Helping to put together a gaming build for a friend, neither of us have much experience so any help/advice is welcome :)
Here's what we got so far:
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor - £60
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 ATX AM3+ Motherboard - £100
G.Skill Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory - £53
XFX Radeon HD 7870 2GB Video Card - £156
Sandisk 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - £67
XFX 650W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply - £67
PGS B Series XPredator X1 Devil Red Edition - Mid tower - ATX - £59
That comes to £562 and the budget is £500. where can we save money or just gerneraly improve the build.
Thanks in advance for any help
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/1jK8E
SSD's are great for boot times and loading applications, but it doesn't have headroom for storage, I'd suggest getting yourself a Seagate Barracuda drive that gives you over 1tb of space, then wait later for an SSD, besides they drop in price as time goes on.
Processor wise, get one of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-FX6300-Edition-4-1GHz-Socket/dp/B009O7YORK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374592340&sr=8-1&keywords=fx+6300
The FX-6300 will be better than that Phenom and will last longer without having to upgrade, you'll also notice a bump in framerates.
Power Supply is a little anemic, not to say it won't dothe job, but I wouldn't go below 700W, it will give you operating headroom for upgrades in the future.
Motherboard wise, try a Asus M5A99X EVO R.2, in my opinion it has a much easier bios to navigate and a wonderful feature set that match or outclass the Gigabyte board, not to mention Asus has amazing quality.
Thanks for the advice, I'll start looking into the parts you've both suggested