Mid tier Gaming Build

Pure Loonamus

Hi Guys,

Friend of mine is looking at making an order from pc specialist with the following build, he wants to keep it under €1k if possible, can ye let me know what ye think?

Intel® Core™ i5-7400
ASUS® STRIX B250H
8GB Corsair VENGEANCE 2133MHz (maybe go for 16gb here)
4GB GEFORCE GTX 1050 Ti
250gb Samsung 850 2.5" EVO SSD
1tb SATA-III 3.5" HDD
CORSAIR 550W VS Series PSU
Game Max Falcon Black Gaming case

This works out at €1012, doesn't need new monitor or peripherals just the tower, would you change anything? Would 550w be enough to power everything there?

Cheers

Xenoronin

Seems a little expensive for an i5 with a 1050Ti build... Even with build and markup. It looks grand though. 550W is more than enough, even if you were to upgrade to a 1080GTX in the future.

K.O.Kiki

You can get a better deal here:
http://www.laptopsdirect.ie/pc-specialist-core-i5-7400-8gb-1tb-dvd-rw-windows-10-gaming-desktop-pcs-d1165528/version.asp (i5-7400 / GTX 1060)
http://www.laptopsdirect.ie/grade-a1-pc-specialist-osiris-striker-amd-ryzen-1600-8gb-1tb-120gb-ssd-77400122-1-pcs-d1212487/version.asp (Ryzen 1600 / GTX 1060)

Billy86

My first bit of advise would be to avoid prebuilt type ones, they're taking him to the cleaners on that at €1,012 - here's a far better build at €50 less.

The thought of physically doing the building might be intimidating but having done my first last year, it's actually ridiculously easy. Anything that you're worried about like inserting the CPU chip there is a bunch of youtube tutorials for, the rest of it is essentially just a more complex version of Lego. I was terrified of putting the wrong part in the wrong place and the whole thing going up in smoke... turns out that is essentially impossible, as they have built them in such a way that it is physically impossible to do that. It shouldn't take more than about an hour or two, will result in a far, far better system... and the best part that only dawned on my recently is it makes diagnosing what is wrong should there ever be any issues and fixing it yourself rather than spending extra to send it to the shop and waiting for however long it takes for them to get around to it, far easier. I really, really cannot recommend building it yourself nearly enough.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (£185.00 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: ASRock - AB350M-HDV Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (£63.99 @ Ebuyer)
Memory: Team - Vulcan 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (£119.50 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Storage: Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£85.96 @ BT Shop)
Storage: Seagate - BarraCuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£38.97 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Inno3D - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB iChill Video Card (£259.19 @ Novatech)
Case: Game Max - FALCON WHITE RGB ATX Mid Tower Case (£49.43 @ Ebuyer)
Power Supply: EVGA - SuperNOVA GS (UK) 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£73.48 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £875.52
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-07-28 11:41 BST+0100

* GPU - this is the biggest difference, I have done two builds with a 1050 TIs as gifts recently and it's a really, really good card when you factor in it's low cost and low little power it consumes - but I put it into €400 builds, €1,000 is a whole different beast. Here's an 'on paper' comparison of them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcL_sc1wD5A --- and here is an FPS youtube comparison, we're talking 30+ fps difference here which is huge - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcL_sc1wD5A.

* CPU - Ryzen 1600 is simply better than an i5 7400 and has essentially made them obsolete in this generation, long story short it has 6 cores ans 12 threads vs 4/4 on the i5 which means it performs better in most really highly demanding games like Battlefield 1 and as CPU demand continues to grow, this gap is likely only going to get bigger with time. It can also overclock unlike the 7400 which your friend might have zero interest in now, but this is a CPU to last for a solid 5 years and OC'ing is far easier than you would think (only did my first build last year and was tweaking around with it out of interest within a few months) so that could easily change in time as he gets more comfortable with the system - it's a nice optional extra, basically. Another hardware comparison here http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-7400-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-1600/3886vs3919 - and FPS comparison here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbRkXeKdJng

* RAM - this build comes with 16GB (I'm assuming the build in the OP would charge an additional €50-100 to go to 16GB) and it is at 3000mhz frequency so faster again.

* PSU - Corsair are a really good brand generally, however their 'VS' PSU series is known to just be flat out bad, on the budget end the likes of EVGA (or Corsair CXM series) are best here. All the same, this is a system that could use a reasonable amount of power and so the difference to Gold+ efficiency will pay itself back in time especially as the build is already under budget. As well as being Gold+, Supernova PSUs have an excellent reputation for stability (one going bad can basically destroy everything inside the case so while it's a very unsexy place to put budget towards it's also very worthwhile too) and being fully modular makes the wiring extremely easy to control (modular vs non-moldular PSU comparison - https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5de85ef2064013084386f7030f009d846df66ade1cc4db69d82aa7a116c38793.jpg ).

* Storage and case are the same (assuming their HDD was 7200RPM/64MB cache).

K.O.Kiki

ASRock - AB350M-HDV is to be avoided, can't overclock as it has no VRM heatsinks (might as well just get an A320 then).

Billy86

Didn't know that, cheers! Perhaps switch the Asus Prime B350M for £6/€7 more then - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/nLx9TW/asus-prime-b350m-a-micro-atx-am4-motherboard-prime-b350m-a

TerrorFirmer

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

You can get a better deal here:
http://www.laptopsdirect.ie/pc-specialist-core-i5-7400-8gb-1tb-dvd-rw-windows-10-gaming-desktop-pcs-d1165528/version.asp (i5-7400 / GTX 1060)
http://www.laptopsdirect.ie/grade-a1-pc-specialist-osiris-striker-amd-ryzen-1600-8gb-1tb-120gb-ssd-77400122-1-pcs-d1212487/version.asp (Ryzen 1600 / GTX 1060)

That i5 is a very good deal for a pre-build with a GTX1060. €820 including a 3 year warranty. Yes, Ryzen 5 may be marginally better or have better longevity but the i5 is still a great gaming processor and is upgradable to i7 should the need ever arise.

K.O.Kiki

Billy86 wrote: »

Didn't know that, cheers! Perhaps switch the Asus Prime B350M for £6/€7 more then - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/nLx9TW/asus-prime-b350m-a-micro-atx-am4-motherboard-prime-b350m-a

Still missing a heatsink over the VRMs.


More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/69p7h4/all_the_b350_vrms_crash_course/

Avoid:
MSI B350M Gaming Pro
Anything without heatsink on CPU VRM (SOC VRM doesn't matter) - for example Asus Prime B350M-A.

MSI - B350M BAZOOKA is probably the best value mATX board in B350.

Pure Loonamus

Thanks for the replies guys, he is keeping an eye on the thread, he is well capable of self build but is without a pc at the moment (hence the decision to upgrade) so will probably go down the convenience route of a pre build.