Hey Everyone

Thought I would ask GB for help as this is my first time building a PC, I am mainly a console gamer but have dabbled in the PC many years ago. I have finally plucked up the courage to build my first PC as I don't own any new consoles and thought Id rather build a PC for this generation ( late i know ). My budget is between £800-900. This is the PC that I would like to build however I am open to suggestions for any tweaks or tips. It would also be a big help if anyone could reccomend a monitor for this system I have been looking online for Monitors, mainly 1080P ones as that seems to be best for this current rig. But is it worth getting a 144hz instead of a 60hz I don't know if this rig could handle it?

PCPartPicker part list: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/2rgGnn

Price breakdown by merchant: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/2rgGnn/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (£188.49 @ Amazon UK)

Motherboard: MSI B150 Gaming M3 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£94.81 @ Novatech)

Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory (£69.98 @ Novatech)

Storage: Sandisk SSD PLUS 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£63.92 @ BT Shop)

Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£41.99 @ Amazon UK)

Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB GAMING X Video Card (£249.99 @ Amazon UK)

Case: NZXT S340 Elite (Black/Red) ATX Mid Tower Case

Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£76.99 @ Novatech)

Case Fan: Corsair Air Series SP120 High Performance Edition (2-Pack) 62.7 CFM 120mm Fans (£24.00 @ Amazon UK)

Total: £810.17

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-11-26 23:45 GMT+0000

Thank you very much to anyone that can help me

Looks like nobody else is responding, so I'll try to offer some thoughts.

Looks basically fine for your budget. I don't think you need the extra case fan, I'd scrap it and put it into...iuno, storage? You could get a better SSD at the same capacity. Maybe even the MyDigitalSSD BPX to use the M.2 slot on the motherboard you picked out if you're willing to throw in an extra £25, though that drive might continue to experience shortages.

I can't really think of anything else you could meaningfully bump up with the money from the case fan. If you went for the CPU you'd have to move up to the 6600K, you'd then need an aftermarket cooler like the 212 EVO, and you'd be mad not to pair it with a Z170 motherboard so you can overclock it, because that's almost the entire point of the K chips. So that's probably in the vicinity of £100. Moving up to a 1070 video card probably means doubling your video card budget.

I guess you could switch out the SuperNOVA NEX for the SuperNOVA G2, which is generally agreed to be the better PSU as far as I can tell. You could switch to the 550W G2 since your motherboard won't allow SLI or any major overclocking, so you're unlikely to use the extra power, but it might be worth staying at 650W for the sake of future-proofing: the case and the PSU are two components that are likely to make it into your next build (say, 4-5 years from now), so having the extra power might give you a little leeway then.

More generally in terms of cost-saving: try to find some sales before Black Friday ends that might give you a little more leeway in your budget or get you more performant components, of course; and if you have any old laptops (or desktops) that you're not using anymore, maybe you can pull out the storage drives in them to use in this build. I'm currently using an eclectic collection of HDDs and SSDs from old laptops in my new build until I finally settle on an NVMe drive, which isn't perfect, but I'm getting by and it's a cost-saving measure I was able to take up-front so I could make other parts of the build better.

Its looking good. I agree with @fnrslvr that the extra casefans might be overkill. If you want better/quieter cooling i would put those $ towards an better CPU fan instead for more effect. Extra fans are never a bad thing however :)

If you want an upgrade its the GPU thats on the low end but it will do fine for 1080p in 60hz.

Regarding screens i dont have much knowledge about the kind you want so i got no tip for you. 144hz and G-sync could be really sweet but i would perhaps put that money towards an 1070 instead.

Hm, fwiw it looks like you can move up to a 6600K for ~£21, and for £26 you could move to the Z170A Gaming M3, which is the Z170 version of the board you chose, although you could also move to, say, ASRock's Fatal1ty Gaming K4 for £14, which is recommended over at Tom's Hardware. Combined with ditching the case fan and putting in a Hyper 212 Evo cooler (which is a good idea to do anyway if you're worried enough about cooling to add case fans), that'd put you out of pocket an extra £47 (£35 if you go for the K4) for what amounts to a decent CPU upgrade and some connectivity upgrades and whatnot on the motherboard. It's not something you urgently need to go for, but it's something to think about.

Getting a Z170 motherboard and a 6600K would be worth it since it makes overclocking possible. It really prolongs the life of your build. For example I have a 4 year old build but since it is overclocked it is as good or better than a new CPU at stock speed.

Also the next generation of CPUs are coming out in January if you can wait.

@dagas: @rethla: @fnrslvr: Thank you both for your input I thought about 6600k but was apprehensive as I have never OC before but it seems to make sense value wise so I think I will go with that. Regarding the new Kabylake Chips coming in January I have been reading online that they are not worth the wait as the difference is incrimental however I could be wrong in your opinion is it worth the wait and will they be more expensive ?

@solidlife: New CPUs are never worth waiting for.

If you decide to move up to the K series, just remember you HAVE to buy a third party heatsink as they do not come with a stock one.

Skylake vs. Kabylake is around a 10% performance difference and the usual power saving improvements. Nothing to care about at all especially for gaming. Overclocking a Skylake chip by a small amount will make it faster than the comparable Kabylake at stock speeds. For laptops however...the power savings can be a big deal.

CPUs are really boring. It's good to buy a strong one and then enjoy your 4-6 years of not really needing to upgrade it again (there's still people gaming just fine on 2010 i7s!). The biggest case for upgrading a CPU every two years is when you are spending a lot of time waiting for stuff to finish encoding and rendering, minimising that is always good if you are doing video work and so on often.

It sure is nice having a cutting edge CPU though, my Skylake i7 right now is encoding 40 episodes of Seinfeld from DVD to h.264 (3 minutes an episode!) and my PC doesn't even feel slowed down at all even though I'm browsing the net on the same machine and watching YouTube lol.

@wynnduffy: @oursin_360: @rethla:Thanks for that yes, I will be getting a cool master 412!. As for the CPU guess it makes sense not to wait for kabylake the OC seems like it will do the job. thank you all and enjoy your seinfield :)