FX 8300 BEN NAVIS GIGABYTE 970A-DS3P KINGSTON 8GB 1600 MHZ SS STRIDER 500W 80+ BRONZE MS VOYAGER MIDI ATX
= $920.
- you'll get free assembly—and honestly, looking at them, they might even overclock your PC for you since they used to offer pre-overclocked builds back in the day (just ask them and let me know what they say).
I'd rather Boss just swap it out—even though that liquid cooler is killer, the cables are way too short, especially those 2x4 pin CPU ones that'll have to stretch all the way across the motherboard.
Exactly—plus, it actually has a beefier power phase delivery than some of those pricier B85 or H97 boards out there. Besides, this isn't an AMD build where you have to worry about cheap motherboards causing constant headaches.
If you haven't given them a shot yet, honestly, you should—you might actually be surprised. They’ve stepped up their game big time compared to that old Phoenix or carbon etc. line, and they're miles ahead of those ancient MS-ov models like Taurus or whatever—those were a total joke. With the newer stuff like Knight, Voyager, etc., they finally added support for 120mm fans in the front and back, plus there's way more room and much better cable management (especially for those beefier GPUs since they tweaked the HDD cage), along with a few other little perks. The chassis is pretty solid too; it doesn't feel flimsy like paper, and you don't really feel any vibrations—I've built a few rigs using the Phoenix and Carbon, so I know what I'm talking about. Look, I'm not saying they're perfect or anything, but they're definitely worth the price tag. They're a solid buy and definitely not something you need to steer clear of.
That's a solid choice for a favorite—honestly, you can't go wrong there—but just a heads-up, you might want to steer clear of that XFX TS 430 because a ton of those units tend to have some annoying coil whine issues.
Honestly, you should probably look into Intel—it’s just a better all-arounder, plus you'll actually have a path to upgrade to something beefier later on. With those FX 83xx chips, you're pretty much hitting the ceiling for what AM3+ can offer.
So, you've got that Acer with the mSATA slot—if you wanted to go with a standard 2.5" drive instead, you'd basically have to ditch the existing Hard Drives. Personally, I think if we're looking at capacity, a 180GB version for around $525 would be the absolute sweet spot.
That Intel drive is a solid choice—honestly, you’re probably not going to find anything better since the selection of mSATA SSDs here in the States is pretty thin and they tend to be overpriced as hell.
Why are you even stressing about it not having HDMI? Honestly, the only real perk HDMI has over DVI is passing audio—everything else is basically a wash. If you’re dead set on needing an HDMI port, then just grab this Dell instead.
If you decide to go with the NVIDIA GTX 970—honestly, maybe look for that slightly pricier EVGA GeForce RTX model instead—you could probably get away with a more budget-friendly power supply, something like a Corsair RM550. Since newer cards don't pull nearly as much juice as they used to, you won't have to sweat the upgrade path later on. If you do that, I’d say take those savings and bump up your storage capacity—maybe grab a 240GB Samsung SSD instead—since cutting back on the PSU and GPU should balance out the total cost perfectly.
Just ask them to pull it from another branch and hang tight for a few days. Honestly, that Alpine isn't going to cut it for FX unless you kill the turbo and dial back the voltage a bit.
What kind of power supply are you running—brand, model, wattage? I’m guessing it isn't some bottom-of-the-barrel junk since you're already rocking a GTX 460, but let's double-check just to be safe.
With that CPU, an R9 270 would probably be your sweet spot—anything beefier than that might require a bit more overclocking headroom.
:To looks like a $1037 to me. All in all, they totally trashed it—threw in some cheap motherboard, an aftermarket cooler that's basically a zero out of ten (I mean, you need it for that processor, but even without overclocking it'll hold up fine in an ENIAC), and the power supply is just straight-up garbage.
Man, I totally missed where he mentioned his max budget—my bad! So, I figured I’d just put together a rough idea of what we could do.
Something along these lines with an fx 8300/8320 E and a GIGA 970A-DS3P would fit right into that budget (around $1733). Or, you know, we could just stick with that build you and Kimberly Gomez34 already suggested.