SSD boot drive plus a big slow 2Tb for storage is a good call. Check UK hot deals for SSDs. There are offers almost daily.

£140 for a case and no PSU. IMHO you'd get better value dropping the case budget to about £80 and spending the other £60 on the PSU.

Budget for your build?

What is your machine to be used for?

I need new kit, PC, MoBo, RAM, GFX - £600. SSD & Necrosoft Windowz £140. Rest I have. I'd buy the cheapest case suitable and the best PSU you can afford. This will be your system's heart and the cleaner the juice it supplies the better OC you will get outta it and it will last longer. Re storage SSD for OS and mission critical and some 2x2TB or 1x4TB should do nicely. RAID Arrays only useful if data security paramount or hot swappable storage system needed.

Haven't quite finalised spec yet as the moment I think I'm there I read a bad review of a component then start looking for something else. Once I'm done I'll post

The spec is almost there but still tweaking. If there's anything missing or you think I could change let me know. Final price is higher than I wanted so I'm still looking at cheaper places to buy from or alternative bits. Lots of the prices are with discount from Amazon. For those who remember I originally wanted a laptop for around £700 so did want for roughly the same price. But then again this is a lot better. The only odd addition is the 1200w PSU. While I don't need that much power it's cheaper that the lower models from the same company and gets good reviews.

Antec 1200 - £111.78

GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 650 Ti OC 2048MB GDDR5 - £139.99

Silverstone Strider 1200w - £139.99

i5-3570k - 3.4ghz - £162.20

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (120mm) - £14.99

Corsair Vengeance DDR3 16gb 1600mhz (4x4GB) - £52.99

Asus P8Z77-V (Socket 1155) Mobo - £112.70

Optical Drive - £5.25

OCZ 120GB Agility 3 SSD (85000 IOPS) - £54.99

Windows 7 64bit - £62.99

Asus VE228T - £111.99

Total - £969.86

Get a cheaper case. They're just metal boxes you can always get another and shift the contents across. I've a £25 Casecom which was surprisingly good. Came with a 140mm and 120mm fans already fitted.

You'll probably want more than one optical drive to copy discs.

You can probably do without the CPU cooler unless your chip is OEM or you plan to overclock. Stock coolers are fine. We've moved on from the flaming AMD chips of old.

Edited 18 October, 201213 yr by Aspman

Personally I would keep the quality case. Not only do they offer better materials than cheap ones, they offer better cooling, better accoustics(sound deadening/less rattles), better cable routing, easier assembly and if you buy a nice big one it will last you years. I have had my Silverstone about 8 years(paid £120 back then), been through about 4 upgrades and its still excellent.

CPU cooler is decent for the price and that CPU should offer a good overclock easily.

Crucial v4 128GB SATA 3Gb/2.5" SSD 386369 86 in stock £58.94 £58.94 Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium w/SP1 259863 241 in stock £77.49 £77.49 (free accessory) Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 278357 100 in stock £0.00 £0.00 Intel Core i7 3770 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor 349023 22 in stock £231.99 £231.99 Gigabyte GA-Z77P-D3 Socket 1155 HDMI 7.1 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard 407542 190 in stock £69.99 £69.99 G-Skill 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 2133MHz RipjawsZ X79 Memory Kit CL9 1.65V 319760 7 in stock £100.00 £100.00 Coolermaster Elite 430 All Black Interior Mid Tower Case with Side Window 233740 32 in stock £39.47 £39.47 Corsair TX 850W V2 PSU - 80plus Bronze Certified 257234 177 in stock £103.54 £103.54 Philips 226V3LSB LCD LED 21.5" DVI Monitor 367831 > 100 in stock £76.98 £76.98 Inno3D GTX 670 2GB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card 370533 8 in stock £269.99 £269.99

In your budget (little more) and blows away your list to smithereens

i7 22nm lithography 4-core chip

Super fast memory

One of the best GFX chips on the market

Good case

Vary good PSU

Think about it Obviously no need to be using ebuyer, there are other vendors available

But that's the thing with PC builds and my bike build was the same. You spend a little more and you get more, etc. At the moment I can't justify the i7 especially with new chips coming sometime next year. Doubt I'd need to change it for a while but at least id save roughly £100. You have to stop somewhere. It would hardly be slow anyway and it gets to a point where its bragging rights over benchmarks.

I will look at the board and ram again because at a quick glance (on phone)I can't work out why your board is cheaper but supports faster memory. Will be keeping the case though

I'd go with Aspman here as I consider a case to be just a scaffold to conviniently place your kit in and unless you are an aqvid modder you will open it up twice a year to blow the dust off. I looked at your budget and cooked up a spec which is "only " £60 or so dearer but waay quickier. Don't get me wrong, i3 with 1333 memory will run everything you throw at it now, there is nothing wrong with your spec. Where it fails is the value for money i.e. how long can you keep it. New dies are rolled out every 6-12 months, you just simply cannot keep up. Also, the only taxing things most people ever do on their machines are HD vid ripping and gaming, al else can be run fast on kit 5 years old .

