Gaming PC Build

Swapped the PSU to the one you linked me too so my current build is now

Motherboard MSI 970A-G43
Processor AMD FX6300 Black edition
Video Card Sapphire R9 280 DUAL-X 3GB GDDR5
Ram Corsair CML8GX3M2A1600C9 Vengeance Low Profile 8GB (2x4GB)
HDD WD 500GB Caviar Blue Hard Drive
PSU Antec True Power 550W
Case Corsair Carbide Series 200R

That totaling £474.20, I will leave getting an after market cooler and overclocking until I get paid some time in February.
This will be my first time building a PC

EDIT: @Demonix it is the black edition I am getting forgot to add that on, and I have my laptop to make a boot able USB.
 
The corsair caseyou're buying comes with an intake fan at the front and an outake fan at the rear. Psu is at the bottom of the case.

I have a faster processor and beefier graphics card than you and havent encountered any issues with requiring extra fans. If you want maybe buy an extra one put at the top of the case but again, not sure you'll need one.

If this is the first time you're building one have you researched how to do it? Do you know your way round the motherboard, what wires and connectors go where? Do you know how to set the bios to boot boot from usb in the first instance?

When I was waiting for parts to be delivered I read up on it and watched a few videos of people building but was still nervous when I did it myself. Took a lot less time to do than I thought though. That feeling of satisfaction when it boots for the first time was fantastic.
 
britguy said:
The corsair caseyou're buying comes with an intake fan at the front and an outake fan at the rear. Psu is at the bottom of the case.
Click to expand...

The intake on the Corsair is pretty useless in it's current position as it's a solid front case & the fan won't pull much air from the strips of side ventilation plus the hard drive bays will block some air flow. Corsair do make nice quality cases though.

With that case I'd move the front intake fan to the top (front-most slot) still as an intake, keep the rear outtake & put the CPU fan on backwards so it's pushing air towards the outtake fan rather than drawing it in (as the top intake should be pushing fresh air straight into the heatsink.) I'd monitor the CPU heat with the fan on both ways though to see which performs better.

Oh one other thing. You might want to look into a silicon grommets for your fans. Example: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Akasa-AK-MX003- ... T7ARNW6S4Y you use them in place of fan screws & they make fans much quieter, I use them in all builds now.


I've been building pc's for people for about 12 years. Nowadays I only build for friends, family & word of mouth. I mostly seem to get laptops to repair/upgrade/clean nowadays but I did 3 pc builds last year, including 2 mid-end gaming pc's. I've always built & upgraded my own.
 
britguy said:
The corsair caseyou're buying comes with an intake fan at the front and an outake fan at the rear. Psu is at the bottom of the case.

I have a faster processor and beefier graphics card than you and havent encountered any issues with requiring extra fans. If you want maybe buy an extra one put at the top of the case but again, not sure you'll need one.

If this is the first time you're building one have you researched how to do it? Do you know your way round the motherboard, what wires and connectors go where? Do you know how to set the bios to boot boot from usb in the first instance?

When I was waiting for parts to be delivered I read up on it and watched a few videos of people building but was still nervous when I did it myself. Took a lot less time to do than I thought though. That feeling of satisfaction when it boots for the first time was fantastic.
Click to expand...

Been doing quite a bit of research, watched a lot of videos of people building theirs.
I think I know how to make a usb boot in the first instance (Think I might have had to do it on my laptop at one point for something)

@Serpantino Will look into fan placement but will most probably take your advice to make sure I don't encounter any problems.

Will be ordering everything in a few days time
 
How much are you hoping to over clock? I just looked at the motherboard you're looking at & it has no heatsink over the MOSFET/vram bank these can get seriously hot when overclocking.
 
Was looking to overclock to 4.1, Do you have any recommendations on a better motherboard for overclocking in the same price range?
Current one is priced at £45.95
 
I will have a look in an hour or so for you. Not at PC atm. That motherboard would probably be ok anyway & it does look to have mounting holes for a heatsink. The MOSFETs will just be damn hot & push a lot of heat into your case. How hot depends on how high a voltage increase (if at all) you need to hold a stable overclock.
 
