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Building a $1K Gaming Rig
Timmus writes "Firingsquad has posted an article on building a cutting-edge PC for gaming. The author manages to build an Athlon 64 3500+ rig with GeForce 7800 GT graphics and 1GB of RAM for $1,000. In the end they run benchmarks of the budget PC against a high-end FX-57 system to see how they compare. Surprisingly, the budget PC performs pretty close to the flagship system!" From the article: "Quite often we get emails asking which component(s) are 'the best' or, 'I have [x] amount of money to spend for my next upgrade, what do you think I should get?' It's impossible for us to answer these types of questions for you, simply because only you know what your needs are. Only you know how you use your computer, every person out there is different, even among gamers."
Hmmph. $300 Dell and a Radeon 9250. All you need. DVD burners, etc. are nice add-ons, but not necessary in a gaming box. Built-in sound is good enough, built in RAM is good enough for any game (though not usually for productivity).
... but in a previous /. story about a 360 bundle costing $1200, one poster made the comment that you couldn't build an average computer with eleven games for the same price. I proved him wrong. In the above link I also used a good PSU, which this story's author neglected. Please don't mod this post up; I'm not looking for karma.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I must also agree with you. Almost a year ago I built my first 'from scratch' system. I took some advice from the guy at the store I was getting my parts from and he said the PSU that came with my case would be much more than adequate. After a few months and some hardware intensive games, I was always getting random crashes and lock-ups. I could never figure it out until I read a post on the Far-Cry forums about a guy having similar problems to me. It turned out he had a junk PSU. This persuaded me to take a look into the performance of my PSU. Lo and behold, as soon as I started playing any games, the voltage levels were going up and down like pogo sticks.
The moral of the story is that no matter what anyone says, budget PSUs are useless. Now I wouldn't get a new system without spending at least $100CDN on a decent PSU.
Which can be found here.
While they don't do benchmarks, it's updated every month and includes 3 different PCs designed for different people's needs. For people who complained that $1k is too much, they've managed to spend $500 on their cheapest PC (if you don't count a monitor, which firing squad doesn't include in their system). The $500 PC will also run WoW, San Andreas, HL2 just fine as well.
If you thought $1k was too much to spend on a box, definitely check it out (the updated every month thing is also very nice).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
A 3000+ at Newegg is $146 as opposed to the $219 for the 3500+
A Chaintech GeForce 6600 card is $98 as opposed to the $383 7800
That's $358 less right there. Brings their $1032 down to $674.
And that'll play WoW without any difficulty at 1600x1200, I'd imagine.
And you can drop in the higher-end components--or even a dual core Athlon--later on down the road. Or SLI your video card in a couple months for a decent boost, too.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
I have had excellent results with seasonic power supplies. They are built like a tank and have up to 80% efficiency, which will pay for the power supply in less than a year if your computer is usually on. Seasonic is also recommende by silent computing for an inaudible 21 dB noise level - prolly one of the quietest fan cooled power supplies out there.
..........FULL STOP.
Ars Technica publishes an excellent system guide every month. The most recent one came out only a day or so ago.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Sharky Extreme has created guides like this for several years. They used to update each one monthly, but have since switched to updating each one every four months (staggering the extreme, mid-range, and value).
They also give options between AMD and Intel and among video card manufacturers, as well as advice when shopping (e.g. check the dead pixel policy for LCDs).
I don't always agree with them (for intstance, I would spend the extra $10-$20 to get CAS 2.5 memory instead of the CAS 3 value select memory, even if it only runs at CAS-3 until/unless you have 2 chips) but in general they give pretty good buying guides.