AMD Kaveri APU gaming PC for under £500

AMD have recently come out with their new Kaveri APU which allows for more budget builds to be made more easily. So I decided to go ahead and try and put together a rig using this new APU which would be great for gaming at a low price point.

In this guide I will go through each part I picked giving a brief description of the part and the rationale as to why I have picked it.

As this is a AMD Kaveri APU gaming PC build guide I have to go with a Kaveri APU and I went with the AMD A-10 7850k 3.7Ghz quad-core processor. For those of you do not know an APU is basically a processor that combines both a CPU and a GPU into a single processor. While this may not give you the best performance in the latest titles on the highest settings however it is definitely a great choice for a budget rig. This APU on its own will give you pretty good FPS at low settings on most of the latest titles and reasonable FPS on medium settings at 1080p. What makes using this Kaveri APU even better is that it can be combined with AMD's Mantle API which will further help improve performance in games which have Mantle enabled. Unfortunately at the moment Mantle is only being used on a few games including Thief and Battlefield 4 but hopefully developers will start using it more fore future titles.
£119.99

So next is the motherboard. For this build I have decided to go for a Mini ITX form factor. I have chosen to use this form factor because it is a convenient size and if you are doing budget build you are likely not to need more than one PCI expansion slots, Mini ITX only has one, and you will not be using too much RAM either as it can get expensive. So as I decided to use Mini ITX I went with the ASRock FM2A88X-ITX. This is a great little board for the price which comes with many important features. The most important of these is the fact that it supports overclocking. Overclocking your APU is a must I feel if your are going to use this platform as it does give a relatively large performance increase for not doing that much. Do not worry though, if you are not comfortable with overclocking then this board offers ASRock's X-Boost which automatically overclocks your APU for you and gets you up to a 15.77% performance boost according to their website. It also makes manual overclocking easier by using their intuitive UEFI BIOS making it simple to navigate the BIOS and use it in general.
£73.22

For the RAM according to AMD the sweet spot for the amount of RAM to use is 8GB, unless you are doing content creation, as you will not use more than that. It has also been proven that using higher clocked memory does give you a performance increase. So for this reason I went with G.Skill Trident X Series 8GB (4GBx2) DDR3-2400 memory. As you can probably guess from the name of this memory it is clocked at 2400MHz which is one of the reasons that I went for it as it gives great performance in conjunction with the APU, it is also 8GB. I went with G.Skills memory because it is very reliable and a very good brand in general. Overall this means that the memory is reasonably priced while still being very good quality and increasing your performance in games.
£64.49
 
Now an optional upgrade for this rig is a GPU. With Kaveri there a number of GPUs which can be ran in dual graphics mode which means that you will be running the GPU part of the APU in crossfire with the dedicated GPU. One of the GPUs that can be run in dual graphics mode is the R7 250 cards. I went with the non-reference Gigabyte Radeon R7 250 2GB Video Card. The main reason I went with this card is because it is still cheap while giving you 2GB of VRAM on the card which will help you deal with the latest titles and it has a good aftermarket cooler meaning that you can overclock it to get as much performance as you can out of rig. Putting a graphics card in dual graphics with the APU will give you a good increase in performance in all games and will allow you to up the graphics in most games to at least medium while achieving good frame rates.
£71.49
 
The case for this one was a relatively easy choice. When making a Mini ITX rig on a tight budget I would only ever go for the Fractal Design Core 1000. At this price I do not think you will find a better case. As it is Fractal case you know you are going to be getting a reasonably high quality case at least and although it may have not have all the features of their more expensive cases it definitely does the job while looking half decent in my opinion.
£34.98
 
For the power supply again I felt that there was only one choice. Even in a budget rig you should never go cheap on a power supply as it can break your whole rig so always go with a well known brand. I went with the Seasonic SS-400ET Bronze. The power supply is obviously non-modular at this price, the cables are not sleeved and the casing is plain but it has the 80+ certification which means that you know that you are getting a good quality power supply for your money.
£34.08
 
Of course you are going to want to have some storage for your rig and at this price point I would not recommend an SSD, the money can be spent better else where in the rig to improve it. I went with the Western Digital Cavier Blue 1TB. A Western Digital Blue hard drives have "solid performance and reliability for everyday computing" according the Western Digital  website which makes it perfect for this rig.
£42.99


Lastly as I stated before I think it is important that you overclock your system and if you are not going to bother then you might as well go for a cheaper motherboard but if you are going to overclock you need to make sure that you have a decent CPU cooler. For this I decided to go with Cooler Master Hyper T4. This is because the price point is very good, it cools pretty well for the price, and it comes out the box ready to use for AMD rather than Intel which makes it that little bit easier.
£20.82

One of the main things that you have probably noticed by now that I am missing is an OS. In a budget build such as this you are trying to save money wherever you can and I think one way that you can save a lot of money is by using a Linux based OS rather Windows. Granted for now the game support is not as good as Windows but with Steam OS being in the works the support for Linux is increasing so I think it is viable option. If you cannot live without Windows and want to stay around the £450 mark then you can always scrap the GPU, which is optional a pick up a copy of Windows 7 for around £70.

