PSU Choice - rather confused

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Rayakins

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May 9, 2016
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Hi I am planning on building my first gaming rig soon and was planning on the following:

CPU: AMD FX6300 (Will be overclocking and using a 212x to cool)
MOBO: MSI 970a Sli Krait Ed
GPU: MSI GTX 970 OC/Gaming (Will probably overclock too)
RAM: 2x4GB Hyper Fury X
HDD: Sandisk SSD 480GB or similar
Case: Fractal Design Define S with 4-5 fans if I decide to oc the GPU
and PSU: Cooler Master G650M

Having read your tier list I think I may be better off going for EVGA G2 650W - is this overkill? Any advice or recommendations of good PSUs around $120/£80 (I'm in the UK so the range of brands available at sensible prices is more restricted than the US.
 
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bicycle_repair_man
The G2 is a great PSU and whilst it may have more power than you need, it gives you room to expand.

I recommend you change the CPU to an i5 or i3 depending on your budget. The FX-6300 is average at best and wasn't much to shout about when it first released. It may also bottleneck the GTX 970 on account of its poor single-threaded performance.
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bicycle_repair_man

bicycle_repair_man

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The G2 is a great PSU and whilst it may have more power than you need, it gives you room to expand.

I recommend you change the CPU to an i5 or i3 depending on your budget. The FX-6300 is average at best and wasn't much to shout about when it first released. It may also bottleneck the GTX 970 on account of its poor single-threaded performance.
 
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Hawkshot

Hawkshot

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Hi Rayakins,

Im also from England and while mentioned before the 650W is overkill for what you need it wont cause any problems either, As an owner of a EVGA G2 650W power supply I can tell you that even with overclocking my I5-6600k and R9 290x I have no problems what so ever.

What types of applications/ games are you planning on with this new build we maybe able to optimise it a lot more?
 
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Rayakins

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May 9, 2016
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Thanks guys, as it is only about £80 the 650 G2 seems like a good option as the 550 G2 and 650 GQ are almost the same price. It will be a 90% gaming machine, I want to play The Witcher 3, Fallout 4 and Skyrim with lots of mods in 1080p at high or max settings as well as a few RTS (starcraft and total war mainly). Other than that it will just be browsing and and work type stuff.

I cant really stretch to an i5 without cutting back on the graphics card which doesn't make a lot of sense for gaming. What i3 would you recommend as an alternative to the FX6300 - I have heard you can OC Skylake i3s now?
 
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bicycle_repair_man

bicycle_repair_man

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Could you wait a month or two in order to stretch your budget? If not, the i3 to go for is the 6100, with an H170 motherboard and DDR4 RAM.

Overclocking the i3 is simply a case of raising the base clock (BCLK), which existed long before the more common method of raising the CPU multiplier. Increasing the BCLK also overclocks the RAM and PCIe slots, amongst other things, so it requires a great deal of effort. The gains are also minimal, with 300Mhz being fairly typical. Personally, I don't think it's worth the trouble.
 
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Hawkshot

Hawkshot

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with the type of money you have and the activies/games you are going to playing the i3 isn't the best choice for you. stick with the FX-6300, its a pretty good CPU for the price but it is part of a dying range, that means future upgrades are going to be an almost complete overhaul of your system.
 
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bicycle_repair_man

bicycle_repair_man

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I respectfully disagree.

The FX-6300 is based on CPU architecture which is four years old now, and it's been outclassed by the i3 series for many years now. Only heavily multi-threaded tasks, of which gaming isn't one, really allow the 6300 to shine.
 
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Hawkshot

Hawkshot

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OP has stated that he wishes "to play The Witcher 3, Fallout 4 and Skyrim with lots of mods in 1080p at high or max settings" all of these game will utilise 2+ cores if not 4 cores, while the I3 6100 is a fantastic CPU don't get me wrong but being able to spend the extra money on a better GPU and making sure he has enough cores to be able to run the games and not bottleneck the GPU is of higher importance than single core performance in this case. alternitivly if he was playing single core games like LOL/Dota things like that then I would 100% side with your opinion. in the case of what OP wants/needs his computer to do I cannot agree Mr.Reapir man :D
 
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Rayakins

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May 9, 2016
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I could run to an i3 6100 if it was going to offer better performance than a FX6300 as it won't effect the rest of the build cost too much - mobo maybe £10 more. TBH I had been flip-flopping back and forth over whether to get a GTX 970 or and R9 380x as I was aware I was at some risk of throttling the 970 and wasting money. I can see from online reviews that the i3 6100 is probably better than an standard FX6300 but it is also supposed to be easy to OC the 6300 to 4.4 or 4.5Ghz with a good cooler so that is what had put me on the fence.

I have upgraded and overclocked PCs in the past but I went over to the dark side (Mac and xbox) about 7 years ago so my knowledge is very out of date.
 
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Rayakins

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Having looked at it the i3 build comes in at a similar price to the FX-6300 as the extra money for the cpu is saved by not needing a cooler. However I think I will wait a couple of months and see what the Pascal launch does to the price of the 970 and possibly see if I can stretch to an i5.
 
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