Hello, I'm the one suggesting the build.
I can speak from experience regarding most of the parts. See the enclosed picture.
First off, assumptions. He did in fact not tell me - and I didn't ask - but I assumed that the build should be assembled primarily with consumption in mind.
In fact, when I designed it, I was gearing it towards my other consoles - in particular, it should look good and perform well next to my PS4, while maintaining a small cost, energy, and form factor footprint, without sacrificing more power than necessary. Every decision I've made regarding individual parts strived for an optimal perceived balance between those points.
First off, the CPU. The reasons for using the x845 are thus:
- actual quad-core; required for some games, apparently
- very cheap
- available at the point in time I've decided to build the pc
- appropriate thermal footprint (65w TDP)
Regarding performance, contemporary (taxing) titles I've played on it are The Witcher 3, Doom 4, Dark Souls 3 and Shadow Warrior 2. In every cases, my GPU was the (preliminarily) limiting factor. Load fluctuated between 50% (DaS3) and 80% (SW2) on all cores, with media playback and auxiliary services running in the background, however little that means.
I've tried editing video with it (via Shotcut), and the results are as expected. While it was never sluggish, rendering output did take its sweet time. No comparison to the editing tools the PS4 offers, either.
As a further point of reference, this was my first AMD desktop CPU. Desktop, laptops and server both feature Intel CPUs, so I can say with no bias that it's quite amazing what you get for 65 bucks.
Regarding mainboard, I required mITX (obviously), and onboard wifi plus bluetooth. The ASRock A88M-ITX/ac suits that just fine at 90 bucks. I didn't look too much further into it.
Please note, the board I've selected is not the ASRock A88M-ITX/ac, but its more feature-rich bigger brother, none of which were of interest to me however - more interfaces, mainly.
Regarding the socket, both FM2(+) and AM3(+) will be superseded by AM4, which will support Zen-based CPUs (only).
The reason why I chose FM2+ were:
- available during build time
- full compatibility with Windows 7 [1]
- I see no reason to upgrade the CPU of this machine post-assembly
Next up, RAM. I had two 4gb bars lying around, so I just put them in. I've chosen the Ripjaws for the list because they were among the cheapest and no no-names.
8gb should suffice, but I had an instance in SW2 where traversing a large map - afaik last few story missions only - would cause the process to exceed 6gb easily. I had to quit some other applications to prevent Windows writing into swap (or whatever Microsoft calls it), which would result in a diashow.
16gb (2x8) would weight in with 30-40 bucks more. Decide for yourself if that's worth it. Clock rates are negligible in this case, anything contemporary is fine. DDR4 doesn't bring anything interesting to the table, either.
Every other game worked fine, only Doom 4 sometimes hit a 4.5 mark, I think.
Regarding drives, I agree that SSDs should not be perceived as optional; all my other PCs with the exception of the server boot from SSDs, and running VMs on them instead of mechanical drives is not something I'd want to miss.
However, high cost per gb of space means they are not an option in my build. They might be (in conjunction with a "pure" mechanical drive) in bigger form factors.
This is not supposed to be a "work machine", thus the compromise of a hybrid hdd. Boot times are acceptable - some ten seconds - and I didn't perceive too much downtime during load screens et al. It is, like everything else in this build, a compromise. I've used a 1TB version of the drive, which weighs in with about 30 bucks more. I can not say whether there's a performance difference between the two versions.