# Gaming PC - Sub £1000



## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

You clever people here helped me when my boys were speccing up a list for their pc builds, but now its my turn for a treat.

Planning a pc build suitable for gaming and photo editing with a budget up to £1k.

Long time since i built one for myself and it appears that the Voodoo3 2000 isn't the coolest gfx card on the block anymore.

All these years on though and I see it's still Intel vs AMD with CPUs and Nvidia vs AMD on the GFX cards, so i would appreciate some advice on these, i'll then have a starting point to build around.

To keep in budget, i'm thinking something along the lines of:

CPU 
Intel i5 (8k series, maybe 8600?) or AMD Ryzen (1600?)

GFX
Nvidia GTX 1060 or Ryzen 5

Yes I know its probably an Apple vs Andriod, Canon vs Nikon... type question, but fire away chaps!


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## Hereisphilly (Nov 17, 2014)

Are you including tower, monitor keyboard and windows, or is it just the tower hardware itself?

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## DrEskimo (Jan 7, 2016)

I've been out the hardware cycle too long to give you up to date advice on specific components, but will just say when I built my system a few years back I sourced a lot second hand off eBay. In my experience it's been a great way to get more capable hardware much cheaper.

Bought the motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU all second hand and it's still going strong...

Even returned the GPU under warranty and got a brand new replacement (the pump noise was too loud..worked fine otherwise). 

Had 8GB RAM, sold it for what I bought it for originally on eBay and bought 16gb off eBay instead...still going strong!


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## bense556 (Mar 14, 2017)

The only thing I would give caution on is buying a graphics card off of ebay. With the boom around crypto-currency mining, GPU's are hit hard with this, and then normally sold off on ebay as being in 'as new' condition. They are far from it, and will struggle to handle even the most basic of requirements. 

As said above, ebay is great for most things - some absolute steals on there but graphics is the one thing I wouldn't skimp on. I could have had a 2nd hand 1080Ti for £1K, but spent double that on a new one for piece of mind.


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## DrEskimo (Jan 7, 2016)

bense556 said:


> The only thing I would give caution on is buying a graphics card off of ebay. With the boom around crypto-currency mining, GPU's are hit hard with this, and then normally sold off on ebay as being in 'as new' condition. They are far from it, and will struggle to handle even the most basic of requirements.
> 
> As said above, ebay is great for most things - some absolute steals on there but graphics is the one thing I wouldn't skimp on. I could have had a 2nd hand 1080Ti for £1K, but spent double that on a new one for piece of mind.


Very true, good point.

I ended up buying a 980ti last year for about £300. But It was from a local chap who was very nice and obviously not a miner. I even got his sales receipt to use in case of any warranty issues.

As a result of RMA'ing to EVGA for the pump noise (was that hybrid version with AIO cooler), I ended up getting a brand new air-cooled 1070ti....so it can work out as long as you are able to verify things and deal with someone honest I guess?
Likewise, whoever got my old 770 would have had no issues!


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

Tower only, possibly with windows, might just see if I can use the serial no from my old laptop the pc will be replacing. Will be buying brand new. 

A mate of mine has suggested a 1070Ti card to cope better with my superwidescreen monitor and a Ryzen 5 2600X, said this will offer better future proofing as Intel change their sockets often. 

This is looking tempting, 8gb memory keeps it in budget and 16gb pushes it just over, but not an issue.


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## voon (Apr 28, 2010)

On a budget with actual components, you can do something like this:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LgmXyX

The i5 here reaches 4 GHz (or more if OCed) and is better single core than the Ryzen 5 asfaik, so probably the better gaming CPU. It's overspecced on the PSU side, but I like a bit of good quality maker and wattage overhead there to keep it at levels, that don't require much noisy fan work etc.


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

Thanks voon, that looks good. 

We put an EVGA 650 in both the boys’ builds for the same reason. 

I’ll need a large HDD, probably 2TB, for music, photos etc. Would it make much difference dropping the ssd to 250gb?

