Mairin
Active member
While I do grasp the basic concepts of assembling a PC piece by piece, I've never actually done it before so please be gentle if I've made silly choices/suggestions 
I'll try to include my personal reasoning for each thing and hopefully the knowledgable will correct me where I've screwed up. Compared to most I'm on a pretty tight budget of (at most) £600 but the closer to the £500 mark the better. I'll likely invest in monitors at a later date but for now I'll use the ones I already have. The goal of the machine is somewhat of an "all in one" with medium gaming, office use and a bit of image and video editing here and there.
Case: COOLERMASTER ELITE 311 BLUE CASE
I picked this one just because it was fairly cheap and I personally liked the look. If someone has a "but you can get x for about the same price and it has xx% better cooling etc" thought on this I'm all ears
Processor (CPU): AMD A8-5600K Quad Core APU (3.6GHz) & Radeon™ HD 7560D Graphics
From my understanding, quad will always be better than dual core and from the benchmarks I found online this seemed to be one of the most efficient for the money in my budget range.
Motherboard: ASUS® A55BM-E FM2+ (M-ATX, DDR3, USB 3.0, 6Gb/s)
There were only 2 choices and this was the default
Memory (RAM): 8GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Since my old machine was running 2x2Gb the 8 seemed like a reasonable goal for this next build and the 1x8 configuration (to me at least) suggests I could add another 8Gb at a later date rather than having to work around a 2x4.
Graphics Card: 2GB AMD RADEON™ HD7850 - DVI,HDMI,DP - DX® 11, Eyefinity 3 Capable
At present whenever I get a new game, one of the first things I have to do is turn down all graphics settings which isn't fun so even on a budget I wanted to splash out at least a little and from benchmarks and reviews I've found online this seemed to be good value for the performance. Any alternate suggestions are appreciated but baring in mind the 2 monitors I intend to use are a DVI and a VGA adapted to a DVI (the 7850 has 2 DVI interfaces).
Memory - 1st Hard Disk: 2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 64MB CACHE
Between my steam library and video/photo editing it seemed silly to not quadruple the storage capacity for relatively little money.
Power Supply: CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY
The auto-check thingy said the system would need 419w and therefore I'd only need a 450w supply but that didn't seem like much wiggle room especially with the graphics card and the dual monitor setup.
Thanks in advance
I'll try to include my personal reasoning for each thing and hopefully the knowledgable will correct me where I've screwed up. Compared to most I'm on a pretty tight budget of (at most) £600 but the closer to the £500 mark the better. I'll likely invest in monitors at a later date but for now I'll use the ones I already have. The goal of the machine is somewhat of an "all in one" with medium gaming, office use and a bit of image and video editing here and there.Case: COOLERMASTER ELITE 311 BLUE CASE
I picked this one just because it was fairly cheap and I personally liked the look. If someone has a "but you can get x for about the same price and it has xx% better cooling etc" thought on this I'm all ears
Processor (CPU): AMD A8-5600K Quad Core APU (3.6GHz) & Radeon™ HD 7560D Graphics
From my understanding, quad will always be better than dual core and from the benchmarks I found online this seemed to be one of the most efficient for the money in my budget range.
Motherboard: ASUS® A55BM-E FM2+ (M-ATX, DDR3, USB 3.0, 6Gb/s)
There were only 2 choices and this was the default
Memory (RAM): 8GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Since my old machine was running 2x2Gb the 8 seemed like a reasonable goal for this next build and the 1x8 configuration (to me at least) suggests I could add another 8Gb at a later date rather than having to work around a 2x4.
Graphics Card: 2GB AMD RADEON™ HD7850 - DVI,HDMI,DP - DX® 11, Eyefinity 3 Capable
At present whenever I get a new game, one of the first things I have to do is turn down all graphics settings which isn't fun so even on a budget I wanted to splash out at least a little and from benchmarks and reviews I've found online this seemed to be good value for the performance. Any alternate suggestions are appreciated but baring in mind the 2 monitors I intend to use are a DVI and a VGA adapted to a DVI (the 7850 has 2 DVI interfaces).
Memory - 1st Hard Disk: 2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 64MB CACHE
Between my steam library and video/photo editing it seemed silly to not quadruple the storage capacity for relatively little money.
Power Supply: CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY
The auto-check thingy said the system would need 419w and therefore I'd only need a 450w supply but that didn't seem like much wiggle room especially with the graphics card and the dual monitor setup.
Thanks in advance
