I think I can probably make one of these Sandy deals work. I've got a powermac G5 that i can try and sell to get some cash for this rig, i think £200 just isnt going to cut it.
I'll get back to you guys if i decide to go with one of the 1155 chips
Yeah, it's the solution that is gonna give your friend the best bang for his pound. If you'd be limited to buying new, then that APU would be a nice solution.
But for example, the i5-2400 + HD 7770 combination will just fly past it. The GPU itself is roughly twice as fast and the CPU performance, well, you probably know. Sure you could OC the iGPU on that A8 but the same applies to the dGPU so...it doesn't really change anything since the 7770 just has so much more shaders..
If you could find say a HD 7850 used, that would be even better and would give your friend some headroom in games if he wishes to play more modern games. Almost all (except one XFX card) of these are still single 6pin cards so that 430W XFX would do nicely. Quick look on Ebay yields a few 7850 auctions going on right now that are based in UK.
There is a few as well with buy it now prices 70£ or above, but that's ridiculous! It wasn't long, around a week ago, that I skimmed through the used GPU market here in Finland (FI = expensive), I saw 7850's going for anywhere between 40-60€ or about 31-47£.
Im sure you already know this but used parts is going to be the name of the game. Ask around on Tek Syndicate first if you can before moving to ebay. I can't really tell you what parts to use for your budget since it's going to be affected by what you can find for yourself. However consider the following When you're looking for a motherboard see if you can find one that still has the processor on it. Sockets that may provide good solutions would be a used-
FM2+ mobo AM2+ Socket 775
You should be able to find some deals on these parts if you look around. I mentioned the FM2+ board first because if you can find one with a cheap processor on it that can be upgraded later to an 860k which isn't bad. Although if you can find a deal on a couple generation old Intel solution that's fantastic as well. As for AM2+ there should be plenty of solutions out there for boards of that socket. I personally still have a phenom 2 sitting on my desk at home.
Really important though do not get a shitty powersupply or It's going to cost you more money later. Do not get a Rosewill power supply either. I had a Rosewill powersupply for a while and it killed the motherboard in my computer. If you can find someone with a used corsair powersupply or similar on Tek Syndicate that will be your safest bet.
I'm not going to waste your time by going over getting a used GPU. It's the same as with the cpu. If you're having trouble try looking up Scrap Yard Wars on youtube. Linustechtips did a fairly good job with this series and it might give you a little help. Even If it's just what not to do.
I typed this up real fast so sorry for typos. Hope this helped some
EDIT I believe I mispoke. I think the phenom II series is on the AM3 socket
I've just built this system as I had a decent Asus 775 motherboard + Q6600 CPU at home. I just bought the Gigabyte Windforce HD7870 on Ebay to complete it. I was after a GTX 660 Ti but they were going for to much so bought this but turns out it OCs to 1200 Mhz (standard they were 1GHz) so it's actually not that far off.
Winows 10 Pro installed and activated
Q6600 quad core @ 3.0GHz Twin fan tower heat pipe cooler Asus P5K-E Wifi AP motherboard 4GB Ballistix 1066MHz RAM Gigabyte Windforce HD7870 1100MHz 2GB Enermax 720W modular PSU Antex P180 midi-Tower case (has filters etc. + lots of drive bays!) 750GB boot + 2GB data drive Lightscribe DVD-RW
£175.00 + postage
Crap pic below but PM me if you want more details. It's just the base unit I wanted to sell.
I'm in the UK of course and opinions are welcome but I reckon those are some pretty decent parts all together. It runs really cool on both the CPU and GPU as a result.
