PC Gaming budget

Looking to upgrade from a machine that is slow and starting to annoy with stalls but doing so on a budget but want to have something that won't be out of date in a year, like to keep PCs for a few years and happy to swap out stuff.

So thinking

Intel Core i5 7600
600W PSU
120GB SSD for OS, so boot speed better
2TB HDD from old PC, 1TB spare and saves copying lots of junk
8GB DDR4 2133 MHz
Re-use old Radeon R9 270X - which seems to hold up well against the mid to budget cards even though 3+ years old

Pre-built without OS seems to weigh in at £500

Ideal world would i7 7700, GTX 1060 6GB and 16GB memory, but seems new i5 is pretty good, and the other bits can upgrade in time.

Windows 10 Home/Pro, seems to cost either £20-30 via eBay - are the OEM usb/dvd with code ones something others have used? Or pre-installed at £80-£120

If the OEM W10 is via ebay then to all intents and purposes it isn't a valid license. OEM licenses are only valid from MS perspective if they have been purchased with qualifying hardware from an OEM vendor. It would almost certainly work but some possible risk that MS could pull the plug on them if they were ever to discover it.

i5 procs are usually considered to be fine for most purposes - i7 is lovely but in the real world most use cases don't benefit a great deal.

What components do you already have? If you are willing to build and already have a case (as well as the HDD and graphics card you already mentioned) then you could get the i5, 8GB RAM, PSU and SSD for around £375 at Novatech or the package with i7 for £483.

Hulking old Dell box that I can just about pick up, so something less bulky i.e. normal size would be great

AMD are releasing their new Ryzen CPU's at the end of this month/very start of next month and going by benchmarks and price they are once again finally going to shake up the market.

An Intel i7 6850k for instance retails at $600 and the Ryzen 5 1600x is apparently a $260 CPU and in single and multi core CPU bench marks it blew the i6 6850k out of the water so it will be interesting to see what they can do in real world situations.

Other Ryzen CPUs that look to perform around the same as it's Intel counterpart are also way cheaper if the leaked prices are to be believed so you may want to hold out until the Ryzen is released and see what they are like.

Novatech also have some very reasonable no frills cases here

If there you are able to salvage the other components needed from the Dell then you could still get the i7 within a £500ish budget if you are willing to self build.

My own view is this.

In terms of raw performance for gaming the following will help the most in order.

GPU
SSD - SSD and CPU order can swap around depending on game
CPU -
RAM

You chose to reuse old hdd and only buy a small SSD which wont hold many games. Also reusing old GPU.

Have you diagnosed that your existing cpu is the bottleneck?

on amazon a 7600 is £210 whilst a 7600k is £229, based on that pricing the plain 7600 is a pretty bad buy, the 7600k has an extra 300mhz speed out of the box and is unlocked so can overclock it, you can get a 7600k probably to 4.5ghz turbo speed quite easily and even with the automated overclocking tools on motherboards. You saving under 10% of cost and losing probably 20%+ performance.

Similar with SSD, the price per gig for a 120 gig drive is much worse than price per gig for 250gig.
850 evo 120 gig £60, 850 evo 250 gig £90. With games been as large as 20+gig now days I would also say the 250gig ssd is a no brainer.

Like the above comment you definitely want to wait for amd ryzen to be released, even if you still buy intel, intel prices are very likely to drop as a reaction to the new competition.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 20-Feb-17 09:04:41)

I5 7600k 16GB 240GB SSD 600W PSU in the end, about to head downstairs and queue up next set of game downloads.

Case was a bit of a faff getting the R9 270X in as its full length but got there in the end.

Being busy so only had chance to do some World of Warships, but gone from 30 frames to 60 and with higher quality settings. Figure that is enough for now, benchmark (forgot exact figures) is pretty good, and not even attempted to push the clock on processor.

Windows 10 was a ding dong with Bluetooth headphones, but found some different drivers that fixed that and they work nicely.

Boot time is outstanding not timed it, but seems to be in the 10 second range.

Now to find the time to sit down and game.

should have waited?

Intel Core i7-6950X � $300 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6900K � $200 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6850K � $150 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6800K � $140 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-5820K � $100 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-7700K � $80 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6700K � $140 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-4790K � $90 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-7700 � $50 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6700 � $90 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-7600K � $70 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-6600K � $$90 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-4690K � $70 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-7500 � $30 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-6500 � $50 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-4590 � $60 Price Cut
Intel Core i3-7350K � $20 Price Cut
Intel Core i3-7100 � $15 Price Cut
Intel Core i3-6100 � $20 Price Cut
Intel G4400 � $20 Price Cut
Intel G3258 � $27 Price Cut

The price cuts were always going to happen after the Ryzen info was confirmed.
Goes to show what a monopoly Intel knew they had and could basically overcharge and ask what they wanted when they can suddenly drop the price of a CPU by $300, That leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Such is life, whether the price cuts make it to the UK is another issue