Need some help picking parts... $600 PC

Ok, last night I probably spent three hours on pcpartpicker going through CPU's, motherboards, and video cards; in the end I was extremely indecisive. One of the problems I kept running into is that most of these builds I find online NEVER incorporate things like an OS, they throw all the hardware at you, ignoring the other factors that increase the cost of the build.

So, i'm making this thread to get the opinion of what you would do with $600. I already have a keyboard/mouse/monitor, my current OS is OEM, so I can't transfer it (this part irritated me the most... piece of shit); i'm also excluding the option to torrent Windows.

On virtually every opinion-piece I found, the comments were filled with people pointing out flaws in the writers choice of hardware. Compatibility was another issue I found with when considering AMD or Intel. I don't care if it's Intel or AMD, i'm not someone who's going to be playing on max settings, graphics don't matter all that much to me. I care more about the longevity of the system and it performing well without having to upgrade relatively soon.

tl;dr- throw some ideas at me that you yourself would do if you had a $600 and had to pick up an OS as well, all these crap builds always exclude that part... edit: also, being able to scale up is what i'm after as well. edit2: should also point out i'll be using Windows 10, i'd use Windows 7 but certain games I play actually work better with Windows 10.

 

What are you going to be using it for? If you're going to play any games on it, what sort of settings are you expecting to play with? This makes all the difference in a budget build since you'll need to determine if you're going to reduce budget on a CPU to increase budget on a GPU or vise versa, etc. Regardless of what you do I'd recommend AMD for the CPU purely because it'll give you enough wiggle room to buy some other quality components.

As for the operating system, you can transfer an OEM OS. Every copy of Windows has a key associated with it, whether or not it's OEM. There are completely legal tools out there to extract your Windows product key for you. Google one.

I'll edit this post or reply to this thread with a very quick, shoddy build. I'm spending about 5 minutes on this so take it with a grain of salt. It'll be the general direction I'd personally follow if I were under the same budget though.

EDIT: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Db2s6h

With that build you'd be able to plow through any ~2014 and prior games on max settings, current games you might be in the mid-high range. The 280 is a VERY solid graphics card and the 8300 CPU performs well. You can use the extra $20 left over to buy a 3rd party cooler if you really want to overclock down the road.

 

if you want to go the cheap mans route

you could start with this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2011018

add more ram and a moderately okay gpu and maybe change out the psu
your build cost with those additions would barely reach 500 depending on what you add to it

 

My build is a million times better than that but if OP doesn't want to build his own machine that's not a bad suggestion

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/kDtj8d 380 is a beast for the price i3 6300 is better then the 8350 its 15$ over but if you want to be under just swap 6300 for a 6100

 

well i built my pc for less than £250 by using an old dell, yes i said dell pc than just added geforce 250 video card and put 8gb ddr2 ram in it and upgraded my cpu and works really well for me and plays most pc games. If looking an os use linux as it is free and you still run windows games and software by using wine