Building a cheap gaming rig

[Letchy]

Hey guys. I am looking to build a relatively cheap but also powerful gaming rig that can play the likes of Battlefield 3/Battlefield 4, GTA IV, GTA V, World of Tanks, War Thunder, Skyrim, Company of Heroes (and the Blitzkrieg mod) on low to mid settings with a bearable and fairly good steady framerate.

The build is as follows:

Here is a basket of most of the parts on Scan.co.uk: LINK
Here is the PSU: PSU

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: Sometime after the 8th of June this year.
BUDGET RANGE: £400 - £450
USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Gaming. I will want to play games such as GTA IV, BF3/BF4, CoD, GTA V etc.
CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: None. I am looking at buying the 1GB XFX Radeon HD 7770 DD Core Edition, 4500MHz GDDR5, 28nm, GPU 1000MHz, 640 Cores, though. The PSU I will be purchasing is the Corsair Builder Series CX 430 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supply Unit.
OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS: I will be purchasing these - (MOBO) MSI H61M-P31 (G3) Motherboard, Intel H61, S 1155, DDR3, SATA II - 3Gb/s, PCIe 3.0 (x16), D-Sub/ DVI-D, Micro ATX; (CPU) Intel Pentium Dual-Core G860, S 1155, Sandy Bridge, Dual Core 3GHz, 3MB Smart Cache, 30x Core Ratio, 65W, Retail; (RAM) 4GB Corsair Value DDR3 PC3-10600 (1333) Non-ECC Unbuffered, 9-9-9-24, 1.5V; (CASE) Fractal Design Core 1000 Black micro-ATX Mini Tower Performance Case with 120mm Quiet Fan w/o PSU; (HDD) Seagate 500Gb 3.5" Barracuda Hard Drive 7200rpm 16MB Cache; (PSU) Corsair Builder Series CX 430 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supply Unit; (OS) Windows 7 64-bit.
PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Scan.co.uk, Overclockers.co.uk.
PARTS PREFERENCES: No preferences.
OVERCLOCKING: Not bothered.
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1280 x 768
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: I want to be able to play the following games on at least low settings with high/fairly high FPS: Battlefield 3, GTA IV, GTA V, World of Tanks, Company of Heroes (and it's Blitzkrieg mod), Skyrim etc.

Thank you for your time.

 

[kevinuk]

Hey guys. I am looking to build a relatively cheap but also powerful gaming rig that can play the likes of Battlefield 3/Battlefield 4, GTA IV, GTA V, World of Tanks, War Thunder, Skyrim, Company of Heroes (and the Blitzkrieg mod) on low to mid settings with a bearable and fairly good steady framerate.

The build is as follows:

Here is a basket of most of the parts on Scan.co.uk: LINK
Here is the PSU: PSU

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: Sometime after the 8th of June this year.
BUDGET RANGE: £400 - £450
USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Gaming. I will want to play games such as GTA IV, BF3/BF4, CoD, GTA V etc.
CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: None. I am looking at buying the 1GB XFX Radeon HD 7770 DD Core Edition, 4500MHz GDDR5, 28nm, GPU 1000MHz, 640 Cores, though. The PSU I will be purchasing is the Corsair Builder Series CX 430 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supply Unit.
OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS: I will be purchasing these - (MOBO) MSI H61M-P31 (G3) Motherboard, Intel H61, S 1155, DDR3, SATA II - 3Gb/s, PCIe 3.0 (x16), D-Sub/ DVI-D, Micro ATX; (CPU) Intel Pentium Dual-Core G860, S 1155, Sandy Bridge, Dual Core 3GHz, 3MB Smart Cache, 30x Core Ratio, 65W, Retail; (RAM) 4GB Corsair Value DDR3 PC3-10600 (1333) Non-ECC Unbuffered, 9-9-9-24, 1.5V; (CASE) Fractal Design Core 1000 Black micro-ATX Mini Tower Performance Case with 120mm Quiet Fan w/o PSU; (HDD) Seagate 500Gb 3.5" Barracuda Hard Drive 7200rpm 16MB Cache; (PSU) Corsair Builder Series CX 430 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supply Unit; (OS) Windows 7 64-bit.
PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Scan.co.uk, Overclockers.co.uk.
PARTS PREFERENCES: No preferences.
OVERCLOCKING: Not bothered.
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1280 x 768
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: I want to be able to play the following games on at least low settings with high/fairly high FPS: Battlefield 3, GTA IV, GTA V, World of Tanks, Company of Heroes (and it's Blitzkrieg mod), Skyrim etc.

