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prebuilt gaming rig under $700?
VikingLegion
Member Posts: 30
in Hardware
looking on ordering a new prebuilt gaming rig soon on a budgest of under $700.
want to be able to play skyrim, swtor, bf3 smoothly.
Not mega big into pcs but learning
i know im gonna need a quad core processor, at least 500gb hard drive, adequate video card preferably nvida or gforce. 4gb ram minimum.
basically just lookin to get the best rig i can for this price? any suggestions?
Comments
Is that $700 with or without peripherals? And are you in the US?
Don't buy a prebuilt, as it will come loaded with a bunch of cheap junk parts. If you can't or won't get your own, then it's best to get something built to order that lets you pick the exact parts.
I already got mouse, keyboard, monitor, speakrs, and yes i am in the US.
Its my first real gaming rig and I think i should get a prebuilt one for my first and go from their. upgrade that one slowly and learn...
I am worried i would order a bunch of parts, this or that isnt compatable, what if it dont boot, or what if some driver wont install.. so many things that could happen i just feel safer doing it this way the first time. and it would be nice to have that warranty in case something does go wrong.
Prebuild is ok ,pre-factory is not , make sure you either get a "gaming brand"or a pc that is set togetter for you whit parts you choose, it dont have to be all super parts but the basics need to be good. im sure Quiz or someone else whit US shopping experience will be replying whitin a day or so giving you some great advice/shop order spots.
edit : oh he already is here :P
So much hate will come from what I'm about to do, but if you want a pre-built check out Alienware's new computer.
http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51/pd.aspx
It's one thing if you are spending 1500 on a prebuilt VS a DIY build, but for 700 you are going to get gimped big time by buying it premade rather than building it yourself...
Really, putting PC's together is very easy, so long as you take a couple simple precautions(IE: don't cover the motherboard in cooling gel lol)
I built my first PC not too long ago, and it went just fine. I found a ton of guides on the nets for step by step instructions, start to finish. The HARDEST thing(for me) was sorting through the mothercoard manual to see where the wires plugged in. Quizzy is a beast at this PC shit, let him make you a list, and you just put it together. Everything will work. Drivers and stuff come AFTER you build it, and are pretty easy as well. My HD6870's downloaded their own drivers and installed them.
The Deep Web is sca-ry.
Who is quizzy? If i had an expert help me with the parts i need maybe i should do it this way
oh you mean quizzical
The $700 version of that isn't much of a gaming computer. And the form factor ensures that it can't be upgraded to be a respectable gaming computer, either.
If you want a respectable gaming computer built to order for $700, that's doable, but I couldn't squeeze a quad core processor in like you wanted.
http://www.avadirect.com/desktop-pc-configurator.asp?PRID=17135
Case: Antec Two Hundred V2
Power supply: XFX Pro 650 W
Motherboard: MSI 970A-G45
Processor: AMD Athlon II X3 450
Memory: Crucial 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) PC-10600
Video card: MSI R6770-MD1GD5 Radeon HD 6770
Hard drive: Western Digital 500 GB WD Caviar Blue
Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Everything else default.
Total price: $686.19. Adding shipping probably puts you over budget, but that's in the right ballpark.
If you're willing to assemble parts yourself, then that gives you room for maybe $100 worth of better stuff. And that will make a big difference.
You should also consider whether to get a hard drive or an SSD. Your budget doesn't give you room for both, and if you really need 500 GB of capacity, then a hard drive is the easy choice. But flooding in Thailand has caused a hard drive shortage that leaves 500 GB hard drives costing about as much as 60 GB SSDs, and 1 TB hard drives not much less than 120 GB SSDs. If you don't need much capacity, then you might want to consider going with an SSD instead of a hard drive. That will make your system much faster and more responsive.
I like http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/ . They made good gaming pc for cheap.
I will not play a game with a cash shop ever again. A dev job should be to make the game better not make me pay so it sucks less.
I have been very happy with http://www.pcusa.com/
Bought 2 gaming rigs over the last 4yrs from them.
There's quite a difference between a link to a web site that sells computers and a viable gaming computer configuration that fits the budget.
