The road to good value starts here
When you're putting together a system, there's a trick to finding the best bargains. Shopping around can save you a little bit of money -maybe a quid here, two quid there - but if you want to get the most power for your pound, the trick is simple: side-step the hardware arms race of getting your hands on the latest, fastest components and instead look for products that are in the pricing sweet spot. The place where the trade-off between age, price and power reaches its optimum point.
Hardware that isn't brand new but is instead towards the middle of its life-cycle is often heavily discounted, while retaining competitive performance, so you save a lot of money and get a system that's still above average. Of course, this doesn't apply to every type of product. Sometimes the best value products genuinely are the newest or the most expensive. So to help you find the best bargains for your system, we've combed the market and compiled the information into this - our guide to buying PC components that have hit the pricing sweet spot.
CPUs
Although AMD chips are good for building low-end systems thanks to their high-quality integrated GPUs, few would deny that it's Intel that triumphs on price-to-performance ranges. Since it's tough to evaluate both CPU and GPU performance, you'll have to trust us when we say that if you're looking to get the best performance out of your money, it's an Intel chip you need.
Intel CPUs are best suited for use in midlevel to high-end systems, which need great single-threaded performance, so things like HD media playback, gaming and image processing. While Pentium and Celeron chips are less powerful and therefore cheaper, they're also quite expensive in performance terms. If money is a huge worry, your best option would be to buy a Core i3 chip, which is significantly more powerful than Pentiums and Celerons (but better value), or a Kaveri-based AMD APU, which will at least give you the ability to save money on a graphics card.
But if you're assembling a system from scratch and looking for the best value performance, stick with Intel. It makes most sense to go for the most recent generation of chips, because CPUs don't lose a lot of value as they age. Having an older chip and motherboard is only going to limit your potential for making future upgrades. For Intel, that currently means buying a Haswell chip and ideally one from the Devil's Canyon refresh.
It's also worth looking for a K-series chip. The main advantage is that they can be overclocked, which means you can potentially get significantly better value out of your purchase. If that's what you're looking for, then it's a good idea to go for the latest, fastest chip in the Core i5 line regardless of whether you want faster, because they already run as well as a Core i7 chip even before they're overclocked. In any case. Core i7 chips cost a significant premium, so the performance you get per pound starts to drop sharply once you get out of the Core i5 line.
That said, if you're definitely not planning to overclock your chip, you can save around a tenner by going for the locked version (it'll have the same model number but without the К suffix), and it's probably worth doing that; the only reason to buy a К-series chip is their overclocking potential, and if you know you won't exploit it, don't waste your money.
Recommended Intel CPU:
If you're buying a new Intel chip, there's only one real choice: the quad-core, Haswell/Devil's Canyon-based Intel Core i5-4690K, which has a 3.5GHz base rate that's 100MHz faster than Intel's previous best i5 (the 4670K). This translates to better singlecore performance and slightly better value than the older chip, and both are way ahead of the next cheapest, the i5-4460. The on-board Intel HD Graphics 4600 graphics are relatively weak, so if you're buying it for a gaming or media-editing system, you'll want a proper graphics card in there, but it's far from mandatory. All things said, you’ll pay about £185, but the cheapest Haswell i7 is a full £50 more despite being no better for the majority of home usage.
Motherboard
When it comes to motherboards, there's a wealth of choice available. For that reason, we should work backwards for the choice of CPU. We've established that the best value chips are Haswell, because they give you the best performance and the best upgrade path, and we've also established that the best value Haswell chip is the one you can overclock. Therefore, you need a Haswell motherboard that can be overclocked. And that all narrows down to two choices of motherboard chipset: the Z87 or the newer Z97, both of which support full CPU, GPU and RAM overclocking.
As its designation suggests, the Z97 is an upgrade to the Z87. Although Devil's Canyon chips are only slightly better than original Haswell chips, the newer motherboard platform has one significant difference: it'll support Broadwell chips when they come to market. That's crucial for keeping your upgrade path intact, and that's why we have to recommend the Z97 over the Z87: for a small premium, you get a year's extra usage.
Additional features of the Z97 include support for SATA Express and M.2 SSDs, both of which will greatly increase maximum throughput for SSDs, so it's not all about the chip you put into it. Once you've selected the chipset, you could go crazy trying to pick the right board that uses it, but the reality is that they're all broadly the same. Some variation in features is inevitable between manufacturers, but as long as you have a decent number of expansion slots and USB ports, that'll be most users catered for. The only feature that might sway you is on-board Bluetooth connectivity. Even Wireless AC is rare enough that you'll probably want to buy a separate card rather than pay for it on board.
As a final note, if you don't plan to overclock, then you can save money by going for an H97 board, which has broadly the same features but doesn't support overclocking. You can save about £20 but, of course, if you have a chip that can be overclocked, the cost in performance terms is potentially much higher.
Recommended Motherboard:
We can't, in good conscience, recommend a motherboard for a mid-level PC that costs more than £100, so while Asus's Z97-K board doesn't showcase all the chipset's features, it is the one we'd go for. The biggest omission is that it's not SLI compatible because the secondary PCI-E slot is only 4x speed. To get support for SLI you'll need to pay another £50-£75 at least, though, and that's for a feature that the majority of PC users will never use. Unlike cheaper boards, this one has four RAM slots, and by contrast that is worth paying for in case you ever want to add more memory without replacing your existing set. There's also no wi-fi, but when you can buy a wireless card for £20 or less, it's not worth worrying about; it's almost always more expensive to get a motherboard with on-board wi-fi than it is to buy separately.
