Goin cheapo with room to upgrade. This is what I got so far Case: er Master Elite 130 - Mini-ITX APU: AMD A10-7870K Kaveri Quad-Core 3.9 GHz Socket FM2+ 95W Motherboard: ASRock FM2A88X-ITX+ PSU: EVGA 100-W1-500-KR 500W ATX12V / EPS12V RAM: PNY Anarchy 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) HDD: Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive Motherboard has 1 x PCIe 3.0 to add a solid graphics card later. Total cost: $405.93 Any input would be greatly appreciated.
The AMD a10 is an apu it has r7 250 gpu built in. I should be able to run most games at mid-high settings at 1080 with decent fps. Later on I plan on upgrading to 16 gb ram and a dedicated r9 3xx card. Totally forgot about os. Downgraded the APU to 7700k and the hdd to stay on budget.
I'm not sure on the AMD with built in Graphics on them... that seems like a @Veee question... i've always been intel/nvidia type.
Well AMD is like the best shit available. It's a proven fact that people who use AMD have sex with more women on average than Intel users. Other than me being an AMD fanboy, At the lower price builds like the one I am doing, it would be silly to choose Intel because you just won't get anywhere near as much power out of your system. My truck was significantly cheaper to fix than I thought so I was able to bump the budget a little higher, I added a 240gb sandisk ssd. And depending how easy it is for me to return the 7700k APU I ordered on newegg I may just go ahead and get the 7870k (Best FM2+ APU on the market). http://pcpartpicker.com/p/X2NvMp
Massively blew my budget and got this Gigabyte Radeon R9 380 4GB SOC Video Card as well as a liquid cooling system lol. I'm in it ~750-800 now. Everything is put together except for the gfx card which I will be getting tomorrow. I just hope my 430w PSU will be enough.
Yes but under max load I hit 128w of usage without the gfx card. Do you think that card will use 300w?
You should never use more than 60% (or less than 40%) of the power supply's rated capacity for stability and for longevity of the power supply. Power supply rated capacities are MAX LOAD capacities and if you run it max load constantly it WILL die for faster and will probably take something else expensive in your PC with it (usually CPU/GPU/MOBO if not all 3). You are currently pushing 65% of the power supply (128W without GPU and 150W added from the GPU) which is out of it's optimal range and while that might seem like a close enough number it isn't and will cause it to die off faster than you think. Also even though it is rated at 430W it will only give a stable load at around 175-260W. Anything above and the power supply will start to fluctuate it's voltage which is a bad thing for PC stability. Overdrawn power supplies are one of the biggest causes of hardware instability in a PC and being out of the 40-60% optimal range is typically considered overdrawn even though it isn't at max capacity. I'm not Vee but I do this for a living and I know enough to have actually rebuilt several old power supplies for work to save money. BTW for the DIY people here is a disclaimer because sadly there are the few who will try it (because that guy Myriad did so how hard could it be?)....: Don't try to rebuild a power supply if you don't know what you are doing. They have HIGH HIGH voltages and high current that can kill you from just stored energy in capacitors if you slip up and a short in one can end up causing a fire or an explosion so make sure you know precisely what you are doing before you attempt it. Edit to fix a typo. Meant to type 175W
OK so I popped the r9 380 in my rig and a new 600w psu. My rig runs pretty much everything at max settings 1080 with ~60 fps. DANK. However, I am getting periodic crashes where I get a black screen then it goes to desktop and says the display driver has stopped responding and has been restarted (or something like that). I am running current drivers and everything is stock. I should maybe note that my bios shows my memory as ddr3 1600 when its actually 2133, so I manually set it to 2133 (not sure if this is causing the problems). Any ideas anyone?
Updated bios good to go. Got it stable and tried overclocking the APU. No point couldn't get it stable any higher than the turbo already gets it. All in all this rig crushes games at 1080p. Highly recommended. EDIT: After playing around in bios all day I got my APU stable at 4.1 ghz (stock was 3.4) temps ~55-60 under load and my graphics card at 1050 mhz (stock 990) temps ~60-70 under load.
