Gaming PC for £600?

# qfc:249981
# AMD Athlon II X3 455 3.3GHz Socket AM3 Retail Boxed Processor

127584 - Coolermaster Elite 330 Black Mid Tower C

247677 - Corsair 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 Me

238977 - Gigabyte GA-M52LT-D3 nForce 520LE Socket

177466 - Hitachi Deskstar 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7 x2 Raid 0

176157 - Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 Socket 775, 1156, 1155, 1366, AM2, AM3 Heatpipe CPU Cooler

229934 - Arctic Power Pro 750W Modular 14cm Fan PSU - 4x PCI-E 8x SATA

145450 - Samsung SH-S223 22x DVD±RW DL & RAM SATA Optical Drive - OEM Black

250400 - Asus HD 6950 2GB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI Dual DP Out Graphics card

Total £583.15 from ebuyer

Maybe you want to stretch a little futher and get an SLI/xfire board. I wouldn't cheap out on the PSU, CPU can be upgraded, but from a gaming standpoint clocks are better than cores (at least with >=3 cores). GPU will impact much more than CPU. For encoding an SSD would be nice, but seriously capacity is a real factor with big HD files so for your budget better to RAID a couple TB drives.

Everything is of course a matter of opinion. But I think this wouldn't disappoint you too much at all.

gigabyte make solid mobos, I prefer long life as I don't upgrade often.

Which CPU would be best out of these? Thanks for the advice.

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=AMD+Phenom+II+X4+Quad+Co...

Here's another idea

Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigabyte-ga-870a-ud3-amd...
Phenom II 955
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-phenom-ii-x4-955-bla...
Corsair Memory XMS3 Classic 4GB DDR3 1600 MHz
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-%282x2gb%29-corsair-...
Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-samsung-spinpoint-...
PIONEER DVR-S19LBK DVD Writer
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/pioneer-dvr-s19lbk-24x-d...
XFX HD 6950 ATI AMD Radeon Graphics Card - 2GB
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-xfx-hd-6950-pci-e-21...
Seasonic Bronze S12II-520 520W
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/520w-seasonic-s12ii-520-...
Coolermaster HAF 912 Plus
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/coolermaster-haf-912-plu...


Total £596.82

Thanks for all your help guys. I'm taking every option into mind  

For your stated priority being gaming first only the CPU's with the highest clocks will make any difference at all. the x4 @3.6GHz is the only one that would have an appreciable difference.

For encoding the number of cores are important, That is why I put forward the triple core. It is sort of best of both worlds, cheap, fast, and a few good cores. Also you can often ~%50-60 of the time unlock the fourth core.

In fact I didn't check if the gigabyte board has that feature in the BIOS. You should check it out because potentially you could get a free core, and if not you still have a really quite fast CPU if it fails.

Anyway, if you want my advice go for the fastest clock speed that keeps it in your budget.

P.S. for attention of Mosox, Your build has half the ram, which could hit encoding capabilities, a 1/4 the hard disk capacity, at ~1/2 the throughput and a no name brand (he specifically said well known brands only) PSU that is kinda underpowered. All that and it costs more too. The cpu won't give better FPS in games as the clock is slower @ only 3.2GHz, it would help encoding as there is the extra core except that your storage throughput is crap as mentioned before, so my build would slam yours there too.

I am not trying to be mean, its just I really think for his stated priorities and budget its not as good.

What resolution ae you gaming at both above builds are graphics heavy which is great if you have a high res monitor but if you are below 1920 x 1080 you want to spend more on the CPU and less on the GPU.

I totally appreciate what your saying simon12, but nowadays a 22" 1920x1080 monitor sells for ~£100 brand new.

246954 - Hanns-G HH221DP Full HD TFT LCD 21.5" DVI-D Monitor with Speakers £99.83 VAT INCLUDED

there really is no excuse to not be gaming in HD, ESPECIALLY for a new build.

I take your point that if you aren't pushing 1920x1080 or higher the graphics is less critical, but truly for his stated priority No.1 being gaming the GPU is where you want to invest.IMHO.

BTW apologies to Mosox, having just read the $2000 dollar build article, it appears seasonic is a choicy PSU. so I was mistaken when calling you out on it.

I still stand by a 2TB raid 0 array for storage and the extra 4GB ram. Also the CPU choice would be better for games.

Interesting how similar the component choices are to the $2000 build (albeit not xfire, and SSD's out of price range, and of course going AMD over SB).

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/88?vs=202

none of those are benchmarks are games^^, a more accurate representation would be found in "Who's Got Game? Twelve Sub-$200 CPUs Compared" here on toms,

However, looking at the test setup page it appears someone "accidently" simulated the athlon IIx3 455 as a 445 with only a 3.1GHz, so even that article doesn't actually show the real lack of difference that paying double for a cpu would make.

And you don't take into account that the 4th core could very easily be unlocked with the click of a button.

Have a look at the dragon age origins benchmark on anandtech. or the WoW at over full HD res.

both show you that this cpu can feed the GPU just fine.

Hey guys thanks for all your replies but since this post i have built a gaming pc to my specs, however i took in to consideration americanbrian's advice and did go for a more reasonably priced cpu (see my specs below). However i had to cut back on some things and decided to go with 4gb ram instead of the 8gb to save money and tbh its all i need. Im very happy with the parts i chose and would like to thank everyone who posted for there advice.

CPU : AMD Athlon x4 3GHz
GPU : XFX HD 5750 Single Slot 1GB GDDR5
HDD: WD 1TB 3.5" SATA-III 6Gb/s
RAM: Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz
CASE: Coolermaster Elite 430