Thank you for your time.

Hi, i don't know a whole lot about PC's but if an opinion counts then here it is:

Graphics card option seems pretty good, I don't own one but i do own the Sapphire HD 7750, i play BF3 at a higher resolution than the one you requested, on a mix of high/ultra settings. During multiplayer i get roughly 40 FPS. The 7770 Will easily be able to run all the games you have requested. I don't think you will be struggling for Mid-High settings (maybe ultra) at the resolution you said.

As for ram, Go for 8GB, if possible, that's what a lot of people run with and with Ram being as cheap as it is right now, it's would be a waste (in my opinion not to go for more). Not that you actually need 8gb ram, but as i said, it will run a bit faster and with it being cheap it's worth it.

PSU Seems good, but going to a 500w may prove better incase you wanted to upgrade in future. That said, the beauty of the 7xxx series is that they don't require a huge power draw.

I'm not aware of processors to be honest as i've used my standard one that came with my pc (i5 650 3.2GHz). This is something you may want to look into also, as if you plan to upgrade say your graphics card in the future, you need to make sure that it won't bottleneck anything.

These are my opinions, i am slowly learning to upgrade but i've just tried to help a little from what i do know. I hope that someone with more knowledge will reply and good luck with your build, it's a lot of fun learning the in's and out's!

 

[Letchy]

Thanks for you answer Kevin. Yeah, the CPU I will end up upgrading later on... However, thank you for letting me know that the graphics card is fine for my needs at the moment! Not sure if I will get the same performance as you because of the CPU though haha.

 

[scragnoff]

Hi Letchy!

Check out the build at the Modest and Fair Tier. With your preferred resolution of 1280x720, and low to mid detail settings, you'll be playing with more than bearable and fairly good steady framerates.

They actually have almost the same specs with your build, except for the cpu (965 quad-core), and the Fair Tier bumping up the video card to a GTX 650 Ti.

 

[Letchy]

Hi Letchy!

Check out the build at the Modest and Fair Tier. With your preferred resolution of 1280x720, and low to mid detail settings, you'll be playing with more than bearable and fairly good steady framerates.

They actually have almost the same specs with your build, except for the cpu (965 quad-core), and the Fair Tier bumping up the video card to a GTX 650 Ti.

Thank you, Scragnoff!

That is just what I wanted to know. My build is heavily inspired by this video by a YouTuber named JackFrags, and it is great to know that the build will perform just how I would like it too!

Logical Increments is a very, very useful website too - thanks again!

 

[Armabyte]

Perhaps a current gen Pentium? (G2020/2120)
GPU looks fine to me, 4GB of RAM should be fine unless you always have lots of background programs running.
Not familiar with MSI motherboards, so can't help you there.
You might want to upgrade to a 520w psu if you want to upgrade in the future.
Also you may want to wait for Haswell CPUs.
I imagine just getting 3rd gen will be fine; plenty of people are still running fine with 1st gen i7s and 400 series GPUs.

Just my advice

 

[Letchy]

Thank you for you input. I have changed my build since this thread and the list is as follows:

BUILD

With 2 sticks of 4GB RAM.

 

[Armabyte]

That looks great!
Good luck building it

 

[scragnoff]

Thank you for you input. I have changed my build since this thread and the list is as follows:

BUILD

With 2 sticks of 4GB RAM.

Although you could probably do with a lower wattaged power supply, it's still a great build!

Good luck!

 

[Letchy]

Thank you both Armabyte and Scragnoff. I'll be sure to update this thread once I have built the rig, if I remember too! haha.