This build costs £462.62 which may be a little bit over the price of a Xbox One or PS4 but for the extra £100 you are getting a fully functioning PC, most likely better graphics, and the main thing I would say is the use of Steam. This is a huge influencer in my opinion because if you shop smartly on Steam then you can get some absolute bargains by using their sales. If you want the pcpartpicker then follow that link, some of the items are missing as they are not available for some reason.

Hope you found this useful and if you enjoyed make sure you check out my twitter and give me a follow so you can be updated whenever I post.

Project Ara. What is it?

Many of you may not know what Project Ara is or even heard about it, but I feel that it is something everyone should know about as it could/probably will revolutionize the mobile industry.

Project Ara is an attempt by Google to make the worlds first modular smart phone. The idea of the project is to create a phone that can be completely customized with parts that can be swapped out whenever you want. Now this may seem like something that could be quite complicated to use but it should not be at all if Google achieves what they are aiming to do.

The idea for Project Ara came from a man called Dave Hakkens. Dave Hakkens originally came up with the concept of Phonebloks in 2013 and gained a lot of attention on the internet which was what it needed as he basically trying to crowd fund it without a site like Kickstarter.  Motorola Mobility initially expressed interest in the idea and eventually got Hakkens to work for them and help build the phone. Google had acquired Motorola Mobility in August 2011 so that meant that Hakkens was working for Google really. Google then sold Motorola Mobility at the end of January this year but part of the deal was that held onto what is now called Project Ara; this has meant that Project Ara is still very much based on the Phonebloks concept.

So the basis of this phone which you will have to buy originally from Google is being referred to as a "Grey Phone". This will be the very basic core of the phone with other very important things such as the processor, screen, and camera being modular tiles which you would have to add. This means that you can make this phone as expensive or as cheap as you want. This makes the phone open to so many different markets which is Google's aim, they want it accessible to 6 billion people. So if you were someone living in poverty in a third world nation this phone would still be accessible to you as you could buy the Grey Phone and then just the basics modules to make it run such as the low end processor, screen, and battery which would make it incredibly cheap. Over time then if you have saved up some money you could then add a camera module or upgrade the processor. Then on the other hand if you millionaire living in Dubai you can get the Grey Phone and then deck it out with the best modules available such as the fastest processor, 4k screen, best camera, and all of the other things available. This would mean that your phone could last much longer than the normal 18 or 24 months as you could just keep on upgrading parts to make it more relevant to the technology at the time.

The idea is that the Grey Phone will come in 3 different sizes, small, medium, and large making it even more customizable and the goal is to make the Grey Phone cost just $50 and so after you have bought the most basic modules just to make it run it will cost much less the cheapest smart phone around now.

Of course a problem like this is going to have many issues during development and there have been and there will be many more.

Many of you after reading maybe asking, "When can we get one?". Well the team behind Project Ara has said that their goal is to have the first model released by January 2015 which is not that far away really. But I think it is unlikely that it will be released then as the alpha is going to be released to a select few, much the same as Google Glass and that has not had it's full release yet.

If you enjoyed this and helped you understand what Project Ara go check out my Twitter and follow me so you know whenever I post a new post.

TRN's Weekly Review, CES 2014 Highlights

Seeing as over the past week CES 2014 has been going on in Las Vegas I though that I would make this weeks weekly review a CES special and share with you what I thought the highlights of 2014 were. While I was not able to attend CES 2014, I have been following it and have found some it very it interesting while most of it not very interesting.
While there was a lot of focus on new 4k televisions with curved and bendable displays this year at CES 2014 this was not the most interesting thing to do with 4k that came out of CES for me. There has been much speculation saying that Nvidia's G-Sync will only be compatible with 1080p TN panels which disappointed a lot of people; however, this was certainly proved untrue by Nvidia as they had a Asus 4k display with a G-Sync module attached running a real world scenario in a game. This is certainly good news for both monitor and gaming enthusiasts a like in the near future they could be seeing the beauty that is 4k combined with G-Sync which will mean no screen tearing along with all of the other benefits of G-Sync. At the demo you were actually able to switch between using G-Sync, V-sync, or neither and the difference was apparently remarkable; with V-Sync there was no screen tearing but big drops in frame rate, with nothing on there was large screen tearing and drops in frame rate, but with G-Sync there was no screen tearing and the frame rate remained at 60 fps throughout.  

