New PC For A Friend

TitianGerm

Hey guys,

A friend is looking to build his first PC and I'm just trying to get a rough idea of what to look at. He has about €500 I think but we don't need a GPU as I'm going to give him my spare RX580 until supply issues sort themselves later this year. I've case fans and a CPU cooler here and I do have a 128GB M2 SSD we could use for the OS.

The main game he plays is Warzone on Xbox so that's what the PC will mainly be used for.

I'm thinking along the lines of an older Ryzen CPU (or one of the cheaper 3XXX series if available), cheap motherboard, 500GB SSD, 8GB of RAM (possibly 16GB if we possible), cheap case and a decent PSU.

Any advice?

minitrue

You shouldn't have to skimp tooooooo much. I'm not sure about the delivery charges from Amazon.de but I think the following would go a bit over budget when you factor that in (especially as the case doesn't come from Amazon themselves, I just stuck it in as I've built in one and it's not utterly horrific and is very meshy).
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor (€189.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Motherboard: ASRock B450M PRO4 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (€72.41 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 CL15 Memory (€69.80 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Crucial BX500 480 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€47.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: Aerocool QS-240 MicroATX Mid Tower Case (€35.92 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: KOLINK ENCLAVE 600 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (€74.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €490.92

You could shave off money from the board and power supply to get under €500 if that's the hard cap and/or you could drop the cpu to a 1600AF. I'm assuming at this point the board is going to come with a new enough bios for the 3600 but you could play it safer with a really basic board like the MSI B450M-A PRO MAX and save about another €10. Changing the SSD to M.2 would cost about another €10 for a Crucial P2 or Intel 660p.

TitianGerm

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/mNV8sX

This is what I had. Can definitely swap out the 1600 to the 3600 though I'd imagine. Because Warzone is so big I think a 1TB drive would be better though.

minitrue

Sticking to stuff from Amazon itself it looks like €18.64 shipping from Amazon.de for a complete build (looks like Prime would get it down to €4.99). I can't see any benefit of the PRO4-F over the PRO4 and the PRO4 has usb3.2gen2 (type A and C) as well as a saner number of fan connectors. I'd be a little loathe to buy anything significant from Amazon UK now anyway as while I suspect they won't hide behind Brexit who knows in the short/medium/long run how support/returns will work out. The good news is the German prices are generally better anyway!

I'm a fan of cases with a lot more capacity to breathe then it looks like the SPEC-05 has.

I think your build would be €546 (assuming free delivery).

Blending the two on Amazon Germany (changing the case to something which will ship cheaply):

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor (€189.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Motherboard: ASRock B450M PRO4 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (€72.41 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 CL15 Memory (€69.80 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Western Digital Blue SN550 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (€89.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: Deepcool MATREXX 30 MicroATX Mini Tower Case (€34.70 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: be quiet! System Power 9 600 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€57.18 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €541.26 (including shipping, I think this is the full actual cost for Ireland)

Drop back to the 480GB BX500 and it was €498.xx At a pinch you could put in a 1TB plain old hard disk (€40) instead of an SSD using your 128GB for the OS.

Can't say I'm a massive fan of that case either but at least a front fan could breathe a little. You would have to take a saw to it to remove the drive cage to get a gpu over 250mm in. An extra €11 for a blue (lol) Focus G would probably be saner and if you can get a free month of Prime would basically leave it the same prices as the above. The 12nm Ryzen 1600AF is €135 so that's the simple way to get under €500 if you want to stick with the 1TB ssd and have a bit more to play with for the case (or psu or whatever, another €10 gets you Crucial 3200MHzCL16).

Homelander

You can save a bit by swapping to an Intel 10400F + H410 motherboard, processor is €50 cheaper and just as good as the 3600 for games, and it's way better than the Ryzen 1600.

That will get it to under €500.