Gaming Rig for £600 - £800 (Could be More)

Hey, ain't been on in a while

My friend wants a gaming rig built up, with a budget of around £600 to £800

He doesn't need a monitor or mouse.. just everything else lol,

I was thinking of just building him the same rig as me, but there's probably some stuff that could do with changing

I also thinking going Core 2 Quad, maybe a Q9650, but then there's Core i7.. and i5 i suppose

so what do you guys think?

oh also would you recommend ati or nivida

thanks =)

I'd get the Core i5 750.  For the price it is quite powerful.  I don't know UK prices exactly, but a build with an i5 750 and 4GB of DDR3 RAM should easily fit within the budget.  I'm not familiar enough with motherboards to recommend one.

Now for the video card, I recommend ATi whole heartily.  For that budget, I'd grab a Radeon 5850.  The only problem is trying to find one in stock, and I'm sure that's even harder overseas.  I suppose you could settle for the slower Radeon 4890 if you don't wanna wait, but for the DX11 support (and lower power usage) I'd recommend trying to wait for a 5850.  I see no need for Nvidia unless you want the few Physx games and really like that feature, in which case a GTX 275 is about as fast as a 4890 (but costs more, which is why I normally never recommend them unless you want SLI - because SLI scales better).

Your rig is hella fast, but he might as well go with the newest socket 1156.  And his budget should easily allow a 4890 or 5850.  I especially would support having 4GBs of RAM over 8 because that extra money would be better spent on GPUs imo.  Crossfire 4870s is pretty cheap but is pretty damn fast (equal to 5870 performance for less money).

Yeah if you can go for the newer socket. I love my Q9650, but its kinda a dead end. When I do wanna upgrade I'll have to go to the new socket. I also agree with CCs video card. The 5850 is a sweet looking card.

I would say get a C2 Quad just bc the price of them at the moment.... I sure you would be on the 775 socket but, say 4 years down the road the newer mobos will no doubt have Pcie 3.0 and usb 3.0 on them...

Der Meister:

I would say get a C2 Quad just bc the price of them at the moment.... I sure you would be on the 775 socket but, say 4 years down the road the newer mobos will no doubt have Pcie 3.0 and usb 3.0 on them...

The USB 3.0 should be mainstream by 2011.

Good point on the C2 Quad. Here's a quick comparison between the Q6600 vs i7 920.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=47&p2=53

It really depends on what you're looking for. But I would at least try for the Q9550, available for a little less than an i5.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0299412

Hey, thanks guys =)

I was thinking of going i5 but  i found a I7 920 for £180, he isn't really looking to upgrade anytime soon after (like maybe 3 years or so) so i think the 920 should serve him well.

I decided on..

Asus P6t Se

I7 920

6gb Triple Channel Corsair xms 3 (1600) (only £80!)

Asus ATi 4890

Haf 932

Corsair HX850

Samsung Spinpoint F1 1tb

Lite-on Dual Layer Dvd Drive

Logitech G9

Saitek Eclipse III Keyboard

and a Baram for the cooling, though i'm thinking about the megahelams

which comes to £897

i had another build but it was £1190 and wasn't that much better

what you think? =)

That's a very fast, very nice build.  The only thing I would recommend is maybe trying to cheapen something there so you can step up the 4890 to a 5850.  Remember: the GPU is the most important part of a gaming rig.  Consider that switching the 4890 to a 5850 is what, £50 more?  That's maybe 6% of your budget.  But doing that switch will generally give you around a 20% performance increase!  If you can't fit it in - you can't.  But I really recommend it for, on top of performance reasons, DX11 gives it longevity and it uses less power (so it'll save on the electricity bill in the long haul). 

I'm not sure where you'd cut back though... except going for the i5 750.  But if you're set in the i7 then that's cool too.  But GPU > CPU for gaming.  Anyway, is that an 850W PSU?  That's really awesome, but if you only intend to ever use 1 GPU then you should cut back to 550w.  If you plan to Crossfire in the future, even then 750W is enough.  Maybe save some cash there?

Yep recommend the 5850 over the 4890 as well. The i7 920 can be overclocked pretty well.

The Corsair HX850 is indeed a 850W PSU. It's quite expensive and maybe overkill.

Are you eventually planning to use Crossfire?

Looks great.

thanks =)

yep definitely be using crossfire eventually.. but now i'v seen an Asrock board, the Asrock X58 Extreme, which supports crossfire and sli and it's cheaper, but i'm not sure about it

there's a toughpower 750w psu that can run Quad CrossfireX which is £88

which gives me enough for the 5850