My best friend is graduating college in the next couple of weeks. He is an avid gamer and well his computer is about as powerful as a toaster. He currently is running a 1st gen i5 laptop for this gaming computer. Me and a few of my friends are getting together to build him a PC. He does not have the money for a new PC at this time so we decided he needs a good grad present. In total the 4 of us doing this build will be putting in around $900. Right now we have purchased the Case, Fans, Wifi adapter, Keyboard, Monitor, OS, PSU, and Fan Controller. The remaining parts we need are: CPU, CPU Cooler, Motherboard, RAM, SSD/HHD, and GPU. There is currently $550 remaining in budget for this build. This is a hard budget can not go over $550. We want to make the most out of this build, we want his graduation to be unforgettable. I will include the pc parts picker link with the parts i have already purchased.
Total Budget: $900
Budget Remaining: $550
PC Parts Picker link: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3FZRu
It all looks pretty chill, but my one suggestion is to drop the SSD (you can always get one later) and use that money to get a nicer motherboard, such as:
No point getting a 32GB SSD. You can get 120GB capacity drives for $60-70. I dropped the SSD to accommodate a preferable motherboard. It's the cheapest motherboard I would recommend. An additional $20-30 will enable you to get a decent motherboard for additional upgrade paths.
The FX6300 and R9 270x will prove to be a nice combo.
My current updated build per your guys ideas, I only added the ssd to make windows 7 boot faster. I'm hoping that with this cooling I can do some slight overclocking to help boost the performance to get more bang for my buck.
What really limits the AM3+ platform is the power delivery system. AMD chips are power hungry, and the 4+1 power phase design on that board won't really allow you to overclock much.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3G34x
I did this off the intel build. The R9 270 has the same amount of stream processors as the 270X. It's essentially a cheaper, underclocked 270X. I also switched out the motherboard for a Z87 chipset motherboard so you can do some small overclocking.