Silverwarrior: AMD FX4 series... Peronsally I would steer clear from all but the top of the line FX series. However, the AMD route is probably the way to go unless you need the VERY best CPU on the market - although for the money thats going to be really hard... Edit: Ah, you meant FX 4 core not FX4... So basically I agree somehwat now... Sorry for the confusion. I did some research into the FX series into some depth since when it came out I was all 'FX is the future for my next build....' before seeing some stuff which I checked out just about every and was all 'oh.................... phenom ii x4 960t is is. no more available? wha
Cybermonkey:
I finished my last build for £300 (monitorless) as an emergency so I didnt put in too much shopping around, but it was on budget and creams most £450 moniterless systems I can buy anywhere which is nice... Heres my process, 1) find market sweetspots and find a 'target specification'. 2) shop around, see where acrifices can be made so it fits around 95% of the budget including shipping... 3) enjoy XD
1. My recommendation would be to do something like this:
CPU: Athlon II x4 (one of the high end chips, if you dont mind a bit of overclocking...) Or a Phenom II x4 unless you can pick up a top spec FX-6 series or an FX8 series. The issue with bulldozer and the FX chips is simply that they do worse than previous generation Phenoms and Athlons when applications are badly threaded. So if you need more threads then go FX, if you need a few threads and lots of speed go Phenom. This would put you back around £60-95 depending on what you get. I have an Athlon II X3 (the 460 I believe currently with the stock cooler and if I have it running in its normal 3 core mode I get around 3.9-4.1GhZ which creams any core 2 and on the cpu benchmarks seems to stack up just under a mid range i5). If I unlock its 4th core I get a Phenom B50e which I can only take to about 3-3.2 GhZ due to it munching more power and spewing more heat into the stock cooler. My pick for germany would be this: http://www.lambda-tek.com/HDZ965FBGM...l~csDE/B255784 although there are 6 core phenom iis they are sort of expensive...
Motherboard: You're going to want an AM3+ board, with something later than an 870 chipset - AsRock do nice boards at nice prices as do asus in my experience - so that you get all the upgrade options open for quite some time as well as all the USB3 goodness and whatnot. I have an ageing AsRock 870 Extreme 3 R2.0 with the latest BIOS/EFI support. A VERY important thing to check since some SSD/motherboard combos can have issues. My setup is fine with SSDs now but not when I first built it - would only start in BIOS 'safe' mode on every 2nd boot... al fixed now thoughMy recommendation at the moment would sit somewhere around an ASRock 970 Extreme4 which has all the latest as well as an x8/x8 pci slot setup if you want to crossfire later on... You can pick one up for around EUR95 apparently http://www.lambda-tek.com/970-EXTREM...A~csDE/B861327
GPU: This one has been moving at one heck of a pace lately. I have an HD5750 from XFX which is sitting at clock speed just higher than a stock HD5770 which is actually surprisingly capable of a GPU in my opinion since I have no problem playing STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, MAss effect 1,2 and 3 all on the highest settings at vsync (which for me is 1280x1024 at 60fps). Although for around £50-65 gets you an XFX HD6670 with 1GB of GDDR5. NOT DDR3. GDDR5. I like XFX for my cards, my friends likes Asus... We both had no issues. Although if driver support is a must consider an nVidia alternative. My board recommendation has no issues with SLI so....
RAM: A set of corsair XMS3s should have you covered. 2x4B should fill up some slots on that motherboard as well as be nice and dual channel.... and for only EUR40 http://www.lambda-tek.com/CMX8GX3M2A...9~csDE/2071001
Storage: In my experience: SSD boot drivers are here and they are the future. Take my old SU4100 laptop. A paltry penryn dual core deal with 1.3GhZ of headroom... HDD boot times are around 35isj seconds for my setup of mint. Stick in a first gen SSD and it'll do it in 12 flat. SO: for a boot drive I'd go for something like a 120GB Vertex 3 which can be had for around £60 and a 1.5TB WD caviar black for the storage drive for around there, say £70 to be on the safe side... Or save £10 or so and get 1tb... I prefer the 1.5tb deal since its more or less todays sweetspot. Put your OS and core applications (or all if you like XD) on the SSD and the data on the HDD and reap the rewards of blistering speeds and load of space...
Case&PSU: I usually buy these together since there are some bargains to be had. I paid £30 for my case and I got a brand name 650W psu. Okay the case is a tad flimsy but it has space, drive bays and a nice PSU so... From my above recommendations you should have a total cost so far of EUR40(RAM)+EUR90(CPU)+EUR95(MB)+GBP65(GPU)+GBP70(H DD)+GBP60(SSD)=EUR225+GBP195 which according to google is around EUR240 for a grand total of EUR445... which I know is EUR45 above the target, worst case scenario - that is, if you have no bargains, want the top of the line CPU option, 'spacious' SSD and extra space, pay extra shipping and land current RRPs... Lambdatek I have dealt with (in the UK) and are an awesome bunch so there you have it. Next...
From here you have some choices, heres the order I'd tackle them in:
1.) SSD: do you mind loading/boot times. An SSD boot drive makes things FEEL a LOT - and I mean a geological AGE FASTER - but is costly...
2.) HDD: I know this is an odd one HOWEVER if on windows, by the time you fill 1TB of space your OS is going to slow down. Quite a lot. If you dual boot or are a linux user you can pretty safely ignore this point (unless you apt-get everything on your HDD in which case... nuff said)
3.) GPU: If you dont play many games, going down a notch here can save a few euros although going down to far may affect compatibility with the latest OpenGL releases as older architectures lack the support. Eg. My 5750 only supports OpenGL3.2 if you go that far back, despite it giving out nice frame rates on everything I throw at it
4.) Motherboard: the 970 chipset is VEEERY nice in terms of upgradeability options. Full on native sata 6gbps, Am3+, >8 core support, USB 3.0 all out of the box by design - unlike the older 8 series which tend to feel a bit 'kludgy' to setup although those features are USUALLY possible... The 9xx series are usually 10euro or so more than the 8xx but its worth it if you upgrade rather than replace...
5.) CPU: I would recommend sticking to a phenom ii x4 black edition, it can be overclocked, it has threads, it has raw power and it'll do everything you ask it to. If you want to you can skimp to an x3 model and hope it unlocks when you need it to/permanently but there are no guarantees. x3s are quite capable on their own though. It depends if you do a lot of multithreading. Note that a step down here is only likely to save you a couple of euros at 10% performance cost or so so I'd advise against it...
So, where does the case/PSU fit in? Well simply - I can't survay the ebay, amazon and such sites to find a good bargain. Just try and find something with around 650W of juice from some brand or you might have power fluctuations that can hurt performance and worse - hardware. As for the grand total I think this target spec is doable for around EUR425-440 is if you shop around and take amazon and such shops up on their numerous xyz%off this week offers. Also it does, to the best of my understanding reflect a mid range market sweetspot and should - dpending on your needs (whether its gaming, encoding and such) serve you a good 3 years+ with the minor tweak here and there. eg: new game comes out, you want MAX not HIGH settings, need to spend what will be <EUR50 to crossfire and virtually double GPU performance
Anyway, sorry for the long post and all the depth, just didnt quite know the use scenario so I covered all the bases and since EUR400ish is my price point, if I hadnt built my new machine last year this is actually EXACTLY what I would build
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