I knew I should have set my budget at £500 and ended up with a £1000 pc rather than set it at £1000 and end up spending £1500 :lol:


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## A&J (Mar 4, 2015)

6 months ago I picked Ryzen 1200 + asus x370 motherboard+ rx560 + 250gb ssd + 1tb hdd + 8gb ram = very capable gaming pc. It all cost around 620 eur including the tower and power unit. 
I overclocked it to 3,8 ghz and it runs like a charm. Ryzen 1600 I think is the best price performer of the series and will make an awesome gaming pc and working pc.
For games which mostly use single core its slightly slower then intel but much faster in rendering which uses multicore.
I for one am a very happy Ryzen user. Also Ryzen 2 series is out which has a built in graphics card comparible to geforce 1030 so you can save some money not buying a graphics card imidiatly. You just have to be sure that the motherboard is compatible with the ryzen 2 series.


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

Been looking at bench marking comparisons and i think i'm going to start with a base of a Ryzen 5 2600X CPU, MSI Gaming Pro mobo and a 1070Ti GPU.

To be honest that will pretty much surpass my requirements, at least i'll be able to play NFSU2 on full whack anyway :lol:

The only game i've bought in years is Elite Dangerous and currently have nothing to play it on, it will easily cope with that and i'm then free to get back into the world of gaming and see what's about these days.


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## A&J (Mar 4, 2015)

Yep that combo will do you for a while&#55357;&#56397;


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## voon (Apr 28, 2010)

Shiny said:


> Thanks voon, that looks good.
> 
> We put an EVGA 650 in both the boys' builds for the same reason.
> 
> ...


No, a 256 GB works fine and is not really slower. Put the OS on it, which still leaves room for a partition D: for a few apps or games. Just don't go below, as SSDs loose speed then and room for games gets tight.


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## PugIain (Jun 28, 2006)

I've held off building a new pc.
Nothing I play taxes my current one, so it would be a waste of money. It's a 4.4ghz 2500k quad, 8GB Corsair vengeance ram, Nvidia 660ti gfx, Samsung 840 SSD and 2 western digital caviar somethings, antec 1100 case, 24" Asus monitor, and Corsair strafe RGB keyboard and sabre mouse.

The base system must be at least 6 years old now.
I've recently put the graphics card in and the 2nd mechanical harddrive, they were cheap on eBay second hand.

It plays witcher 3 cranked up, Skyrim on ultra with lots of texture mods.
Wow, obviously, but then a 25 year laptop could run that.

Maybe I'll upgrade in another year or two.

Sent from my VFD 710 using Tapatalk


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

Cheers guys.

Been having a bit of research orcrather getting my lad to research :lol and I think we are nearly there with this - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Shiiny/saved/gTNKZL

Any thoughts or feedback would be appreciated.


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## DrEskimo (Jan 7, 2016)

Shiny said:


> Cheers guys.
> 
> Been having a bit of research orcrather getting my lad to research :lol and I think we are nearly there with this - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Shiiny/saved/gTNKZL
> 
> Any thoughts or feedback would be appreciated.


£385 for a 1070ti??

Not sure you're going to get it for that price, they are in the £450 region, particularly an EVGA one (which I highly recommend, amazing CS).

If you can find it that cheap (is that used??) then go for it, otherwise you could just get a 1070. The 1070ti is overpriced IMO, as it's just a down clocked 1080 to fit a market segment that AMD created. I know I have one...but I didn't buy it new, and wouldn't!

What resolution monitor are you going to be gaming on? What sort of games?

If it's just current games on 1080p, you could even go for the 1060....


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## voon (Apr 28, 2010)

One immediate thing: get two RAM DIMMs. You want to run dual channel, not single. Buy a kit of two, those have been tested by vendor to pair well. And: Ryzen platform likes and needs RAM speed, so if you can get a 2x8gb kit 3200, get that (unless you know how to OC slower RAM). Put them in the right DIMM slots as per manual. Ryzen is slightly slower in games. 

Secondly, you picked a SATA SSD drive. Those peak at around 550mb/s. The modern M.2 slot PCIe slot SSDs are in the region of 2000+ mb/s. Now not everything profits like this from this, but don't go with an older SATA design if your board has M.2 slots, IMHO.


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

Ouch. I was relying on the pc partpicker displayed prices somewhat. Just checked and the 1070ti is £450+ 

Will have to readdress this. Lol. 

Monitor is 29" 2560x1080. 

Not sure what games yet, only recentish game I have is Elite Dangerous. Quite fancy having a go at Star Wars Battlefront though. Just don’t want to be held back too much on performance if I find demanding game I like.


