'Cheap as chips' build

spirit

spirit

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Hey all,

I know I don't often make threads about what hardware to buy, but I just wanted everybody's opinion. Basically the story is I have a friend who is interested in me building him a gaming PC - trouble is he only has around £200 maximum to spend and needs a whole PC.

From what I gather, all he wants to do is play Minecraft and 'TechIt' (don't ask me what that is) on what appears to be a relatively small screen.

For £200, here is what I have come up with. He says he can get an OS and I'll be kind and sell him an old HDD and DVD drive I have lying around for cheap.

Celeron G550 http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...telceleronandpentiumdualcore/bx80623g550.html

MSI H61 board http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/motherboards/intel1155h61chipset/h61m-p31-g3.html

4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3 1333MHz (board only supports up to 1333MHz so I doubt anything faster would be worthwhile using) http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...c3-10666/1333mhz/bls2cp2g3d1339ds1s00ceu.html

XFX 450W PSU http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/powersupplies/p1-450s-x2b9.html

Cougar ATX case (yeah I know it's not very good but hey, we're on a very tight budget here) http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/cases/nov-cougar.html

MSI Radeon HD 7750 http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/amdradeongraphicscards/amdhd7750series/r7750-2gd3.html

And as I said I'll sell him an old HDD and optical drive of mine for cheap.

I tried to put as much money into the graphics card as possible (hence for 4GB of RAM and not 8GB).

I don't think he is terribly computer savvy, so he is probably not overclocking or anything like that!

Will this play Minecraft at a low resolution OK? I really don't know much about the game at all but I did quickly find out the minimum system requirements. I think it was something along the lines of a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, 1GB RAM and a GeForce 8600 GS.

Does it all look OK? £200 is $322 by the way. Not a lot of money at all. I was hoping to get him a 3570K and a 7850 etc etc but when he said his budget was £200 or thereabouts that plan kind of went out of the window! :D

Sorry for sounding like a total n00b!
 
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Unsure whether it will play Minecraft but does he have windows, monitor, keyboard, mouse etc?

And 200 quid for a set up for gaming is a mighty small budget, good luck lol :P
 
Yeah he said his Dad can get him Windows 7, I'll leave that one up to him to sort out, he says he has an OS.

He says he has a monitor too, so he probably has a keyboard and mouse and speakers. He had no idea what resolution this monitor was, which makes it hard trying to judge what to buy. He just gave me an idea of the size. It seemed pretty small - probably 19" widescreen or 17" 4:3.

If it turns this out this isn't good enough for Minecraft I'll have to tell him his budget is too small. My biggest concern right now is the CPU but recently I've been reading here that people have been surprised by the Celeron.
 
I used to play Minecraft on my previous system and it did struggle. From what I saw, Minecraft uses more of the CPU over the GPU and my previous system had a very similar processor to what your considering.

It was playable, but every now and then it lagged for a couple of second and I doubt you could get some mods or texture pack with that set up.
 
OK so do you think I should spend less on the GPU and more on the CPU then possibly?

As I said, I have no experience with Minecraft on PCs at all. I've played it, but on a system far superior to this one! ;)
 
If it's mainly for Minecraft then I would suggest getting a better CPU.

In my experience, minecraft uses a hell of a lot of memory and gives a good load for the CPU.
 
For £218 I can get:

Pentium G870 http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...telceleronandpentiumdualcore/bx80623g870.html

8GB Crucial Ballistix 1333MHz http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...c3-10666/1333mhz/bls2cp4g3d1339ds1s00ceu.html

Radeon 6670 1GB http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/...hicscards/amdhd6670series/r6670-md1gd3v2.html

With the same case, board and PSU as above in the original build list as well as the HDD and ODD I'm going to sell him (the HDD and ODD will probably £10-£15 onto the cost).

Would that be a better setup for Minecraft?
 
Should be OK should it?

Thanks for the help, I know 200 quid is a really low budget. I'm hopeful he may up his budget, in which case I'll try and get a beefier GPU I think (along with the Pentium and the 8GB of RAM).

Anybody else got any other ideas?
 
Tekkit is just a form of Minecraft with a bunch of prepackaged mods.

http://www.technicpack.net/tekkit/


Yeah that should be fine. I was able to run Minecraft just fine on "far" settings with smooth lighting at around 30 FPS with a Pentium 4 2.8GHZ and an 8400GS. That should be totally fine running it.
 
And when you're building you should OC his card a little bit. Not much, but a few MHz boost to core and memory would help. :D
 
True, I'll look into that.

I just want to get this straight: with Mnecraft is it better to have a powerful CPU than GPU, OR a more powerful GPU than CPU?
 
I don't know about price conversion or pricing differences in Europe, (The budget is about 250 usd right?) but for this low of a budget build wouldn't an AMD APU be better? Such as an A10 5800K or something?
 
The budget's £200/$320 USD. If an AMD APU will definitely work better, then that's what I'll use, otherwise I think I'll go for the Pentium and the 8GB of RAM and the 6670.
 
To thread starter, your still a kid after all~ building PC this days are very much easier rather than IDE days, tips: back from the old days we don't spend so much money for computer case, because if your really good you can pimp your crappy case into a cable management friendly case.
 
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