So, I'm literally waiting on one part right now for my new build, but I wanna know what everyone will think of this, cause that's pretty much why we build computers ourselves; personal competition and friendly critique, lol.
CPU: AMD FX-4300 This is the part I'm waiting on, and it should be here by either tomorrow (Monday Feb 10) or Tuesday. I'm in Canada, so the FX-6300 was about $20 more which unfortunately wasn't in my budget cause I didn't want to skimp on the mobo.
GPU: ASUS R9 270 DirectCUII
Mobo: ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0 I'm an ASUS Fanboy, I must admit. I do like MSI, though.
RAM: Generic 8GB DDR3 @1333Mhz I'm taking it from my current computer
HDD: Seagate 1TB Barracuda also from my current comp.
PSU: Corsair CX600M I wanted modular, so I spent a bit more on this.
Case: LEPA LPC307B This was a really cheap case that had all my hardware prerequisites, but it does feel flimsy and there was a dent in the back. But Lepatek specializes in fans and PSUs and their case line came to North America in the last 2 months or so, so I'll cut them some slack.
I'll probably post pics and such later on when I get it built. Let me know what you think.
I hate to say it but I think the $20 was worth it. The 6 core really does a much better job, especially in multithreaded applications. That being said the FX-4300 should hold you for a while.
I know you said you didn't want to skimp on the motherboard but you kinda did... The standard R2.0 board is decent but the LE model isn't great. It lacks heatsinks on power delivery components. They can get quite hot. While this may not be much of an issue with the quad core, although it might be I'm no expert, you shouldn't be overclocking on that board and upgrading to a six or eight core CPU later on is kinda out of the question.
The LE should be fine for the 4300. It should be fine for the FX-6300/6350 at stock speeds. If OP starts overclocking, I would start to worry a bit.
The non-LE version is much, much better.
Unfortunately, the 4300 was on sale for about $120 at my local NCIX as well as my other local computer store, but the 6300, as well as the 6100 at my TigerDirect, were both over $150. The 4300 then went up to $143 the day after I bought it. So I think I got lucky, and I'll most likely upgrade again in the next year or two when the games that I play (Battlefield, Titanfall, Borderlands, Bioshock, Planetside) start dropping in FPS and such. I don't do video editing or any of this, and in game on my current A10-5700 comp, the CPU doesn't use more than 60% CPU when playing.
And I did notice that the LE didn't have the heatsink over the components near the CPU area, but I think I should be okay because I do have a fan pulling air away and my front fan is aimed so the air flow moves right over the RAM, CPU, and those components. But I probably won't be overclocking anyway, because I'll be using a stock cooler. I'll most likely upgrade the cooler to see if I can lower temps and see if that improve performance, do a bit of an overclock to get better performance, and then when those start getting sloppy, I'll upgrade to a 6350 or maybe even an 8320. Thanks for the comment.