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

voon said:


> One immediate thing: get two RAM DIMMs. You want to run dual channel, not single. Buy a kit of two, those have been tested by vendor to pair well. And: Ryzen platform likes and needs RAM speed, so if you can get a 2x8gb kit 3200, get that (unless you know how to OC slower RAM). Put them in the right DIMM slots as per manual. Ryzen is slightly slower in games, but you may profit from more cores in a production tool.


Cheers. Plan is to get a 2nd 8GB ram in a month or two when the dust has settled on this purchase.


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## DrEskimo (Jan 7, 2016)

Shiny said:


> Cheers. Plan is to get a 2nd 8GB ram in a month or two when the dust has settled on this purchase.


I agree with voon. RAM modules are designed to work together out of the box, so not sure you will get great results by trying to match a single RAM module with another single RAM module down the line.

I went with 2x4GB to start, then just sold that and upgraded to 2x8GB only recently. Buy second hand and you can usually sell it for what you paid for :thumb:


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## voon (Apr 28, 2010)

Shiny said:


> Cheers. Plan is to get a 2nd 8GB ram in a month or two when the dust has settled on this purchase.


Not a good idea. Rather wait then till you can buy a two stick kit. RAM vendors test kit dimms to play nicely together, single dimms might not play nice, even if it is the exact same model.


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

Fair dos. I’ll have a rethink on the ram and decide on 2x4GB or 2x8GB. 

Same with the GPU, or my budget will have gone completely to pot.


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## DrEskimo (Jan 7, 2016)

Shiny said:


> Fair dos. I'll have a rethink on the ram and decide on 2x4GB or 2x8GB.
> 
> Same with the GPU, or my budget will have gone completely to pot.


There is a bit of trap with PC building that you end up chasing numbers for the sake of getting higher numbers...

When the budget makes constraints, it's worth taking a step back and thinking what your applications will be, and what extra CPU cores, RAM and more powerful GPU's will actually enable you to do.

Always good to look at real world tests of what you plan to use the PC for, and see what impact 6 vs. 4 cores will be, 8GB vs 16GB will be, a 1060 vs. 1070, etc etc..


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## Cookies (Dec 10, 2008)

I got my son a gaming PC for Christmas. He uses it on all the usual on-line platforms , mostly fortnight to be honest. The spec I went for was i5 processor, 8gb ram, 1td hdd and a 128gb ssd, 1050ti graphics card. Starbuck (on here) kept me right with regard to the numbers, and he was absolutely spot on. 

So far, apart from a faulty ssd, it has been brilliant, and performs perfectly with any of the on-line games. 

Hope you get sorted. 

Cooks

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk


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## DrEskimo (Jan 7, 2016)

I tend to have a bias towards Intel/Nvidia systems, but I would probably look at something like this personally:

CPU - Core i5-6600k
MOBO - ASUS Z170-K (or similar)
CPU Cooler - Anything by Noctua
GPU - EVGA 1060 SSC 
RAM - 2x4GB G-Skill Ripjaws
Storage - Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 

That comes to about ~£800, so leaves you plenty for a decent PSU, case and additional HDD if needed.

If 6-cores is needed, can look at what cost savings Ryzen gives you 

I think a 1060 will be plenty for your res and games. I was running a 770 for a good few years without an issue....


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

Revised with a 1060 6GB, i'm sure that will be more than enough with the games i'm likely to play, and 2x4GB ram - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/GGK34q

Sits right on budget too, provided of course pcpartpicker isn't deceiving me with prices again :lol:


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

voon said:


> Secondly, you picked a SATA SSD drive. Those peak at around 550mb/s. The modern M.2 slot PCIe slot SSDs are in the region of 2000+ mb/s. Now not everything profits like this from this, but don't go with an older SATA design if your board has M.2 slots, IMHO.


I missed this earlier, so have further revised the list which with a bit of shopping around will be more or less on budget - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/7hn28Y

There's a sale on an EVGA 1070 so for £100 extra, i might go for this for a bit of future proofing - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/9MqdHh

Any thoughts? I'm not sure if the parts i have picked are good or not, but the reviews I have read seem all OK.


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## voon (Apr 28, 2010)

Jup, now it sounds good. If you can get through the pain for the 1070,then do that.


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## Shiny (Apr 23, 2007)

I'm a grown man, i shouldn't have to justify my purchases to the missus! :lol:

But sadly we all know that's not true.


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