A buddy of mine wants to build a PC and has $1200.00 to spend. He will be using it as a gaming rig a majority of the time. we came up with this http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1eeha but are open to suggestions. He is not brand loyal or a fan boy in any way. Any recommendation will be appreciated.
As far as gaming goes.
Cpu: Personally, I'd go i5 with my money. He probably won't be using all 8 cores, and thats the only real advantage AMD has.
Cooler: great choice, that's what I've got, just make sure it fits.
Motherboard: I would've went Asrock, but I'm kind of a fanboy like that :P
Ram: Not bad ram, but I would've gotten something more flashy looking because of the windowed case. You should be getting something that looks as good as it functions for that price. Something like this unless he likes the flat black.
Storage: I have a Hyper X SSD, but I hear Samsung is good too... I would go with a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB for gaming though. SSDs don't have enough space for all your games, so you'll want a gaming HDD for load times.
GPU: Not bad, I'm an AMD fanboy (kinda) so it pains me to say that I'd go with a Nvidia card, unless you can wait for AMDs new 9000 cards to come out. Nvidia 700 series is next gen AMD 7000 series isn't, simple as that.
Case: looks bad (in a good way) for the price
Power supply: Nice pick on Corsair, I would get a 750HX though, just in case you want to upgrade in the future.
All in all, good build. You don't really have to change anything, I'm just tossing personal opinions around :P
I probably could have made it a little better, but i put it together in like 3 minutes. Its $100 over budget, but offers more oc potential, and slightly better gpu performance. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1ezaA
If you live near a microcenter, congrats. You will save a ton, especially on the cpu.
48 cents over but this bad boy will kick ass
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1ezyU
also, will you be doing any overclocking?
No over clocking for him. I really like this build!
thanks for liking it, if he will not be overclocking you dont need a great cooler, i would still go aftermarket to keep it cool but you could downgrade the cooler to fit some more goodies in!
People, Seriously, Dont even reccomend a 770... Its a Rebranded 680... Go with a 7970 GHZ or go with maybe a 780 if you want nvidia Because a 780 is the ONLY new card..
Rebranded, overclocked and cheaper.