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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."
They should do this type of report every 3months, if not the information and prices get dated very quickly. I was suprised at what kind of system you can get with 1k these days.
$1k is the BUDGET system? I'll keep playing world of warcraft at 800x600.
I'd rank the PSU just slightly ahead of the case, but behind memory and hard disk drive in order of importance.
I don't agree with that. The PSU is one of the most important components, in my experience. Then again, no one should really be buying crap quality HW in the first place.
... 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.
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.