Carrying on with PC related things revealed at CES Corsair released a few new interesting things including some new cases. The most interesting was the 760T. The most interesting thing about this case was full acrylic side panel window to really show off your set up and the hardware that you have inside of your rig. The chassis of the case is based upon the 750D, which in itself was a great case, and it maintains almost all of the 750D features. This means that it can be used for a fully custom water loop as it supports a 360mm rad in the top, 240mm rad in the front, and then 120mm rads in the bottom and back. If you are not a fan of that full acrylic window then you can buy the 730T case which is the same but without the window. I think this is a really good looking case with lots of potential for water cooling as well as many things.

One of the more funny things to happen at CES was Michael Bay going off stage mid-way through the Samsung TV presentation. Samsung probably thought that they had hit the jackpot when they got Michael Bay to endorse their new televisions at CES but boy were they wrong. After a Teleprompter fail mid way during his speech Michael Bay said that he would "wing it". Well after a few awkward silences Michael Bay clearly could not take any more of it and walked off stage apologising. I personally think that this was rather amusing but did not look good on Samsung's behalf.

The main focus on CES, alongside with televisions, was were able technology. The amount of coverage that I have seen on Smart Watches, fitness bands, and smart bands was ridiculous so I just talk about one of them, the Pebble Steel Watch. The Pebble Steel has changed the aesthetics completely of the original Pebble and also changed some of the hardware, for example the old Pebble charge will not work with the new Pebble. The main thing about the Pebble Steel is that it is made out of stainless steel. This lends itself to more formal wear than the original Pebble but I personally am not a fan of the new aesthetic.

As a PC enthusiast the most exciting thing to come out of CES 2014 was Project Christine. This Razer's attempt at a fully modular PC. It is nowhere near being complete but what we have seen so far looks amazing. They have a wonderful industrial design going on with many different modules over the whole case, if you can call it a case. One of the most amazing things about it is that it completely oil cooled which makes it incredibly quiet. Because it is oil cooled no fans are required meaning that it can be so quiet. If this were to come to market it will allow so many more people to get into upgrading their PC who had not before because they were too afraid to open their PC. I personally think that this is an amazing idea but will not be with us for a few years unfortunately.

Thank you for reading my highlights of CES 2014, I hope you enjoyed it and if you did please share it on Facebook and Twitter and if you want follow me on Twitter here:
https://twitter.com/TechRandN

Steam Mover, how to move steam games and programs to a secondary drive

If you follow me on Twitter you will know that I recently got a new SSD. One of the main problems of getting a new SSD is that in order to get the programs you want from your old HDD to your new SSD then you have to uninstall them and re-install them on your new drive, this can be a huge pain if your moving steam games that are very large files. I was actaully going the other way, moving programs and games from my new SSD to my old HDD; this is because I cloned my HDD onto my SSD using the Samsung software which meant that I had many unwanted programs on my SSD making it almost full.
This is where Steam Mover comes into the equation. As you can probably tell from the name of the app its intended use is to move steam games from their original file location to a new file location but it can be used on any program you want. This is effortless and the makers of this program deserve a round of applause. If you want to download the program follow this link:
http://download.cnet.com/Steam-Mover/3000-2248_4-75764205.html
Once it has downloaded locate where it downloaded to and open it up and double click on the steam mover.exe:

When you double click on it the program will open up, I suggest you make a short cut to your desktop so you do not have to find it each time. When you first open the default file location you will be looking at folder where all of your steam games are by default and it should look like this with all of the games that you have downloaded:

To find the program that you want to move just click on the first three little dots thing (the circled one):

It will then come up with this and locate where the programs are you want to move and select the folder that they are in:

Then click on the second three dots to locate where you want to put it. Once you have selected where you want to move it to, then click on the file so that it is highlighted:

Then click the blue arrow pointing to the right in the bottom right hand corner and it will come up with this command window:

When the command window closes the process is done the command window will close and the program will have changed file location. The whole process is pretty quick considering the size of the files. It is possible to undo the change in file location if you moved it to the wrong place by clicking the blue arrow pointing to the left:

Notice that there will still be a file in the original file location but this is just a short cut to the new file location.
If this helped you remember to share it and follow me on Twitter:
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TRN's Weekly Review, NSA developing a code-cracking Quantum computer

Hello and welcome to the second edition of my weekly review of technology news. Today I am writing about: the latest cryptocurrency "Coinye West", League of Legends has been hit by hackers, Facebook has been sued, Nasa have been using Oculus Rift and the Xbox Kinect, and the NSA are developing a code-cracking Quantum computer.

