My advice:

1) I would grab a small SSD for windows (60-100gb) just the cheapest you can find (this is your windows drive).
Then a regular or hybrid drive at 500gb-1tb (this is where you keep all your installed games on ect).

2) Id probably save a few $ and get a i5-6400/i5-6500 instead.

3) I wouldnt buy super expensive ram, get the cheapest ones rated at the values you need.
If you dont need 2666mhz dont buy them. The gain in performance is so damn small, and sometimes the differnce in ram prices are pretty big.

4) Sound card? why? the onboard ones usually so good you wont be able to spot any differnce between them and the discrete sound cards you can buy for pci. Its a waste of money imo.


5) Make sure the power supply is a high rated one, its one of those components you really shouldnt be cheap on.

6) Its convient the RX 480 is soon out, Id get one of those to go with this PC your building.
Their supposed to be really good value.

If your looking at keeping it under 700£ that shouldnt be a issue.

Its alot of money and as long as you spend it wisely you can build a pretty darn good PC outta it.

(hint : skip the sound card, use the onboard, go small&cheap on the SSD, and ram)

OK, taking on board what you've both said, the changes I've made are:

Switch to a cheaper motherboard and stick with DDR3 RAM,

Switch to 120gb SSD (I've got a 3TB external too already).

I won't bother with a GPU for a long time if ever, and I shouldn't have included the soundcard here, it's the onboard option anyway, can't take it off.

What do you guys think about the power supply?

At the moment it's a Corsair 550W to future proof if I do ever decide to put a modest GPU in, is that overkill too?

With the current setup 350W is fine, but I assume adding any GPU would push that over, 450W is also an option.

I bought my PC from a business on ebay called FreshTech. I think maybe it'd be a much better fit for you and save you a lot of money compared to using pcspecialist.

The link below is for a PC that's only £420 so much cheaper than you were going to pay, It has the same CPU and 16gb of ram still (slower ram but you'll not notice any difference), it comes with a 1TB hardrive so if you wanted a more responsive operating system you'd have to buy an SSD, but then you have the 1TB still for storing additional files and freeing up much needed space on the SSD o/. It doesn't come with an os.

So basically £420 for this machine, add a 240gb SSD it'll cost you £470 total, just as good as the machine above and an extra terabyte of storage, and just like the PC above just add a GPU and it's ready for anything gaming!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Skylake-6600-Quad-Core-Fast-Office-Home-Multimedia-Pc-Computer-1Tb-16Gb-703-/371533851767?hash=item568124ac77:g:Zx8AAOSwqrtWo6gt

Thank you for the link, I'm definitely going to make changes to it, can you read what I said in my last multi quote. With those changes it brings the price down to £534.

That's with a 350W power supply, I think I might as well go for 550W as it'll make the total £556 and it will make sure there are no issues if I ever add a GPU.

Yes 550watts is enough.

With that you can easily run your CPU and a GPU like the RX 480, which would make it a very capable gameing pc.

DDR4 isnt really that big of a thing (for gameing atleast).

120gb is more than plenty for windows, just make it a point to always install games on your other HDD, ei makes "games" folder and install things there.

"I won't bother with a GPU for a long time if ever"

Downgrade your CPU (like to a i5-6400) / motherboard or ram costs abit and get a graphics card.

Haveing the option to play games on your PC is a nice added bonus ontop of just haveing a pc.

In like 5days the RX 480 is launching I think, should consider adding in one of those.

I'd probably have it dual booted with Linux and Linux as the primary partition, so something like 80/40 split. Can you install games on an external HDD? Sorry if noob question.

450W is plenty for any current and future GPU. If you plan to buy midrange like a 1060 or RX 470, 350 would be fine as well.

Like Vivster said a h110 motherboard will do you fine, and you should be ok with DDR3 ram. You could probably drop to a single stick of 8gb ram instead of getting 16gb, I doubt you will need 16gb for anything you are doing, but incase you find you do, it's simple enough to just grab another stick, if you most likely find 8gb is more than sufficient for you then you've saved some cash.

As for the power supply the 550w is probably overkill for your needs, a 400w power supply will handle the PC even after shoving a GTX1070 in it, which isn't a modest gpu. the main thing is to get a good brand PSU, the cheaper ones can be noisy as hell. A Corsair Builder 430w would suit your needs nicely, but yeah 400w is enough.

OK, I'll go for 450W, meet in the middle :). My build now costs £546, so over £100 cheaper than before. Thanks everyone I think I'll go for that :)

Yes ofc you can (you ll have to have it plugged in though, everytime you want to game).

Even those damn Apps can be installed other places than your main drive (incase you wanna get some windows store games).

Its really not a issue at all.

However external Drives can be slow at moveing data around. Its why most people just get internal ones (for stuff like gameing).

Is your external drive a USB 3.0 drive? that would help abit.

Otherwise Id just recammend you get a small extra 500gb internal HDD instead, theyre pretty cheap.