Building a new PC

Hey so, for christmas my parents decided to pay for a new PC for me, and my Dad's reluctantly accepted trying to build one instead of getting a pre-built.
I however have no idea what I'm even looking for in terms of specs XD totally useless at this stuff, so I'm throwing out suggestions here. I need it for playing games (duh, I actually want to play games at a reasonable 60fps with the pretty picture graphics); and also for doing coursework stuff in Maya, Cubase, Visual Studio etc etc.
My budget is prolly £400-500 max - it depends how much of my student loan money I can save in the next month. Which is hard. I'm superpopular now and get invited to parties a lot

An easy way to go about it is go the Newegg's public wishlist and find a list of parts that's compatible with your budget. It's a good way of pretty much knowing you're getting compatible parts.

PC Part Picker would be a better option than that - http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/

I stopped following hardware as much about a year ago, so I don't think I can give great advice.

I only follow hardware when I'm gearing up to buy something. Otherwise, I'm totally in the dark

So is this budget only for the rig or would you need to buy a monitor and a keyboard as well?

I essentially have 2 monitors anyway at the moment (my old one from my old desktop, and my TV which works as a monitor) but need a KB

I have a Razer Blackwidow I can sell. MX Blues. Used for a year ish. I'd be looking for about £30 + shipping if you're interested.

Also, I have a 6850, a Phenom II X4 955(with a cheapish aftermarket cooler, some AM3 motherboard & 4x2GB RAM), an Asus sound card(I think it's a Xonar DX) and a Benq 24" 1080p monitor I could sell.

So since you're quoting the price in Pounds, are we to assume you're somewhere in the UK?
Also, do you have a preference for MicroATX or regular ATX sized motherboard?
Are you planning to add on any additional cards like a capture card to the PC?
You need to add Windows? 7 or 8?
Or plan on Running Linux?
Optical Drive? DVD Burner or Blu-Ray Reader/Burner?

Would you sell it outside of the UK? I'm sorta interested. Also how2imsg on these forums

Sure, but shipping would be more expensive.

To PM, click my name, then click "Start a conversation".

hmm. this looks a little bit like you not going to sleep!!!

Someone started poking me on Skype, so I had to stay up a tiny bit longer

I recommend taking a look at Ars Technica's system guide. They publish it every 3 months or so and post the recommended parts for 3 systems that range from inexpensive to ridiculously priced. They also have guides specific to gaming machines. If it's your first time building, I'd recommend giving them a look. (I'd link the pages, but Ars is blocked at work for some reason. I'll post when I get home.)

I could give you ideas based on the system I just bought... but that's without the screen or keyboard etc. It also cost just over £600 but it's what you likely would need.

If you are in the UK I would direct you to overclockers.co.uk

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/1Wysf - £476 with Windows 8

To bring it down to £400 you could either buy a lower end CPU/GPU or purchased used powerful ones. Ebay or Amazon might help there.

Do be sure to use this table for power comparison for GPU:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

And this table for CPU comparison:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html

**** overclockers.

They sent me a broken video card once, then made me pay like £16 to send it back to them.

Uh yeah, I don't need monitor and KB, we have those at home or with me. Honestly my dad and I are in talks about this all, the money thing is getting weird; I'm still getting a PC, but... we'll see.

Austin Evans ( youtube channel) has a good budget build for $600 ( which I think roughly translates into 400- 500 euros).

I have the ultimate gaming laptop


CPU: 16MHz 30386SX
RAM: 6MB (upgraded from 4MB)
HDD: 80 MB IDE
Graphics: Western Digital WD90C20LR
Display: LCD 9.5 "640 x 480/16 gray levels
Interfaces:

• serial
• parallel
• Keyboard
• Floppy Connector
• VGA (256 colors)
• Expansion

This amazing gaming MONSTER plays these great titles:

• Commander Keen
• Duke Nukem
• Dune 2
• Doom 1 + 2
• Descent
• The "Original" Test Drive games
• Stunts
• HiOctane
• FASA Dos RPG's (Robotek and Mechwarrior)
• SupaPlex
• and many more great games

Interesting little factoid: a player recently won an online quake CPM tourney because he was hitting around 50% accuracy in most of his games.


He was playing on a netbook.