Am I an idiot?

[Nec_V20]

How so?

I am trying to work out why you are choosing the components you have.

The cheapest prices for the board and CPU I have found are:

Asrock E3C224D2I $179 including shipping
Intel G3250 $60 including shipping.

So that's £240 out of your £370 budget. The Asrock board only has a VGA out so you would probably have to buy a VGA to HDMI adapter. What kind of PSU are you going to get? Or to put it another way do you want the computer to last for more than a year?

I am not slagging you here, I really am trying to work it out.

I enjoy building computers as a hobby, the thrill of the hunt for the best bargain for the components I have chosen (the choosing is in itself a process almost a ritual), the FUD of pushing the power button for the first time after it's built.

I only build the computers for friends, not strangers. I had some bad experiences building computers for a friend of a friend (who was a stranger to me) and I just didn't enjoy it.

One thing I do get a kick from is seeing the person's face when I first bring it over and turn it on. I love to lowball what I am building. For instance for this build I only told the person that it was a bit like a shoebox.

The first comment I got when I pushed in the power button was, "Is it on?", which made me very happy (I had surreptitiously turned the monitor off).

Enough of that. If you have some spare bits and pieces I can see you coming in at $370.

 

[XavierMace]

You could try reading the whole thread because I explained that choice already.

 

[AkumaX]

More importantly, the G3250 isn't on the CPU support list. My question is why not and any chance it's not the CPU that's the problem? The G3240 and G3450 are both on the support list. What makes the G3250 different enough not to work/be on the list? Looking at Ark they seem to be damn near identical save for the clock speed. Given the whole system cost $320, it really sucks to eat $70 on the processor.

G3420 is Haswell Refresh, which came out in Q2 2014.
G3250 is Haswell Refresh also, but came out a tiny bit later in Q3 2014.
Latest BIOS probably covered enough for Q2 2014.

Note that there are plenty of motherboards out there that won't support Haswell refresh until a BIOS update. That means you'd need something like a G3220 (which came out in Q3 2013) before you can use Haswell-R CPUs.

It honestly sounds like the mobo is only supporting Haswell-R up to Q2 2014. With the G3250 being Q3 2014, probably a no-go :\.