£600 Budget (Upgrade)

[Deleted]

Just looking to upgrade my current rig by replacing my Motherboard, CPU, Graphics Card and RAM. I have no need for anything else, just those 4 components.

My budget is around the £600 mark and it will primarily be used for gaming. I will also be overclocking my CPU using my current cooler 212 Evo.

After having a quick look around this is what I've come up with so far but not 100% sure this is the best bang for buck and would like someone with a little more knowledge to lend me a helping hand.

XFX Radeon R9 280X DD Black Edition 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (R9-280X-TDBD)
Intel Core i5-4690K 3.50GHz (Devil's Canyon) Socket LGA1150 Processor - OEM
Asus Z97-Pro Intel Z97 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9)

[Hyve]

I'm certainly not a computer expert, it's been a while since I got involved in building my own and some of these names are really foreign to me, but two things always come to mind with computers.

1) Be smart with your RAM. RAM isn't the be all and end all of computers, but it is a huge benefit to have enough of it. 8GB really isn't seen as the standard today, looking at all the pre-built gaming computers you can find online, they all come with 16GB minimum, so definitely look into squeezing a little more in there if you can.

2) Invest in a good CPU. A lot of games are making more and more use of Parallel Programming, essentially meaning the better your CPU, the better the games should run. If you're mostly looking to play World of Warcraft, then the CPU is really the biggest bottleneck to performance, more so then RAM or almost anything else.

Again; I'm not an expert on these matters but I know enough to get by. £600 for an upgrade seems a little excessive when you could probably save for a little longer and just rebuild your whole machine, get a nice SSD to go with it and such.

[Deleted]

I'm certainly not a computer expert, it's been a while since I got involved in building my own and some of these names are really foreign to me, but two things always come to mind with computers.

1) Be smart with your RAM. RAM isn't the be all and end all of computers, but it is a huge benefit to have enough of it. 8GB really isn't seen as the standard today, looking at all the pre-built gaming computers you can find online, they all come with 16GB minimum, so definitely look into squeezing a little more in there if you can.

2) Invest in a good CPU. A lot of games are making more and more use of Parallel Programming, essentially meaning the better your CPU, the better the games should run. If you're mostly looking to play World of Warcraft, then the CPU is really the biggest bottleneck to performance, more so then RAM or almost anything else.

Again; I'm not an expert on these matters but I know enough to get by. £600 for an upgrade seems a little excessive when you could probably save for a little longer and just rebuild your whole machine, get a nice SSD to go with it and such.

Thanks for the suggestions. 16GB seems a bit overkill for a gaming only machine. I also already have a SSD along with a good power supply so all I really need is the mobo, gpu, cpu and ram.

[Deleted]

Try this out for size:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor (£163.00 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI Z97-G45 Gaming ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£89.96 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LP 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-2133 Memory (£66.96 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: XFX Radeon R9 290 4GB Black Edition Double Dissipation Video Card (£279.59 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Total: £599.51
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-08-09 23:19 BST+0100

[BicycleMafioso]

Thanks for the suggestions. 16GB seems a bit overkill for a gaming only machine. I also already have a SSD along with a good power supply so all I really need is the mobo, gpu, cpu and ram.

16 GiB is definitely overkill, 8GiB is quite plenty; 4GiB was more than enough up and into 2012. Not that much has changed since, 8GiB is a good spot to land.
I think tenangrychickens recommendations are sound and have nothing to add beyond that.