The build is solid. Why not Intel? Less heat and less power draw but more expensive.

New mobile GPUs are coming out in October. I may purchase 980m SLI on a 17 inch Clevo notebook.

not going with an Intel CPU is lolbad imho

I have alienware laptop. broke and dell finances. I game so alienware was only choice

Intel CPU are very expensive - what would you cut from this build to make room for one? or just suggest to spend more or forget it. Using a comparable priced Intel (Pentium dual core G3420 I would think) is unlikely to be an upgrade in any scenario AFAIK.

Didn't think about alienware laptops. Makes sense.

personally I would

take out the 250gb SSD and buy a 120gb samsung 840evo SSD + 500gb HDD for around the same price ( or take a 20£ hit and swap the 500gb for a 1TB, but it's not needed ).

take a hit on the CPU and buy an I5 3570 for 146£. Top notch CPU.

Then again, what is this build for?

It's 70£ more for a serious upgrade, imho. Even does some high quality gaming. But if you are only going to be browsing the net with it anyway, keep the money.

was trying to be as cheap as possible really so went amd.
ive only had crappy laptops for the last decade or so so its a huge upgrade either way.

hoping to use it for gaming mainly, but not really fussed about running AAA games on ultra or anything.

i already have a 500gb external hardrive if it still works after falling off my desk, but if not ill probably get one sometime down the line anyway.

AMD is fine. Don't worry about it.

500gb internal non-ssd should be down to like, what, twenty bucks?

I have an fx 6300 and a GTX 660 and the CPU never bottlenecks gaming performance

But you only play minesweeper

5 million fps tho

Human eye can only detect a difference up to 3 million fps tho

no u

I'm considering building a new PC. Could be very soon, could wait until I see the Black Friday deals. Whatever, no real hurry.

I'm going for a budget gaming build. I'm not a heavy gamer, as I just don't have the time, but the computer I use for it is several years old and is starting to bog down. I haven't played many very new games on it, but it still runs most things I've tried just fine, even if it not on the highest detail levels. It just ****s up a lot, so it may be time for something new.

At any rate, I've built PC's in the past, so I don't need help as far as the mechanics of it all, but it's been a long time, so I'm not up on all the latest stuff in the slightest. I'm using sites like anandtech and Tom's Hardware as resources, so I won't bug 2+2 to educate me on everything.

One thing that's new to me is the difference between CPU and APU. I understand APU has the graphics processor built in, but that's really all I know. My question is this: if I plan on buying a separate GPU, is it better to go with a regular CPU or can there be some advantage to also having an APU (perhaps bang for the buck is better or something)?

Like I said, I'm going for essentially a budget gaming build. I don't generally spend money on the newest games, but I want it to be able to play everything that's out there, though I'm not concerned with being able to jack all the detail settings to high. The computer will be used for general family computing, as well, though if it can run games, it can do internet and Microsoft Office and what-not.

First google result for CPU vs apu:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/324378-28-versus

Just check PC part picker or whatever that website is that everyone uses these days

wish NVIDA would release the 900 series cards

Man.
So my old duo core gaming laptop that I let my cousin have, it finally died. Vid card went blammo. Cost to fix is like $250, so that's half a laptop basically.

I haven't done the research due to lack of time.

I want to get him a replacement for Christmas.

What's a good laptop that can play hearthstone and maybe path of exile/ Diablo 3(lol d3)/starcraft 2 on low settings?

I don't really want to spend over $500, but I know that I may have to.

If have an APU and GPU you can in some cases crossfire them and in effect have a dual graphics card system.

FWIW only a small range of cards crossfire with an AMD APU. AFAIK no card crossfires with an Intel HD graphics.

Personally I would not build my system around a crossfire apu setup; but if the pieces you want are compatible anyway, you get a small boost out of it.

They're releasing the GTX 980 and GTX 970 some time this month. Those cards are overkill if you game at 1080p. Prices are dropping for the older cards so wait a little.

ya the 19th.. and the 770s are supposed to drop to $275. curious to see how the rest of the prices shake out

Even a 770 is almost overkill unless you're doing 4k. My 3 year old 670 still hasn't found much of a challenge. At this point the top of the line is really only worthwhile if you're in to things like SweetFX or GeDoSaTo for downsampling and shader injection. Personally I can't really tell the difference with downsampling, at least with the few games I've tried. Dark Souls 2 at 4k downsampled to 1080 (1200 I guess in my case) looks about the same, though some of the shader stuff can have a big visual impact without too much extra processing.

770 will handle most games in 4k just fine. Unless you wanna run crysis 3 in ultra w/ more than 2xaa.

I'm on a 280x and playing 4k in all my games w/ ultra and hitting 60fps.

The only thing I found that really killed it was Dark souls 2 w/ textures packs + gedosato, which put me down to like 45-50fps.

Thanks for the tips. Holy ****, pcpartspicker.com is awesome. It's been so long since I've built a PC that nothing like that existed at the time.

It does sound like, from what I've read, that it would be silly to worry about crossfiring an APU and GPU unless I was going higher-end and at that point, might as well just get dual GPUs.

For those interested, here's my "budget-ish" gaming PC I priced out for under $600 including Windows 8.1:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/fX8xTW

I haven't bought anything yet. I am able to save money by buying both the CPU and motherboard from Microcenter (most of the stuff is from there), as the motherboard ends up to be free with the combo. It seems like a pretty solid board, too - one weakness is the lack of USB 3.0 headers, but it does have two USB 3.0 ports in the back. I then opted for a case without 3.0 ports because that would be a waste.

The Samsung HDD and optical drive are listed at $0 because I already have them on hand. That HDD will not be the primary drive - it is just coming out of another machine to be a photo HDD.

I went with a small SSD for the OS and maybe a couple key programs.

I posted the build on the pcpartspicker.com forum and have gotten one response so far, which was positive. I happened to stop by Microcenter today and asked a guy his thoughts and he said it looked solid for what I want it to do.