Rammy said:
It's really nice, very sensible. There isn't much that necessarily should be changed.
What I would say is that it's relatively expensive for what you get at the end. The case for example, is great value, but it boxes you into using an SFX PSU which is pretty expensive for the wattage, and it's not the most reusable PSU either.
My suggestion for a similar setup would be the Coolermaster Elite 120/130 and XFX Core 550 PSU. This gives you a similar (slightly longer) case, full sized ODD, and a quality standard sized PSU which can be used and reused for a variety of builds (like if you wanted to upgraded the graphics card for example). Approximate saving ~£15
Couple of other notes -
It doesn't make much difference, but the general solution is 2*4Gb of ram to enable dual channel mode. Given that it's unlikely you'll ever need to upgrade to 16Gb, there isn't a huge amount of need for you to leave a slot free. Either way works though.
A 250Gb SSD on a smaller budget only really makes sense if you have a specific purpose for it. It's not outrageously expensive, but it is more expensive than a 128Gb+1TB HDD which is the generalised "value" solution right now, which arguably gives a much better allocation. Even then, if you want to keep costs down you can make a case for dropping the SSD altogether.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a 3470, but if you wanted to chop off some cash to try and get it below say £600, then you could drop this to a 3330 or 3350P for a £10-20 saving without really losing any significant performance.
The CPU cooler is effectively superfluous. For it's price, it's not bad at all, but the stock cooler is perfectly sufficient, low profile, and free. It's hard to make a case for adding a cooler unless you really want to alter the acoustics somehow, and then it's always something you can retrofit as needed.
At £130, the R9 270 is great value, especially relative to say the GTX660, though I'd say the HD7870XT is also worth consideration as it's significantly faster and not a huge amount more expensive. The 270 does use quite a bit less power though.
That's incredibly helpful, thank you. Slightly updated, and happily cheaper -
PCPartPicker part list:
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/2ySu1
Price breakdown by merchant:
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/2ySu1/by_merchant/
Benchmarks:
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/2ySu1/benchmarks/
CPU: Intel Core i5-3470 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (£139.98 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H77N-WIFI Mini ITX LGA1155 Motherboard (£84.07 @ Aria PC)
Memory: Avexir Core Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£59.90 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (£70.59 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon HD 7870 XT 2GB Video Card (£143.46 @ CCL Computers)
Case: Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini ITX Tower Case (£36.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: XFX 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£47.12 @ CCL Computers)
Other: Old Laptop 500GB HD (Purchased)
Total: £582.11
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-01-10 11:48 GMT+0000)
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It's funny you mention the alterations you did. The builds I'd planned before included the Cooler Master Case amongst others, but I thought in the end to go for the smallest case I could compromise the price a little. But actually, you make a good point that it'll be much better in the long run to have a reliable PSU ... I would really like this build to last a long time!
CPU similarly, I had the 3350P down before, but I changed my mind after reading this article:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/build-your-own-gaming-pc-... - It made it sound like there would be a justfiable difference in the two, so I thought for £12 extra it'd be worth it. Do you think the performance is extremely marginal? I wouldn't say no to knocking it back if that was the case.
I agree with you on the GPU, it stings a little bit but after comparing the specs they are quite far apart in performance .. but at least with this case I don't need to worry about card length like I did before, which was a little part of the justification of that 270 card. I'm assuming I won't have any trouble with power issues with the 7870XT with the XFX PSU?
I think I was going overboard a bit on the 250GB SDD, so I halved it. I think I'll cope more than fine.
CPU Cooler wise - I didn't realise the stock was a low profile cooler. I assumed that all stock coolers are too big for Mini-ITX builds/cases. That's not the case then? Thank you for that!
So to solidify what remains ... is the CPU performance between the 3350P and 3470 justified for £12 in your opinion? Or is it purely the case that I'm just paying for the same ratio of performance. And another question - should I buy any extra fans or configure the ones that come with the case differently? I'm not very experienced in this area, but I read on a bit-tech review of the case that having a pull in/push out system worked a lot better?
Thanks again for your swift reply.