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Help me cut to meet the budget
maskedweasel
Member LegendaryPosts: 12,195
in Hardware
The idea is a decent gaming PC for under 500 dollars (US).
What I have so far:
One particular highlight is the free burner with the purchase of the hard drive. Its already over the budget for the user I'm building for...with shipping the PC goes a good deal over budget.
Subtotal before shipping: 506.89
Comments
Unless the user is a huge Linux fan, you're still going to need an OS, and that's another $100, so you may be a lot further over budget than you realized.
You can cut back the power supply price tag. An Antec Basiq isn't very good, and is overpriced at the price tag you found. Try this, especially if you like rebates:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139026
A Corsair CX V2 is kind of all right, and for a higher power gaming system, you'd want something better, but it's appropriate to a severe budget system.
You're really going to need to cut back on the processor, motherboard, and video card, though, if you want to save money.
This video card is much cheaper, and will work for gaming:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102934
And then you could grab a lower end processor:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103911
together with a severe budget motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131728
Or even get the motherboard in a combo deal with the OS:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.791359.13-131-728
If that's still too much, then you could go the integrated route:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.807848
Note that that's $134 total for the processor, motherboard, and graphics. And the motherboard isn't even cheap junk, either.
If you do go the integrated route, then you'll need faster memory, though.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161474
The user is a student, the school they go to allows for 1 free license to all current microsoft software, so the operating system is taken care of.
What kind of price to performance difference are we looking at by changing the Processor and Video card? Would there be a noticeable difference?
just doin a double check, but you have the monitor worked out as well? i may be blind, but didn't see any mention of it in the list or in the text.
They currently have a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Thanks for the double check though. This build is primarily for a tower.
Some additional information: The user wants to be able to play SWTOR and Diablo3 on "max settings" .. I would imagine she is looking for decent performance while doing so, if at all possible.
Ask the user why she thinks $1000 and $1500 gaming computers should exist if $500 is enough to run everything on max settings. If you've only got $500 to spend, then you're going to turn graphical settings down quite a bit in many games.
I figured it would be unlikely that every game will be able to run on max settings with a budget build. The best price to the performance is key in my opinion, and I'm not as in tune to where hardware has gone in the past few years.
That being said, with th information given here, I should be able to cut enough and put something together.
Some other questions though, if you have a chance Quiz,
What the performance difference between the 6670 and 6570?
Is there a major performance difference between the athlon and the phenom processors?
FX processors in comparison to phenom processors (for AM3+), is there any real differences, or performance changes for gaming?
A Radeon HD 6670 and 6570 are the same "Turks" GPU chip, but clocked differently. The difference between GDDR5 memory and DDR3 has a bigger impact than the clock speed difference. Alternatively, you could go a little higher on the video card and tell her to learn to fill out mail-in rebate forms:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121474
That would probably be enough to let her claim that she's running games at max settings even if it isn't always smooth.
The Athlon II I linked is clocked at 3.3 GHz, so that would have per core performance in the same ballpark as a typical Phenom II or FX-4100. The big difference is 3 cores versus 4, which isn't that big of a deal just yet. The motherboard is basically cheap junk like you might get from Dell or HP, but it will more or less work. You may lose future compatibility, but that's the price you pay for a severe budget.
Kick the GFX card, get a low-end Nvidia instead.
I run a corei7 with a 9800GTX2 which is like what, 3 years old or sth, and ive yet to encounter a game that doesnt run on high settings with it.
Most games are console ports, the GFX power is just not needed atm unless you want to max AA and shadow quality to ultra or sth which has almost no impact on visuals (skyrim on ultra looks the same as on high).
Get a low end 1gb nvidia card, will be half the price and run like a charm with most games.
Invest in more RAM instead.
Personally id also go with an intel processor, but i dont really know that much about performance there for the same price. Then again Intel mobos are generally cheaper than the AMD ones so idk... (ASUS is a good choice but id go for a gigabyte for OC if needed)
Also id recomend a custom CPU cooler/fan instead of stock.
Thanks! I'll move some items around and see if I can get a good match.
I think you missed the budget. Spend more money here, spend more money there, and you blow the budget by several hundred dollars.
If you can afford a Core i5 2500 (or 2500K) for over $200, then sure, get it. But below that, you're better off going with an AMD processor.
On a price/performance basis, Nvidia doesn't have anything competitive to offer below about $200 (for a GeForce GTX 560 Ti). That's way out of the budget for a $500 computer. Kepler might change that, as Fermi's problem was terrible performance per mm^2 and big chips are expensive, but we aren't there yet.
Intel motherboards tend to be more expensive than analogous AMD motherboards, because Intel charges more for their chipsets. And that's in addition to charging more for their processors.
To overclock properly, you need overengineered parts all around. You can't even avoid significantly cut corners on a $500 budget, let alone overengineered everything.
And on a $500 budget, you're sticking with the stock cooler.
I went with Quizz's suggestion of the 6770 as I have one of these cards in a spare machine and I know the performance of it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121474
I don't know if there are any Nvidia cards at that price range which could provide the same performance, but I'd be willing to entertain that if you have some suggestions.
A GeForce GTX 550 Ti performs about the same as a Radeon HD 6770, but tends to cost more. If you find one cheaper than the cheapest 6770 you can find, then have at it. I'm not sure that I'd trust the GTX 550 Ti to perform properly if you try to use over 768 MB of video memory, as it does mismatch the memory channels (and might be the only video card ever to do this, or at least in a very long time), but that's not a concern unless you play games at fairly high resolutions.