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."

Comments

ArsTechnica has a similar Guide

[Prien715]

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).