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.