Cheap built around a 970GTX...

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Hi there from Greece!
I recently aquired a used 970 from a friend and i consider building a cheap system around it , to have as a secondary PC, mainly for light-medium gaming, web browsing, wife's work and presentations (powerpoint, excel...), that sort of thing... It must have at least SOME gaming capabilities, in order to cover wife's gaming needs and to avoid having all gaming load at main PC (which is i58400, 1070, 16Gb ram) Imight be able to also get my hands on a HDD 1Tb WD Blue and a spare WIn 7 Home disc from another friend
Any suggestions? Please try to keep cost relatively low, with capabilities on level with 970gtx
Many thanks in advance!
 
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Gui Siu, I think the second hand market in Greece is limited, as are on line options and prices, but you really want to get hold of a Haswell z97 motherboard and an i5, if you OC it, it will be perfect. for gaming a Haswell i3 will be a little bit of a bottleneck unfortunately.
 
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My sons PC is an i5-2500K clocked to 4.5 Ghz, 16Gb DDR3 and the Windforce 970 card and he can play most stuff pretty smoothly, tho the latest titles he does have to drop a few settings down, might be an idea for a budget system..?
 

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Thanks for the answers! I did a bit of a search regarding availability and prices, and it seems to me that one logical built is : i3 8100, 8gb DDR4 (or could it be DDR3???), a cheap mobo (NOT Z370) and the aforementioned 970GTX...
Opinions? Will there be a bottleneck of some kind with such a built? Is it overshooting?
Again, many thanks!!!
 
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Ryzen 1400 less risk of stutter as four cores can get maxed easily these days. Faster GPUs, more fps, and the way games are coded etc. Your main PC has an i5-8400 so you can test this by going into the BIOS and disabling two cores to make it four. Play some online multiplayer games and monitor CPU usage. Might still be just about okay for GTX 970 and certain games but then think about if you have to replace or upgrade GPU with faster (like the GTX 1070 in your main PC). You would definitely have to upgrade the i3-8100 sooner than a Ryzen 1400.

If you wait a bit, maybe a month or less, the price of Ryzen 1600 should fall even further and could be within grasp. Also, you'll probably need to use Windows 10, will run into issues with 7 and new hardware, likely even right from the start with USBs not working etc.
 
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zer

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Probably much of a muchness in reality, IPC single core benefit of intel vs HT core benefit of AMD.

Both are a reasonable choice, my money, I would go for the i3 8100, but many will disagree
Ryzen 1400 less risk of stutter as four cores can get maxed easily these days. Faster GPUs, more fps, and the way games are coded etc. Your main PC has an i5-8400 so you can test this by going into the BIOS and disabling two cores to make it four. Play some online multiplayer games and monitor CPU usage. Might still be just about okay for GTX 970 and certain games but then think about if you have to replace or upgrade GPU with faster (like the GTX 1070 in your main PC). You would definitely have to upgrade the i3-8100 sooner than a Ryzen 1400.

If you wait a bit, maybe a month or less, the price of Ryzen 1600 should fall even further and could be within grasp. Also, you'll probably need to use Windows 10, will run into issues with 7 and new hardware, likely even right from the start with USBs not working etc.

Many, many thanks! Very enlighting posts, will act accordingly!
 
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