RAM
In many ways, choosing the best RAM involves a lot of splitting hairs. As long as you have the capacity (you want at least 8GB), then most of the time you're measuring performance improvements in microseconds, and let's face it, when you're not trying to build a superfast gaming rig, those microseconds don't really matter.
There are some recommendations worth making, though. You should, for example, look for a pair of modules rather than a single one. For reasons too technically involved to be worth explaining here, the performance is better on a dual module pairings. For Intel Core i5 CPUs, you should buy modules clocked at speeds of at least 1600MHz, although 1866MHz is worth buying if you have the necessary support from both your motherboard and chip. Faster RAM isn't completely pointless, but it's also expensive and again doesn't come into play except in a very limited number of cases. Indeed, RAM above 2000MHz can actually impede overclocking performance on your CPU.
Other than those factors, your main interest when looking for RAM is the quality of the memory itself. As long as you buy branded RAM, you shouldn't have a problem, and if you're planning to overclock, then get something with a decent heat-spreader,just to minimise any risks. It's rare that RAM gets so hot that it's negatively affected by the temperature, but a heat spreader will ensure the temperature is always low and minimise wear on the components.
Recommended RAM:
If you're running a Haswell system, you should look for RAM that runs at 1.5V. Modules that require 1.65V will still work, but you may have to manually change the voltage settings in your system's BIOS to get optimum performance. For no particular reason other than they look quite cool and are made by a company with a good reputation, we've picked the Corsair Vengeance 8GB kit, which costs £60 - though, £10 either way will get you RAM just as good from any other manufacturer. Unless you have specialist needs and are willing to pay specialist prices, this kit is going to meet all your needs and then some.
Hard Drive (Mechanical)
The type of storage you go for in a system currently depends heavily on whether you're aiming for capacity or performance. That said, no matter how fast SSDs are, usably sized models are still incredibly expensive, even at the low end of the market.
With that in mind, we think mechanical hard drives are still the first port of call for anyone building the best value system. In theory, to find the hard drive that gets you the best deal, all you have to do is divide capacity by price to see which gives you the most gigabytes per pound, then buy that one.
The problem with doing this is that the 'sweet spot' for hard drives is currently somewhere around the 3TB mark, which means you get about 35GB for every pound you spend. This compares favourably to 4TB drives (34GB per pound), 2TB drives (33GB per pound) and 1TB drives (23GB per pound). But however you slice it, 3TB is a ludicrously huge amount of space to put in a general use PC. It's fine for NAS enclosures or media servers, but for home use it's pretty excessive.
The economics are clear: the bigger the drive you get, the better value each one is until you get beyond 3TB. But is buying space you don't need a way to get good value? A 1TB drive is probably enough for most people, but it's also quite bad value. We suggest you split the difference and buy a 2TB drive. That way, you can keep the amount of money you spend quite low while making sure you get a good deal on it. The capacity on a 2TB drive is only about 5% more expensive than a 3TB drive, but the drive itself is a third cheaper, so ultimately, the economy works out.
Recommend Model:
There's very little variation in the mechanical drive market at this point, but Seagate's Barracuda drives are hugely reliable, and with 2TB of space to fill, the drive will probably wear out before you run out of storage - unless you're a movie-lover who can't stand Netflix. If that's the case, £20 extra will get you another terabyte of storage on top of that, but as we've just explained, we think it makes more sense to hang onto the money. You could equally buy a 2TB drive from Toshiba or Western Digital, though. As long as it's 7200prm and has a SATA-3 connection, it's all good.
Solid-state Drive
If you do want an SSD in your new system or want to add one to an existing PC, we can't really blame you. SSDs are the fastest storage method you can buy, and it seems like there's a new, more efficient, more capacious model out every other month or so.
And while SSDs are expensive, they do add extra value beyond storage - by removing the bottlenecks caused by mechanical drive access, they speed up your system on multiple levels. It's undeniably problematic for midrange buyers that the prices are sky-high, but that is improving, and if you want to get the most out of your money, then that doesn't necessarily mean getting the best capacity; it also means getting the upgrades faster storage brings with it.
As with hard drives, the most expensive SSDs in terms of gigabytes per pound are actually at the smaller end of the spectrum. The cheapest 32GB drives cost around £30 - essentially £1 per GB - while even 64GB drives cost as much as 50p per GB. The current sweet spot for SSDs is around 256GB, which average around 28p per GB, so start your search there. 480GB drives cost about 31 p per GB so they're also quite good value if you want the extra capacity, but 960GB drives all creep back over the 40p per GB line, so avoid those.
Feature-wise, there's really nothing else to look for. Make sure you don't buy enterprise hardware, which may be optimised for multi-user reads and have wildly asymmetric speeds, and don't be fooled by the speeds quoted on different units, since they bear little resemblance to practical use.
Recommended SSD:
It has to be the Samsung 850 EVO, the 250GB model of which costs just £85. Samsung's SSDs have consistently impressed everyone, and the 850 EVO is no exception. It's one of the company's latest models and runs on new 3D V-NAND flash memory, which is superfast and low power. It also benefits from Samsung's proprietary multi-core MGX SSD controller, and a longer than average five-year warranty. It might not compete with mechanical drives on capacity, but 250GB is more than enough to comfortably run a PC on. If you want an SSD, this is the model to go for.