Gaming PC for £350 – take that Cnet!

UPDATE – This article has been replaced by this one (link), with a newer, faster A10 APU!

A few days ago an article posted on the so called consumer tech blog Cnet.co.uk (link) seriously annoyed me; they claimed that for a little less than £350 you could build a gaming PC.

The things that got me about their article were

  • Use of a seriously underpowered CPU – Gaming isn’t just using the GPU, you need a CPU to match – the Intel Pentium G840 is at the low end of the Intels CPUs, a much better option (if you want to stick with Intel would be a i3/i5)
  • Not factoring in postage – The article states ‘£294.05 plus postage’ – well that postage pushes your PC over the £350 mark, what makes it worse is the title of the article is ‘How to build a budget gaming PC for under £350’.
  • Saying that you can get a copy of Windows 7 for £50 – The link to Windows 7 they provide is for a UPGRADE copy, you would not be able to use this to install a fresh copy of Windows on your PC
  • An inaccuracy about RAM – ‘but doubling up to 8GB will help out with general computing tasks when you’re not tackling the latest shooters.’ come on! General computing tasks requiring more RAM than a PC game? I think not!

So then here ends the rant 🙂 here also begins a proper gaming PC that you could build for less than £350 (£330.91 including postage at time of posting).

First a few little mentions – true gaming PCs use the latest in high performance components, if you are looking for something to show off to your friends then you need to consider spending a minimum of £600 on any gaming PC. Further to this the PC below runs Windows 7 which will soon be replaced by Windows 8 so you might just want to hold off and wait for that ;).
Last but not least, you may well be able to find these parts cheaper elsewhere I’m just using Novatech as an example because I like them.

Anywhos here is my part list-

APU – AMD A8-3870K – £89.99
APUs combine high performance graphics and processing on one chip. This particular chip is quad core clocked at 3.0ghz per core and comes with 400 graphics processing cores clocked at a total of 600mhz. If all of that was mumbo jumbo to you take a look at this review of the AMD A8-3870k.

Motherboard – MSI A55M-P33 – £39.98
A pretty simple motherboard which has the option to install a even more powerful graphics card than the one on the APU later on if you ever need.

RAM – Corsair Vengeance 8GB – £37.99
RAM is as cheap as chips (nothing to do with it being made out of chips) so why not have more (than the 4GB of the Cnet machine)!

Case – Novatech Corona Micro ATX – £25.98
Pretty basic case that I have used in the past, as the APU uses power quite efficiently don’t worry about overloading the 450W PSU which comes included with the system.

Hard Drive – Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB – £56.99
A easy part to save some extra money on if you need to (just go for a lower capacity hard drive).

OS – Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit – £79.98
One sec! Crave said I could have Windows 7 for £50 so why am I forking out nearly £80! That is because this isn’t a UPGRADE copy – you can use this version of Windows to install onto new machines.

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14 comments

  1. I use that same APU, and it is great for my casual gaming. I would elect to pay a little more for a Momentus XT hybrid drive though. Yes this is a budget PC, but the benefits from this drive can really be seen. For another £30 you can get a noticably faster PC. Just my two pence. 🙂

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  2. efficantly is spelled wrong, under the case section. Otherwise a good machine!

    Admin Man says – it is now 😛

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  3. Never built my own PC before, other than (I’m assuming) a CPU cooler would there be any other necessary components to finish this off? Wouldn’t want my new shiny gaming device blowing up on me…

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    1. As mentioned by another commenter a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid hard drive is certainly the way to go if you would like a faster computer (looking at windows start up times ect) but other than that all you need is a screw driver!

      Could I suggest this cooler – http://www.quietpc.com/cnps9700 fantastic bit of kit I’ve got the same model from the previous generation.

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      1. Hi there, managed to build this and it works a treat! As stated in the description for the motherboard, I’ll be looking to upgrade with a decent graphics card, anything on Novatech that you could recommend? 🙂

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        1. How much are you looking to spend on the graphics card?

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          1. Oops, forgot to add that part. I’m looking to put around £200 into one, I guess the ‘budget’ part has gone out of the window heh

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          2. I think you are in for a PSU upgrade if you are able to spend that kind of money.

            Something like this http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/amdradeongraphicscards/amdhd7770series/r7770-pmd1gd5.html or this http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/amdradeongraphicscards/amdhd7950series/fx-795a-tdjc.html

            Any 500-600W PSU should be enough to take the card (also check that the cards will fit in the case bearing in mind case/card length).

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  4. So, if I buy those bits for £330 and stick them all together, you think I can play TF2 at a steady 66fps?

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    1. There is a video on YouTube here which shows a lower model A8 APU running TF2 at a claimed 55fps when not videoing so I wouldn’t be surprised if the A8-3870k gets very close.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pImaLTu09wo

      I will be posting up a updated version of this post pretty soon which uses the new AMD A-10 APUs which have even faster graphics.

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  5. good job, i hate blaggers.

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  6. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you also need some kind of optical drive to read the windows 7 disk and install it, or is such a drive incorporated in to one of the other components.

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    1. It depends on your chosen method of installing Windows 7 as for example it can be installed from USB (http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool).

      However you are correct otherwise and you would need a USB DVD drive (or DVD drive in the case) to install Windows.

      Either way these are cheap as expensive chips and its possible to buy them for less than £14 in many cases.

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