Yeesh, DDR4 prices have gone up a lot. It was commonplace to get 16GB of DDR4 3000 for about $65, last June. Running single channel will noticeably hurt this build. I would wait around for a deal on 2x8GB of RAM.
Also, the 480 and 470 video cards are actually very nice. I wouldn't call them "budget". They are considered "Mid-range" cards. They just so happen to be some of the best price/performance ratio seen at the mid-range price area, in some time.Those are cards for maxing all settings, at 1080p. They will blow a PS4 away. and are better than PS4 pro.
You could easily drop down to a lower card and still have a very enjoyable experience at 1080p. I still use a 7870, which is 5+ years old, now. Is a little better than a PS4. I run Battlefield 1 at all high settings, 1080p, with 60fps average. That game has a very optimized engine. But I still have a great time with other games. I'm also using an i3-6100.
SSD are not necessary and are not yet cheap enough, to be a de-facto replacement for outright storage capacity.
Yeah, windows boots faster. and most games load faster. But once you are in-game, performance difference is zero. and you will fill up a 250GB SSD very quickly. Windows install, everyday windows use, and a couple of games later-----no more hard drive space. I still put most of my games on a 3TB 7200rpm drive. I only put a couple of games on my 500GB SSD, where load times are important. Something such as Battlefield.
This new Pentium barely runs faster than my stock phenom II 955BE (im pretty sure it's 7 years old) from 2 builds ago. Definitely a budget chip.
https://youtu.be/SW_e_m89j-c
The AMD FX 6300 is a 6 core 3.5 ghz (4.1ghz boost) AMD processor btw.
As seen in this video, the new Pentiums and the i3-6100, are strictly better than older AMD stuff. Additonally, their MUCH newer motherboards, will have a lot of modern ports and features, which the Phenon II and FX lines just don't have. If you are doing a new build, buying new products makes a ton of sense.
Both the Phenom II and FX lines are still viable processors for gaming, however. So, if those platforms still give you the features you need, you could simply drop in a newer GPU and be ok. Although you would see some bottlenecking.
With my own recent experience, last June I upgraded to a an i3-6100, from an Phenom II X6 (with hefty core and northbridge overclocking. Phenoms love northbridge overclocks). The i3 is way better. Every single game simply runs noticeably better.
Is a dual core really adequate? Some games don't even run on dual cores at all. I understand it has the ability to run virtual cores, but is that a reliable solution looking forward?
Yes, hyperthreading is a viable solution. Intel's cores are so good, the dual core processors can run games quite well. Hyperthreading doesn't really offer a big performance gain. Your Skylake or Kabylake i3 with two real cores + 2 hyperthreads, won't match an recent i5 with 4 real cores/threads, in games where more than two cores matters (although, an i3-6100 with DDR3000, makes a pretty good case against a Haswell i5). And it is important to understand that some games run just as well, with only two cores. You'd be surprised at how many games, actually don't need a 4 core CPU to run at basically full blast.
But, hyperthreading allows you to run games which require more than two threads, to even boot up. I ran Far Cry 4 very well, on my i3-6100. That game requires 3 threads and is pretty CPU intensive.