Building a new gaming PC for a friend...

joncollin81

joncollin81

joncollin81

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10 Oct 2018
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... I know, I know, not really the best time, what with the Great Global Graphics Card shortage of 2021 and all that! But my friend's daughter wants a new PC for her birthday and I offered to build one. She's into games like Fortnight, Rocket League, Road Blocks, Minecraft. Nothing too taxing! She's not bothered what goes inside, only that it can play those games and that it looks cool (lots of bling, funky LEDs, etc). Budget is around £850-900, including a new monitor.

Here's what I came up with so far:
My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £704.05 (includes shipping: £18.12)​
​

Please note that the case should actually be the Aerocool Bolt Mini because I want to go mATX (but it's not listed on Overclockers, I can get it from Amazon).

My thoughts were that I could use an AMD APU in place of a dedicated GPU (which would ideally be a GTX1650 or GTX1660), however having just checked it seems that these are impossible to get hold of (for a reasonable price) too! So, assuming that the Ryzen 5 3400G does become available, would the above system be a good first build for a gamer? The remaining budget should be enough to cover a Windows 10 license (from a reseller) and a dedicated GPU such as the GTX1660 at a later date.

Appreciate any and all advice, thanks folks!
 

ASMB

ASMB

ASMB

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Are you happy to replace the Ryzen with an intel 11400 or similar as it is in stock and can use onboard graphics, until you get a gp?. Intel claim to have made a major upgrade to the onboard graphics of the intel 11400 compared to the 10400, although its to new to find benchmarks
 

bimbleuk

bimbleuk

bimbleuk

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I was looking to build a system around a Radeon RX5600 XT and like you couldn't buy a lower end Ryzen 3/5 CPU so started looking at alternatives. Considered a few older CPUs but ended up buying a i5 9400F 6 core CPU for £108 + Asus H310M-A Prime motherboard ~£55.00 (H410 replaced it). Board only has CPU + 2 x DDR4, 1 x M.2 + 1 x PCI-E (x16) and a few SATA ports but otherwise that's all I needed to get the system built.

CPU doesn't have onboard GPU but otherwise does not bottleneck the RX5600 XT which is a decent mid-range GPU still. You save ~£50 on the non-F version which could go towards a dedicated GPU. Underrated CPU IMHO.
 

joncollin81

joncollin81

joncollin81

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10 Oct 2018
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17
Thanks everyone for your replies! It happens that I've found an online retailer, AWD-IT, with motherboard and processor bundles, including:
AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Quad Core 4.2GHz VEGA 11 Graphics, Asus TUF B450M-PLUS GAMING Motherboard CPU Bundle

This one is £240 which seems reasonable! Aside from the lack of built-in WiFi, this board seems decent enough. Does anyone have any experience using this board?
 

ExoMale

ExoMale

ExoMale

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you cant reference competitors...

make some small changes to the OP build.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £746.96 (includes shipping: £18.12)​
​




chose a more fitting motherboard as they are designed for the 3000 series where as the Aorus B450 itx board might need a bios update if i remember correctly from when i used to have one. so might be hit or miss working out the box. slower m.2 drive due to lack of nvme support, but the differences are not that massive you probably wouldnt notice. slightly cheaper, but equally quick ram. put in a better power supply as the konlink brand are questionable and changed the monitor to a much better one, so while it is like double the price, IPS is a better screen type, it also has 144hz so even faster and supports both freesync & g-sync which will be ideal and have you covered for when you decide what dedicated gpu you will eventually get. the case is just for reference.
 
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