Anyway, from New Egg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.801333
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.791359.13-128-521
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145299
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151096
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135204
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131378
Note the promo code on the hard drive. That comes to $703 including shipping, and before $35 in mail-in rebates.
Compared to the AVA Direct build that I picked out above, this one offers a faster quad core processor and a much faster video card. It's probably also cheaper after shipping. It also offers a nicer case and better memory. The power supply isn't quite as good, but still more than adequate--and I'd have gone with about 100 W less on the power supply if I found a good deal in the 500 W range. The rest of the parts in both builds are pretty comparable.
I highly recommend building your own. You can find out how on the internet (it's not that hard really). If you can spend a bit more on the graphics card as gaming requires good graphic cards. You can get SSD's pretty cheap now as well. Check out Sites that offer free shipping on parts and put the savings into the graphics card. Do a lot of research on the net...the info is out there and save a lot AND get better components.
I managed to squeez in a quad core (Thuban) possibly unlockable. Definately faster than the FX quad core
Case
Rosewill FBM-01 Dual Fans MicroATX Mini Tower
30$ Simple black 2 fans decent reviews.
Motherboard
BIOSTAR A870 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s ATX AMD Motherboard
60$ Pretty good Reviews Sata 6 and essentially identical to 970X. 40$ cheaper without USB3.0
Ram
AMD Performance Edition CL8 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
55$ The 1 lower cas latency and faster speed is worth 20$ IMO
Processor
AMD Phenom II X4 960T Zosma 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core
125$ The Zosma(Thuban) cores are a lil faster than Phenom cores. might unlock to X6
Power supply
XFX Core Edition PRO550W
70$ Cant argue, best value on Newegg
Hard drive
.......I'd go with Quizical's pick the Hitachi for 80$
Video card
SAPPHIRE 100314-3L Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5
165$
OS
Windows 7 Home Premium
99$
Total = 684$ I'm assuming you can salvage your old DVD-rom
Or get the Radeon 6790 for 125$
I know a 6770 struggles on BF3 first hand. It's the 128bit memory interface, 6790 is 256bit
This should get you to High BF3 settings @ 1080p with decent AA/AF
I don´t think you can get a prebuilt gaming machine for that price.
The problem is that as a gamer you need to focus on the GFX card while you can have a rather cheap CPU but almost all prebuilt gears have a rather cheap GFX card for the money it cost.
Many stores like Newegg and many small geek stores let you exchange some parts in at least some of their computers but they still gets more expensive than 700 bucks.
You can get a rather acceptable gaming computer for 700 bucks, even with screen and windows but then you must build it yourself. The alternative is buying a 2 year old preowned high end gaming computer but that would leave you without warranty and you should preferably buy it from someone you know so you don´t get tricked.
Hey Man, If anything playing the games you want smoothly, you are going to have to cash in some money. I started out with a Radeon 6670 and it did play decently but not to where I wanted it. I upgraded to a MSI TWIN FROZR II GTX 560ti and well all I have to say is check out my BF3 screen.
Eh....last 2 days several clanmembers with NV cards.....all I heard was complaints about CTD.
Not with a 10 foot pole.
Your motherboard won't physically fit in your case. But they're both cheap junk parts, so I'd get neither of them. The case might be all right for a low power office computer, but it's not what you want for a gaming rig.
On memory, you're basically looking to pay an extra $26 for Patriot to say, hey, if you overvolt it, you can set the latency timings tighter. AMD memory is really made by Patriot, so it's not even a different brand. The heatspreader will be a different color, though. On a tight budget, surely there are better uses for $26.
It's debatable which of the two processors is faster. What's not debatable is that the one I linked is $15 cheaper. And that matters on a tight budget. Besides, even if you do manage to unlock it to a six core processor, you'd risk frying something on that motherboard.
The power supplies we linked are basically the same, except that yours costs $6 more (shipping costs are real costs, too!) and mine is higher wattage. Yours does have a $15 mail-in rebate, though.
On the video card, you're paying $13 more for the same performance. Sapphire does likely have better build quality than PowerColor, so you can make a case for that, though.
