Built this for my friend the other week. He didn't have a lot of money, so we did a bit of an 'eBay scavenger bid-at-the-last-minute' build.
i7 3770K with the stock cooler from my old i5 2500K which I bought brand new in 2012 and never used (yes - it was still sealed in the box right at the back of my cupboard! I used, and still use, an Arctic Cooling Freezer13 on my 2500K)
ASRock Z77 Extreme6 (took a gamble on this since an old member 'wolfeking' here practically started a hate campaign against the ASRock Z77 boards on here, but I can confirm that asides from stupid positioning of the front audio header, it's a nice board)
14GB DDR3 1333MHz (mostly nicked out of old PCs I had at work - 2x4GB+1x4GB+1x2GB - conventional, I know
)
WD Blue 1TB (tried to convince him to go with an SSD
)
WD Green 500GB out of his old PC
MSI Radeon HD 7950 3GB that he bought last year and used in his old PC (after we had taken his old case apart with a hacksaw to fit it in, lol)
Corsair CX600M (also from his old PC)
Corsair 300R - can't believe you can get these new for £45 from Amazon! Bargain of the decade! These were about £70 or £80 when new about 5 years ago when I was recommending them to people haha! First time I've used this case actually despite recommending it to loads of people on here in about 2012 - it's great!
Some ASUS Xonar sound card he bought but never used, so why not use it in this new build eh?
Dodgy eBay copy of Windows 10 Pro that seems legit...
WP_20170718_23_26_09_Raw by
ThinkPad Review, on Flickr
WP_20170718_23_26_14_Raw by
ThinkPad Review, on Flickr
WP_20170718_23_26_52_Raw by
ThinkPad Review, on Flickr
Not too bad I guess? I know it's about as '2012' as you can get really, but given he's upgrading from an AMD Phenom II X4 840 from 2011 with 4GB RAM it's a nice upgrade.
All in all it cost about £300 if you don't include the money he spent on the graphics card, sound card and power supply last year. £300 for an i7 build which still performs well today is good! I still use a 3770 and I don't feel the need to upgrade so I happily recommended the 3770K to him.
And yes as you can see in the file names of the photos, it was a late night! We started at about 4.00pm and finished at midnight. That's mostly because of how many bloody Steam games he has - his library practically fills that 500GB HDD so you can see that most of the night was spent copying Steam games. *sigh*.