Thanks for your help.
Also don't have enough money at the moment to get windows 7 or 8, is there any alternative OS that's free, ill only be using it for about a month.
Will reply back when I get home from work.
 
If you have a windows 7 disk such as home premium (or if you torrent or download from an official Microsoft reseller) and don't put in an authentication key you'll get a 30 day trial, after which it will start asking for an authentication (serial) number, bear in mind that by doing this you need to ensure that your serial number will work with the version you have (i.e you can't buy an OEM/laptop one like a lot of ebay sellers sell). I wouldn't recommend Windows 8 for gaming, the interface is a step back & compatibility is an issue.

Alternatively there's Linux which has a lot of popularity but it's far less user friendly than people make out & there's a lot of distros (types) out there (i've used Ubuntu, Suse, Redhat & XBMC Linux). Getting windows games running is difficult (& largely impossible) but if you just want something with a web browser, office suite etc then I'd recommend getting one which will run from a USB stick without a full hard drive install as Linux can be a pest to get dual booting with windows & if you want a clean windows install you'd have to fully format your drive first & may have problems with the boot sector/MBR & have to repair them (it's not too hard but it's still a pain.)
 
Will most probably be ordering everything tomorrow.

@Serpantino Did you manage to have a look and see if there is a better mother board around about the same price range, I have been reading up about the MSI 970A-G43 and a lot of people have said its not a good board for overclocking.
 
Hey sorry for the delay. I have been looking around a bit trying to find a decent alternative but the best looks to be this one: (£65.84) http://www.amazon.co.uk/M5A97-R2-0-Moth ... otherboard

All of the boards I've looked at around the £65 price including the Asus have issues with overclocking but you should be able to manage 4.1-4.4ghz. Sadly its hard to get a quality over clocking board cheap unless you're lucky to get one on clearance when a revised model is replacing it. Couldn't find a board with MOSFET heatsinks any cheaper sorry.
 
Just ordered everything now, should be here tomorrow thanks to an amazon prime trial.
Ended up just sticking with the MSI 970A-G43 I can always upgrade, ended up changing the WD HDD for a 1TB Seagate aswell.
 
Good luck. Did you pick up the variant with the heatsink on the vrm (MOSFETs) I noticed there was one available for around £55. That board also doesn't have an internal usb 3.0 front header so you'll have to route the connector from the front panel USB through the case & plug them into one of the 3.0 USB ports on the back (I'm sure that's the default design of that case anyway.)

Hope everything goes smoothly for you.
 
serpantino said:
Good luck. Did you pick up the variant with the heatsink on the vrm (MOSFETs) I noticed there was one available for around £55. That board also doesn't have an internal usb 3.0 front header so you'll have to route the connector from the front panel USB through the case & plug them into one of the 3.0 USB ports on the back (I'm sure that's the default design of that case anyway.)

Hope everything goes smoothly for you.
Click to expand...

Thanks for all your help, picked the one up for £45 on amazon so not sure if its the same one.
Will post an update tomorrow and some pictures :)
 
Set everything up fine, only problem is in the BIOS the cpu temp rises from 45 degrees to 59 and bounces between that and 60 is that normal?
Will be checking the temp again when windows has installed
 
It's within the acceptable limits for the chip but that is high for a nearly idle chipset & you could end up with shutdowns when you try to play games.


Have you overclocked it yet? The easiest way to create a stable overclock is by upping the voltage but that creates a lot of heat (too much too fast can fry the chip as well), the trick is to find the lowest possible voltage it's stable at.

Did you use a different paste to the one that came with the heatsink & did you spread it thickly or thinly? (too thick slows down the heat transference but it should be fully coated across the top of the chip)

Did you move the fan placement & did you make sure the fans are turned the right way round?

Is the CPU fan connected to the CPU fan header (pins) on the motherboard? (other headers might not have the level of speed control that the CPU Fan header does.)

Are all the fans spinning ok?

Is the air from the CPU fan coming out hot? (be careful touching the heatsink as they can be very hot if it's been on for a while).
 
That sounds fine. How high is it going under gaming? You'd want the chip under 70c at full load I think. Not sure the thermal head on the 6300 but I think it's somewhere around 80c (when it shuts down from being too hot.) So Throttle Down is probably around 70c

Edit: Sorry for delay.
 
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