Budget: £800/$1300
Current Build: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/1Ul8p
Looking to buy this soon, just need some help working out the 'kinks' and just peoples view of changing up the parts.
Will be very thankful.
if i were to modify the build, these are the changes i would make:
arctic cooling freezer --> hyper 212 evo (+£5 but worth it according to benchmarks)
if you add three channels of ram, this may adversely affect performance depending on the memory controller. the ram runs synchronously and recognised dual channel as one huge bulk of ram and can use it together, if you use three stick it will run them as individual sticks. unless your are running a 1366 platform, if is advisable to run either dual or quad channel, not anything in between.
i like the nzxt case, aesthetically perfect and awesome performance.
if you wanted to scrape more money off the build, you could reduce the wattage of your power supply, seems a bit too much for the current configuration.
If you already have a spare hard drive, you could reuse that one a get a boot ssd instead of barracuda, or if not then a hybrid hdd or sshd is a great alternative. it really does make a difference to boot times.
you did not mention what the build would be for, from the part it does seem to be general purpose, it would have helped with the parts specialisation.
and for the love of god, don't get windows 8 unless you plan on upgrading to 8.1 and even then win7 is better. i even prefer my linux distros to win8.
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/1UrWw
I changed quite a bit, kept it under 800 though.
-. Took the FX8320, it's basically the same chip but 'underclocked'. With a bit of guidance you can bump it up to run at 8350 speed, saving yourself 30 quid in the process.
-. Changed the motherboard as it's better value for money, period. If you want to stick to the Asus board because of whatever reason, you should take the R2.0 version. It's only 59 pounds but actually a revision of the board you picked out initially, so basically newer and improved. In case you were planning on going CrossFire with the 280x, the ASRock is definitely top dog with three PCIe-slots (16x,8x,8x) over the Asus with two PCIe-slots (16x, 4x).
- I picked 2x4GB RAM for dual channel support, instead of 3x4GB (probably a triple channel pack).The Corsairs are white and will standoff against the black motherboard in the white case. Thought that was pretty neat. They also can run on only 1.35V instead of the standard 1.5V, which will reduce power consumption somewhat.
-. Changed the CPU cooler, you will want the extra cooling it provides when you start overclocking the 8320.
-. I swapped out the MSI GPU for a Gigabyte WindForce OC card. Reviews on that one are very good, both on the power consumption / noise production side as well as the performance. Plus the MSI had yucky red on it.