5punk

Hello you technically minded people.

We're looking to replace em's ancient rig (my old, old one that got built and frankensteined from 2005 onwards) with a new machine. Budget's pretty tight as we're moving house soon and have all those lovely legal fees to pay.

I've been looking at PC Gamer's suggested budget PC build, and I guess it looks good, but don't really feel qualified to say.

I've followed their build exactly, save for cutting down on the GB of the SSD (120 instead of 250), and adding in an optical drive. You can see the Amazon buy-list here. It comes to, at time of writing, £600.69 (fnar).

Can't really stretch any higher than that, and I was hoping somebody could take a gander and see if it's
a) A good PC build
b) Good value for money
c) If we can save money anywhere

Em would like to be able to play Fallout 4 tier games, but isn't fussed about having everything cranked up to ultra - high's good enough. We also need a windows operating system, I guess. She's a registered student, so are there any good deals out there?

That looks pretty tight to me, but you're rather forgetting to salvage the unimportant from her old machine, salvage the dvd drive if you must have one, otherwise lose the Optical drive, I'm not sure the last time I even used one, a little usb slimline one can be had for pennies down the line, for everything else there's USB sticks that are so cheap as to be disposable.

Got any old HDDs? nuke them for storage in the new machine, with fast interwebs and cloud backups, a little storage volatility isn't a total disaster, so that'll save you £45

This might be a better option than the little SSD (and binning the optical drive will pay the difference)

You might get away with a ~£130 GTX 950 with 2gb vram if you're not doing super mega high res (1080p should be reet) Another £40-something there.

We're thinking about using the old machine for Steam Home Streaming and media serving when we move out, so probably won't be able to cannibalise the hard drive. Will definitely look at the other stuff though Berk, cheers.

Can you squeeze value by going back to an older mobo/chipset and ddr3?

If sticking with skylake and ddr4, get this maybe?

It's cheaper and has stock cooling included so you can ditch the cooling as well.

A Samsung 850 EVO, which comes in a 120GB version as well as the 250GB one berk mentioned is faster than the similarly-priced Crucial BX100, but harder to find than that larger version.

An i5 is listed as the minimum for Fallout 4, although that's based on an old, second generation model, the 2300, that sixth generation i3 should easily do the job. A GTX 960 will equal or better the performance of an R9 380 and start at around £150 for a 4GB card, http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B012G7VCGU

As a student Windows and Office are free:
http://onthehub.com/download/free-softw ... -students/
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/educatio ... earch=true

You may need a code from the school if you don't have all the details those sites want.