Friend needs help parting together a pc

[Jake_25]

My friend needs help parting together a pc but his budget is low 400 to 500

 

[Severend]

What does he want to do with said PC? 400-500 for a gaming pc from ground up is prolly not going to happen.

 

[Jake_25]

He just wants to play modern games

 

[pillar]

Tell your friend to either save up or consider getting himself a desktop from Walmart. A decent gaming rig will set you back around $500-700, depending on the parts that you get. Mind you that with that price range, the graphics will be good for a minimum of 2 years.
CPU chips change every year.
Motherboards change every half year (if that).
Memory changes every 2-3 years (why I love memory).
Video cards change every year.
When it comes to power supplies, just gotta find the right specs for a real good price. When it comes to shopping, it depends on where you guys are from. If you live here in USA, we highly recommend Newegg for their free shipping offers. In Canada, ive heard of a few sites including the Canadian version of Newegg. When it comes to overseas, other guys can chime in on that.

Overall, if your friend wants a great gaming machine on the cheap, just simply tell him to be patient & continue to save $$. Nothing is worse than setting yourself up for cheapness.

 

[Severend]

He just wants to play modern games

That ranges a lot in what specs you want from a comp. A game like BF3 takes a pretty beast computer to run smoothly. So if he is looking for something that will play that then i fully agree with Pillar he will need to save some more bucks.

 

[sil3nced]

I completely disagree, with that budget as long as some other parts are not needed such as a new monitor a decent rig could be put together in that budget more than likely a AMD rig but either way its possible.

 

[Grimmaz]

That's a pretty low budget for a gaming rig. You're going to do a lot of "settling" with that price range. I wouldn't expect to build a good rig with that sort of budget even if you're just looking at putting a tower together with nothing else. I just shopped and built a computer for a customer of mine and the budget of $700 for a nice gaming rig was rough. Do not forget you will need to buy the operating system if you plan to build it yourself and the OEM version of Win 7 Pro is $140.00 so now you're looking at even less money for hardware. Like I said before, good luck with that budget.

 

[Jake_25]

Ill talk to him about his budget

 

[mobomelter]

In times of need I always turn to reddit.

Start with this.

Then once you get a build go to reddit.com/r/buildapc and have them critique it. They are super helpful and will steer you away from buying parts you'd regret.