Isn't it a great build? Why buy a Pentium/Athlon when you can get a fancy case, why save money and get a HDD and put money into said CPU when you can waste it on an SSD. Bottlenecks? What are those!?
I couldn't possibly think of a better build combo: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/RBtHWX Sad part is at least they may got it running, I couldn't get my ITX build to boot yet.
My take on what should be done with this budget. could throw a high end i7 and a better graphics card into it later as well as add another 8gb of ram. Upgrade path is unbeatable. For an extra $50 you could add an ssd boot drive. http://pcpartpicker.com/list/zw6Lcc
You want 4 threads minimum for modern gaming, some games just won't run well on a dual core like GTAV or Far Cry 4, and minimum frame rates in general will suffer
for intel at minimum you'll want an i3 6100 at this point
And modern games suffer from per core performance of AMD chips. Your argument is irrelevant, they both suck, my choice just happens to have an upgrade path deal with it.
I would also go with the 845. But I would build it smaller, mITX. I would also try to find a highly efficient PSU. Because the upgrade path is to repurpose the machine as an HTPC and start from scratch. Regardless of what brand of chip is inside it.
Great looks ! but I still think their combos are marketing packages, on which they make good money, not that I mind, but to put them on a pedestal !!!!NOPE, and your research and smart thinking will always beat their kits. (not referring to the 6Gs and up rigs.......and even then)
a pentium/celeron and a z170 motherboard seem like the best choice for any one starting to build a system now. but when amd releases AM4 motherboards an athalon build might be a good idea. even a sandybridge system provides a reasonable upgrade path over am3+ / fm2.
that said skylake supports linux gpu passthrough in almost it's whole line-up where in earlier generations only Q?7 chipsets have native support for it. haswell is the first generation to support overclocked CPUs with VT-D.