I've never built a PC before and am not the most tech savvy person in the world so I was wondering what people thought of my planned build. http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/CFWHD3
I'm from the UK and ideally I don't want to spend more than £800 not including OS and peripherals but I can be flexible if people think there is a big improvement to be made.
I only really need the PC for gaming at 1080p at medium/high settings, I won't be doing any other intensive things with it and I don't plan to overclock because I don't really know what I'm doing with that.
I would look into a slightly bigger power supply if you plan on upgrading a bunch of things or adding another 970 down the line maybe a 750w unit. The build looks good though as long as you don't try to OC anything but you said you didn't have plans for that anyways.
If you're willing to ditch having that optical drive, and can find a red themed motherboard, that build would look really nice in a thermaltake core V21.
I would prefer to have the optical drive just to watch DVDs and stuff and to be honest I'm not that bothered about the aesthetics because it will probably end up sitting beneath my desk, thanks anyway!
If you can spare a little more cash, I would highly recommend adding more RAM. Your PSU should be fine for now, but like mentioned earlier, if you upgrade some components in the future or add a second GPU, you'll want to grab a higher wattage unit. Also just making sure that you were planning a micro-ATX build since your MOBO is micro-ATX and not ATX. The Corsair 200R can hold ATX motherboards and you could find a micro-ATX case with a much smaller footprint if that is important to you.
I read a few articles saying that 8GB would be enough ram for gaming, or is that just for older games? I wasn't actually sure what the micro-ATX meant when I added the motherboard so I may change the case to a smaller one. Is there any performance difference between micro-ATX and regular ATX or is it just more compact? Thanks
the main difference is the lack of multiple pcie X16 slots so you can only have one gpu at the time its userally better to get a atx board if you are oc'ing well as far as i know and it will limit the amount of hdd/ssd you can have in the case
8GB will likely be enough, but its nice to have some more overhead, especially if you want to do some multitasking with gaming and productivity projects. There's not really a performance difference between micro-ATX and ATX. Micro-ATX boards are just much smaller and usually have less components and features (i.e. not as many PCIe slots, not as many DIMM slots, sometimes less I/O like USB, SATA, etc). A standard ATX board would allow for more expansion down the road, but there's nothing wrong with going the micro-ATX route. They are great for home theater PC builds and small form-factor cases.
The 290X is getting old. Tbh, it's probably not the best time to be building a computer considering the 300 series is "around the corner" (as all the cool kids say nowadays).
I agree that while the 290x is an older card that still performs well it won't be anywhere near a 390x in terms of performance. So if you want to maybe wait until the 300 series comes out to build or pick up a cheap GPU for now to replace later on you could do so.
Part of me wants to wait until the newer cards come out to get a better deal but the other part really wants a new computer now to replace my 5 year old laptop. Plus looking at parts is great procrastination from uni exams!
Might be worth grabbing an older second hand card for cheap for the time being and then getting a better GPU when the next generation for cards come out, it's not going to be long. There'll be people selling off their old cards for cheap just before the new generation arrives too - might be able to snag a deal then.
That's my take on your build, similar stats for better money basically. You don't technically need a different CPU cooler if you're not going to be overclocking, but if you're going for quiet then the Noctua cooler I picked should be pretty damn quiet. I also was able to squeeze a 256GB SSD in there instead of the 120 to give you more headroom on the OS drive.