Ok so the first piece of news this week that amused me was the latest cryptocurrency "Coinye West", as you can probably guess this is a Kanye West based cryptocurrency. If you go to coinyewest.com you will be taken to there website where there is a countdown to when you can start mining this coin as well as some other information. However, despite being named after him, Kanye West actually has no affiliation with the cryptocurrency. This made my weekly review this week is because, for me, it epitomises how ridiculous this whole cryptocurrency thing has gotten. There are so many new different currencies to mine now that it has become stupid. There have been a lot of new cryptocurrencies hitting the market over the last few months since Bitcoin went big but they have not got as much publicity as this but still have been mined heavily. People have been taking these new currencies as a kind of get rich quick scheme. This is because if you mine early on in a cryptocurrency's life then it is much easier to mine and so you get more coins of the currency but as more coins are mined the difficulty increases and so you are less likely to find coins. This means that if the price of the currency does go up later on it in its life time there is the possibility that you could earn a lot of money. This happened for people who caught on early with Bitcoin back in 2009 when it launched but it is becoming less and less likely now that these currencies values are going to go up as much Bitcoin did as there are so many of them.


So the second piece of news this week is gaming related. The very popular on line game League of Legends was targeted by the hacker group Derp. Derp began the attack on Monday by DDOSing US and European servers to get them offline and then later on they did the same to the Asian servers with the same result. One popular League of Legends player PhantomL0rd was documenting the attack on daily Twitch stream and this led Derp to begin to target him. This eventually led to the hacker group to follow him to every game he tried to play and take their servers down. This meant that EA, Blizzard, Battlenet, DOTA 2, Quake Live, Club Penguin, and Reddit all had problems. Also PhantomL0rd's personal details were leaked onto the internet which then led to someone prank calling the police and saying that there were hostages being held at PhantomL0rds house. I think some of what they did went too far, such as releasing personal details onto the internet and causing problems with lots of websites rather than specifically targeting one website/game. However, I do find it amazing that one hacker group can cause this amount of issues.

So Facebook has got itself in trouble this week. They have been sued over allegedly sharing the content of private messages with advertisers and marketers. Apparently as people have been sending messages which includes links to websites, Facebook has been scanning the content of the message, following the link and looks for information so that they can get an idea of the message senders internet activity. This is very useful information for advertisers as they can provide adverts to that user that they are more likely to click on and buy things from. This violates the Electronic Communications  Privacy Act and California Privacy. The people who are accusing Facebook of this are trying to get Facebook to stop doing this and they are looking for as much as $10,000 in damages for each user who has been affected so you could be coming into some money soon. This is another example of how out of control the internet has got in recent years with pretty much all of the big companies spying on us or selling our personal information to advertising companies.

The penultimate piece of news is quite an exciting piece of news I think. NASA have been using the Oculus Rift and the Xbox Kinect to control a robot arm. You can see a video of it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqNC72fgetc
NASA has been using these two pieces of technology to control a robot arm called JACO in real time. NASA say that it works by using the position tracking of the Kinect and rotational tracking of the Oculus to create a first person view for the user. Once it has been set up the user can do simple tasks with the robot arm. If this is successful it could have huge implications for NASA and space exploration in general as we could use the technology to operate things like the Curiosity Rover more accurately and be able to pick up things of interest. The immediate implications of the tests being successful would be using the technology on the Robonaut 2 humanoid on the International Space Station.

My final piece of news is the most interesting and shocking in my opinion. Edward Snowden has been at it again leaking more information about the NSA, this time saying that they are developing a quantum computer which will break the encryption which makes messages secure. It is believed that the NSA has spent $79.7 million on it but that they have not got a working machine yet. Once working the computer would be used to break encryption systems used on line and by foreign governments to send private messages and keep them secure. There have been many revelations about the NSA over the last year and many of them have been shocking, this is another one of those. Once again they are going too far and in my opinion America is becoming less of free country because the NSA is spying on everyone.

Well that is the news for this week, I hope you have enjoyed and if you have remember to share it on Twitter and Facebook and follow me here:
https://twitter.com/TechRandN.