDD 3.5-inch SATA 3Gb/s Desktop Internal OEM (Ebay) - £45.35

I am willing to spend another £50 if there are some better options that you know of.

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a b 4 Gaming
January 4, 2014 2:59:49 PM

1) CiT Vantage is awful, go for a Cooler Master Elite 430.

2) I would go with an Nvidia card, a GTX 660 or maybe a 760 if you can afford it.

3) MSI motherboards are not that good, go for a Gigabyte or ASUS board.

Apart from that, considering your budget it seems all good. Maybe go for a similarly priced Intel build (Pentium or i3?)

Anyway hope this helps :D .

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January 4, 2014 3:15:08 PM

Hey thanks for the quick response. I didn't really know which case to pick so I just went to the one that a lot of amazon users said was good, cheers for the heads up on that. As for the graphics card I will go with the 760 as it isn't to much of a price jump from the one I was originally going to buy. As for the motherboards, is there any particular one you would recommend? As I said before I am new to all this, so I wouldn't really be able to determine the difference between various motherboards.

Thanks for your help :) 
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a b 4 Gaming
January 4, 2014 3:22:00 PM

1) I would agree that case is not very good.
2) For AMD GPU's I would from what I have read go with the R9 280 or better if you can afford it. For Nvidia the GTX 760 or better.
3) I have been using MSI motherboard in my AMD rigs for years and have not had one go bad yet. One of them is over 8 years old now. I can't say the same for Gigabyte the last one I used lasted 5 days before it died. Replaced it just have that one die about 40 days later. It might have just been my bad luck but I will never buy a Gigabyte motherboard again.

Personally since you are using a dedicated GPU I would look into a AMD3+ motherboard and FX-63xx or FX-83xx CPU. It would be better performance since you would not be needing the integrated GPU on the APU.
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a c 287 4 Gaming
January 4, 2014 3:27:31 PM

Here's what I would do:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor (£82.49 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£25.95 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Asus M5A97 R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard (£66.72 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Patriot Viper 3 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£59.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£42.99 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB Video Card (£147.71 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case (£47.98 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 500W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (£46.57 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £520.40
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-01-04 23:25 GMT+0000)

-Stronger processor.
-Better quality case.
-Better quality psu. I'm assuming you listed the non-modular version of the CX500, which is much lower quality than the semi-modular version.
-The gpu is about the same. The R9-270X is a re-branded 7870 so they should perform very similarly.
-Added a cpu cooler to overclock.
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January 5, 2014 11:10:19 AM

Thank you for all the replies. After some thought I think I will go with the list that realchaos has put up.
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