Bottom line is I believe in buying kit which will last for a long time i.e. me getting the value for money. Time to buy new gear is signalled when new games I buy cannot be played with all bells and whistles turned on = upgrade time. If it wasn't for the CPU not able to OC any more (still didn't get to the bottom of this as it only runs dead stock and nothing else, maybe some setting in the BIOS went awry and sabotages my OC'ing advances ) I'd still be able to enjoy full eye candy in BF3!

Anyhow, let us know what you decided in the end, you can't go wrong really, even with budget kit, all it won't do is last long keeping up with new games .

Thought he specced an i5, more than enough for current games and future games for a while.

Can always drop in an i7 in a year or two.

Of course he can, my point is that by spending additional £60 to compared to his original kit list he will not have to do that.

You can cut the psu price in half too, I'm running a novatech 750w which cost about £70, It's silent and made by one of the bigger names, can't think which though lol. It will probably be still be used in 5 or more years. My last FSP 450w is still power my spare desktop and that prsu must be nigh on 10 yr old now.

All in a 5 yr old Antec P182 case on it's thrid set up, this is 18 months old now, and the 3500K still chews through anything I throw at it, OC'd to about 4.3 iirc.

p.s. If your buying anything from Novatech, use my reward number and I get a few points !!

I had few PSUs blown (of the budget variety) so now go for better quality ones.

I have changed the case but only to the Antec 1100 so a little smaller but cheaper. I've specced an i5 and 1600mhz DDR3 memory and have found these a few quid cheaper. Every little helps. Will have to rethink a PSU because the one I chose wants £10 for delivery plus I'd have to wait up to 2 weeks for it. The Novatech one may well be my best option. I take it that it's modular? If I get it from there then yeah I'll use your code. I've only ever blown up one computer and this was an off the shelf PC World one. Sat in the corner for 4 years getting clogged up with dust and I was running it flat out on a hot day. PSU cried enough and went, then took out the board.

May not go all out for a 670 GFX but may go up from a 650 to 660 if I can find one decently priced.

Edit: This PSU?

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/powersupplies/nov-psb750.html

I had few PSUs blown (of the budget variety) so now go for better quality ones.

Always the budgets lol

I've changed I don't know how many cheapies for people over the years, stick a £40 one rather than a £15 one back in, never have another problem !!

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/powersupplies/?o=1

Anything ater the £22 quid one, depending on requirements of course.

Martyn, thats the one I'm running, http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/powersupplies/nov-psb750.html

Cool. That's got final costs down nicely. Almost there. Noob question but I presume if there's a Geforce GTX 660 card made by MSI or Gigabyte is only the cooling different? I have seen a few overclocked ready.

They sometimes tweak them in the factory, but it will usually be sold as an OC'd model, most follow chip reference designs from the manufacter, to my knowledge anyway, which is a little rusty on gfx cards tbh.

I can't even remember which GFX card I have lol

It's a 6900 AMD/ATI card, it's either a 6950 or 6970, it cost me about £230, which is over my usual £150 card budget, but I bought it a few weeks after the other bits so it didn't seem as exspensive lol.

I'm sure it was the higher one as it was about £30 more for the next model up which I went for in the end, I think I started at something for £150, then they showed what £180-200 culd buy, and them common sense caved in on itself and I spent more again. I'll fiond out which card now, you keep making look into my novatech account, as I can't remember aything I bought lol.

Boards are all the same following nVidia or ATI reference design as David8 posted above. The only difference is in cooling and BIOS and amount of memory on the card. Do not go below 2 GB. Now different cooling solutions are bolted on, PCB colours, PCI mounting panels, ports etc. Due to better cooling some manufacturers offer high clocks than the others. Check Anandtech.com for extremely detailed, almost scientific reviews and testing for the best overwiev of the current market. I think 660 core is the best at the moment in price per oomph ratio.

One think not mentioned here is going AMD CPU based platform with ATI GFX

http://uk.msi.com/product/vga/R6950-Twin-Frozr-III-Power-Edition-OC.html

Cost me £215, it was a toss up between that and a lower numbered (a 6900 maybe) model for about £180

Plays BF 3 with everything set high !!!

If you make sure you get a K version of whatever processor you for then these are supposed to be better for overclocking than the non K chips.

If you make sure you get a K version of whatever processor you for then these are supposed to be better for overclocking than the non K chips.

Yeah I noticed that. a K spec i5 is in the build

Just ventured onto Overclockers for a look and to ask about SSD's and what a mistake that was. I've always wondered why most of the reviews on their products were 5 stars and over the top and now I know. Their forums are the same & you can't post about competitors at all. Said I was building a system and they wanted to see when I had so far. Posted that PSU and it gets starred out, like it's a bad word. Two immediately said it must be crap and posted alternatives which surprise surprise were both on Overclockers. They wanted reviews which I couldn't post because they were on Novatech and was then told links to competition are banned. If it isn't on Overclockers it's gets slagged off and put down. Not surprising there'd be that much bias really but you'd think they would be like-minded people. Obviously not.

Sill need a screen. Presume it's going to need either a DVI or HDMi connection and has to be 22". It's the biggest that will fit on my desk