My little cousin wants me to build him a PC for his schooling and a game or two as well. He would be using Autodesk Inventor 2016, and LabView as a couple examples. He only has a $600 budget for the build but I got him covered as far as the pc case, OS, and shipping. Just need the rest and would like it to have the ability to upgrade without having to redo the whole build a second time. I know my way around the gaming side of PCs but when it comes to actual work, I'm a bit out of my element as to what would be the best bang for buck route, or which parts I should focus the budget on more than other parts for this particular task set, etc. I would appreciate the help. Thanks.
Assuming he doesn't need a monitor/peripherals. this would be a very nice system. would be more than enough for games, and the 4GB of vRAM on the GPU would handle Autodesk quite well.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/pQY7jX
LAter, he could get a $49 WD blue 1TB drive for mass storage.
That GPU has 2GB of VRAM... and that storage solution seems a tad inadequate. Could probably do with a bit more space.
Swapping that 250GB SSD out for a 1TB HDD would bring you $10 under budget. There's probably some other things that could be shuffled around to get enough together for a small SSD though.
This to me depends just how big his inventor projects will be. If he is just going to be doing it now-and-then for projects and will have reasonably simple assemblies, the pc suggested by weston will be more than enought - I've seen fellow students do quite large stuff in inventor or similar on 4 year old medium-priced laptops without issues.
Have to agree that a 250gb ssd might be a little on the small side, unless he has an external drive already to store things on.
He specifically states that he has the PC case covered.
And woops! okay, i have swapped the 2GB card for a 4GB card. my bad. and yeah.... i think i am just biased over the SSD T_T i love them so much. if it IS possible to cannibalize an old HDD, then go with the SSD for the OS and programs.
I appreciate the help guys. I'm gonna have to do a bit more thinking. I'll most likely give him a Blue 1TB as a gift when we build it. I'd like him to have a ssd from the start so we don't have to reinstall stuff later. I took Weston's build and edited it a little. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/LKZChM $50 over budget but I'm thinking I may just give him my current set of RAM and get myself a new set that matches my system. That would get him to his budget.