well, my laptop literally melted and I need a new machine to game on! Max price I'm willing to pay is £700 ($1085). If I buy the parts, I will post a picture with the finished build and you'll be credited! Go ballistic, guys.
I use laptops, so that's where I generally am knowledgeable, but I did some research about budget gaming PC builds, and I found one that fits in the $1000 USD range. Here is the list that I would personally use if I was to build a desktop gaming pc, and needed to stay under $1000 USD: CPU-Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor RAM-G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) GPU-MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Twin Frozr V Motherboard-Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SLI ATX LGA1150 Motherboard HDD-Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB SSD-Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB Case-NZXT S340 (White) ATX Mid Tower PSU-EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular There's actually a video of a guy building this PC with these exact parts, I kept this list as a fallback plan in case I had to build a new one, so it finally came in handy to post here for you EDIT: May I recommend taking a look at my tutorial here for installing the Core-Temp monitor (<-- link) to your system to monitor the temperature of your cores in real-time? It can help protect you in the future so if you notice it's too high, you can investigate what might be causing it It's a good resource to have, and if you set it to close to he system tray, it takes up almost no memory or processing power to run, and it'll update at what ever intervals you set it to, but I keep mine near real-time at updating every half second. It's worth the read
Here's what I came up with, and it will be one beast of a machine. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/fLykt6 Total is 1,020.91, but after all the rebates, and some promo discounts, you can get one hell of a machine.
It's just 20 bucks above his total budget, also, he could save money, and just go for a plain 1tb hdd for everything, instead of using a ssd for boot and essential programs 3.5 inch hdd's run at I think... 7200rpm? or is it 7400? Can't remember, but it reads faster than a laptop hdd which I think spins at 5400rpm, so it'll still be a bit faster than his old laptop if he goes for just a 1tb hdd as the only storage device
Save the harddrive from it, you can revocer that media later that is contained on it by using a hard drive transfer kit. If you're curious about what that is, pretty much it can be used to connect any harddrive, newer ones like Sata, and even the older ones with the pins and whatnot, into a USB port so it will act as removable media
The hard drive is un salvageable at this point. After I took it out, I tried to transfer a few files but it failed the tests so it's fried
Awe Lesson learned though, off-site storage. Try onedrive for personal backups, it's what I use, 10gb is more than enough for my own personal files
