£700 gaming build advice

[fearless92]

I'm planning on building a gaming pc, with a £700 (approx $110) and I have two ways I'm thinking of going. The first route would be on using a G860 and a relatively cheap socket 1155 mobo and having £300 to spend on a gpu; then when Haswell is released next year replace the cheap mobo and pentium cpu with a good overclockable cpu and mobo. Or I could get a lesser gpu now along with a 2500k and a z77 mobo.


Potential builds - if a part isn't listed it's not needed as I already have it


G860 then upgrade to haswell:

This leaves me with £325 left for a graphics card


2500k build:

This leaves me £175 for a graphics card


What advice and suggestions could people give me? And which of the two options do you think I should take?

Just bear in mind that I'm currently using a laptop powered by a C2D T9300 and a nvidia 9500m gs (avg 25-30 fps on low/medium settings currently) - so I'm sure I could handle a g860 for a year

 

[metal orient]

I'd suggest you buy from aria.co.uk as they have better prices than DABS.
If you're only playing at 1080p a 7870 will be great:

Intel Core i5-2500K £144
GIGABYTE GA-Z77MX-D3H £113
8GB Mushkin Enhanced Blackline Frostbyte #996995 £32
500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 £55
Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 £263
550W OCZ ZS Series £47
Zalman Z11 Plus Black Midi Tower Chassis w/ USB3.0 £50
Total cost (with VAT and P&P) £715.54

If you want to save money you could go for a GTX 570, which is cheaper and about the same performance, but i would increase the PSU to 650W.

PNY GeForce GTX 570 XLR8 £214
650W XFX Core Edition £60
If you change only these 2 parts the cost will be £679.87 which gives you enough money to buy an aftermarket heatsink. Although i'm having real trouble finding a cheap one that's decent (Xigmatek Gaia and Coolermaster 212 were really good but their prices have gone up massively as they were both about £16)

 

[fearless92]

It may be a £50 saving but I can't afford to compromise storage space, I've filled a 1TB external drive in the past 6 months alone, plus I know a few people who have had bad experiences with barracuda hdd's :/

Also why would I pay £40 more for a mAtx board? Unless I am failing to see some extra features I would need from it?

I know that next year I should be able to afford a good haswell CPU when they are launched, and I'm still trying to figure out whether to get by with a pentium g860 now to be able to spend more on the graphics card, or whether I should go for the 2500k now and not have as big a budget for the graphics card :/ I can see both sides of the argument, haswell having avx2 instructions potentially leading to good speed gains in the new architecture, whereas on the other hand I will have to put up with low CPU performance until then.

 

[metal orient]

How on earth have you filled a 1TB drive in 6 months? That's insane.

Yeah it is more expensive than DABS which is a bit odd but if you order the motherboard from them and get the 1TB hard drive that should equal each other out.

I'd say get the 2500K, there's no point wasting £70 and as ivy bridge will be coming out soon a2500K prices are going down on alot and there is so much performance available, that it's just a great deal that will put your laptop to shame.

What sort of graphics card are you after as i would have thought a 7870 would be enough at 1080