And is it really worth taking the optical drive out of an old computer? Surely if you have an old computer and keep it intact, it should sell for more than a $19 optical drive.
xbox 360 with kinect
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229300 (EDIT: fixed link)
CyberpowerPC Gamer Ultra 2117 - $679
Motherboard: NVIDIA GeForce 7025
Processor: AMD FX-Series FX-4100 3.6GHz
RAM: 8GB DDR3 1333
Hard Disk Drive: 1TB 7200 rpm
Graphics Card: Radeon HD 6670 1GB
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit
Power Supply: 600W
Worst part is the generic 600W power supply.
The motherboard is the bottom of the line motherboard from a cheap junk brand. It's not "you have to replace it right this second" bad. And it is the sort of thing that you'd have to take on a $500 budget (though you'd probably go Socket FM1, not AM3, for that). But you can get better on a $700 budget.
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You're wrong about memory on several counts. First, it's 1600 MHz memory, not 1333 MHz. Second, even if it were 1333 MHz memory, that's not bottom of the barrel. Low bin DDR3 is 1066 MHz. Third, even if it were 1333 MHz memory, the performance difference would usually (though not always) amount to basically a rounding error.
But most importantly, the difference between CAS 8 and CAS 9 isn't that big. If you had a synthetic memory latency benchmark testing 1600 MHz DDR3 at CAS 8 and CAS 9 on a desktop platform with everything else the same, the largest performance difference theoretically possible is less than 3%. And that's for a synthetic benchmark that goes out of its way to make CAS latency as important as possible. The typical real-world performance difference might be an order of magnitude less than that.
Furthermore, i'd argue that the difference between being rated at 1.5 V and 1.65 V is more important than that. So even if they were the same price, I'd still prefer the memory I linked. But for a difference of $26 on a $700 budget? That's not a hard decision to make.
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So I take it that you're conceding the argument on the processor? For what it's worth, I'd be absolutely shocked if there aren't quite a few benchmarks that each processor would win at.
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The power supply actually isn't the same. XFX's core series is actually two different lines with the same name. The 450 and 550 W versions are basically Seasonic S12II. The 650, 750, and 850 W versions are a different platform, also sold as the Corsair TX V2 and NZXT Hale82. Regardless, they're all nice power supplies.
As I see it, the sensible thing to do is to choose based on the price tag. If you won't do rebates because they're a hassle, get the Seasonic that I linked. If you regard rebates as completely free (so that $70 before a $20 rebate is just as good as $50 with no rebate), then get the XFX that you linked.
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"Based on the reviews the Sapphire card runs cooler and is more reliable and is less noisy."
I'm skeptical of using New Egg user reviews to prove anything, but the Sapphire card probably is better as you say. If they were the same price, I'd have picked the Sapphire instead of the PowerColor. But for a $13 price difference, you can make a case for either one. The PowerColor card is cheaper, but it's cheaper for a reason.
First off - RAM is RAM... it has specifications, and different vendors slap their logo on it, but by and large the chips come out of one of about 3 factories total. It's like saying you only like to use AMD-approved Hard Drives, or cooling fans. Sure, AMD and Intel will certify that certain brands work, but it's mostly marketing. The RAM isn't any different from any other brand with the exact same specs.
Secondly...
The Phenom II can and does beat the FX-4100. Here's a review where they tested the FX-8150, and it lost to the 6-core Phenom II in almost every single test, even in many tests where it's 6 core versus 8 core on multithreaded benchmarks.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/10/11/amd_bulldozer_fx8150_desktop_performance_review/1
Sure, the Zambezi may over clock well, but so does Thuban. And even if you do over clock it faster, there's still the fact that Thuban is faster per core on the order of 20%, and can do more per cycle than Zambezi can, so you need to get 20% more speed out of it than the Thuban to match it core for core.
And sure, there's the mythical Windows Patch. It's out now. Windows 8 is supposed to be a bit better (maybe 10% by early indications). Here's a quote from AMD:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20120111124932_AMD_Windows_7_Scheduler_Update_Brings_1_2_Performance_Improvement.html