Low-Mid PC Build Entry For Q2 of 2015 (Under $500 / ₱20,000) featuring AMD's A10-7800

Hello everyone!


Today I will be listing a build entry for a sub $500 (₱20,000) build using AMD A10-7800. For starters, APUs are processors with a CPU and a GPU built on a single chip. You might ask: "Intel has been doing this for years, what is so good about this one?" What AMD did to differentiate this to a regular CPU was to sacrifice a little bit of its CPU power while increasing the iGPU performance. This could give lower end pc builders to have their own system at a lower cost as compared to their counterpart. We chose AMD's A10-7800 for being a quad core processor while having a low TDP and cheaper price to it's rival. And why didn't we go for the 7850k?? Getting a 7850k will cost more at the same time you'll be needing to spend a little bit more for a better cpu cooler as well as better motherboard(A88x) for it.

Below will be the list of components as well as the reasoning behind each component.

MOBO: FM2+ Gigabyte F2A78M-HD2

*We went for an A78 board here because we won't be needing the premium materials for an A88x board(no overclocking required too). Any A78 board would be fine(ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, AsRock), but I chose Gigabyte since it's cheap and has a better history than Asrock in my own experience.

CASING: Deepcool Smarter 

*The reason for getting this case for our build is to save as much as possible without compromising the materials.

PSU: Seasonic 400BT- ECO Series 

*Please don't ever settle on generic PSUs. This version of Seasonic's PSU is cheap and has a good efficiency.

RAM: G.Skill RipJaws X 8GB 2133Mhz 

*This right here is very important. APUs works best with frequency RAMs. Having a 2133Mhz for our system build would really increase the performance in game's fps. Just ensure that the Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) is enabled in the BIOS system. Most of the newer motherboards have this in their setting.

Monitor: LG 20M37D 20" 

*This monitor has a native 900p resolution. By having a much lower resolution, we could juice out more fps in our games. But if you really want a 1080p one, then prepare to sacrifice a little bit of performance in most games.

PROCESSOR / GPU: AMD A10-7800 
*The bread and butter of the system. This is the Kaveri variant of the APU.


HDD: WD Caviar Blue 1 TB 
*This doesn't matter too since you could either go WD or Seagate. If you have the budget too, I highly recommended getting an SSD for the boot drive.

As for the benchmarking result, please refer to Anandtech's or Tom's Hardware Review regarding this APU. Also this card performs better than an r7 240. I'll try to do my own tests if I've ever get one myself. But I can assure you that this build will run most games titles in 30 fps or more with high settings for some older titles and more mainstream ones while mid to low for newer and triple A titles.

UPDATE: With the recent price down of the A10-7850k, if you could shell out a little bit more, it could give you better performance than the A10-7800!