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The $500 Gaming PC Upgrade
sand writes "Building a powerful PC for gaming doesn't have to be expensive. In this article, FiringSquad spends $500 on a gaming upgrade, and compares its performance to that of a high-end Core 2 Extreme PC. The Core 2 Extreme rig is faster, but you may be surprised by how well the $500 PC is able to hang with it in Crysis, Call of Duty 4, and Unreal Tournament 3."
When many gamers spend $500 for just a gaming GPU, yes $500 for a full gaming upgrade is cheap - if it lives up to the hype.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Ya but does it run Vista?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I think it is time for our monetary administrators to consider changing the color of our currency to an earthy brown.
Have you payed your dues jack? Yes sir, the check is in the mail.
Inexpensive is generally a relative term. Of course, if one plays CS only, then he or she could probably find a local college or uni throwing out equipment capable of playing it.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
They dropped a PS3 really, really hard on the PC and called it an upgrade, right?
[ think ]
Newsflash: If you buy the last generation of hardware, and not the top-of-the-line video card, you'll save money!
I've been keeping my PC about one or two cycles behind the bleeding edge for this reason, and it plays games just fine
- Roach
For a good performing gaming PC, as many have stated, that's downright cheap.
A bigger complaint would be:
They chose the AMD690 motherboard chipset. The big reason? The one they went on and on about? Dual digital [video] outputs (DVI + HDMI). They also had a discreet video card. Call me nuts, but if you use the DVI/HDMI output on the motherboard, you aren't going to be getting the goodness from that $250 graphics card you just picked up, are you (barring two monitors I guess).
Seriously, they could have saved some $$, or gotten a board with a better set of features, excluding it's graphical output.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I think they wanted to call this a cheap build, but saw that it equated to another normal build. So they removed things like an optical drive, hard drive, case, power supply, speakers, and a monitor to "reduce the price" and make this an "insanely cheap upgrade!"
Honestly, I'm sure half the nerds on this site could build an entire SYSTEM that'd put this upgrade to shame at that price.
import system.cool.Sig;
you aren't going to be getting the goodness from that $250 graphics card you just picked up, are you (barring two monitors I guess)
More than two. The 8800 can drive two monitors itself. You'd need three before you would have to fall back to the motherboard's.
Money well-spent.
The summary (and even the article) is a bit confusing. They're spending $500 on 4 components:
CPU
GPU
Motherboard
RAM
It is assumed you already have the other components (PSU, case, HDD, etc)
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I always use two monitors at home now, it would drive me crazy to go back to one. Of course, I play things like Eve, where there are so many external things you want to run at various times (industrial tools, jump-planners, mapping tools, TS) that you don't want to cover the screen with that there really isn't much of a choice.
I recently upgraded my machine for playing games. I spent about $450 and built something *significantly* better than what is shown in this article. How? By buying cheap/discount/used hardware off eBay. It's really just that simple. I could have easily spent several hundred more dollars on the same stuff by buying from an actual store.
From TFA:
"The GPU of choice in our upgrade article is without a doubt the recently announced GeForce 8800 GT from NVIDIA. ... ... ... Most of the online retailers sold out of their inventory of GeForce 8800 GT cards within hours of the GPU's release, but hopefully they'll be restocked shortly. EVGA is a great brand, offering goodies like a lifetime warranty and their Step Up trade-in program. We've reviewed their cards in the past quite extensively and always liked them.
Keep in mind that NVIDIA is producing all of the early GeForce 8800 GT cards for their board partners like EVGA anyway, so regardless of the brand of card you choose they're all coming off the same production line. This includes the factory overclocked cards.
Alternatives: Until AMD ships their upcoming RV670 chip, the Radeon HD 3800, there really is no viable alternative to the GeForce 8800 GT that we'd recommend. If you want to save a little money the Radeon X1950 Pro would be an excellent alternative though."
Cruisin' a powerful PC fo` clockin' doesn't have ta be expensive . Yippie yo, you can't see my flow. In this article, FiringSquad spends $500 on a doggy stylin' upgrade , n compares its performance ta tizzy of a high-end Core 2 Extreme PC . You gotta check dis shit out yo. The Core 2 Extreme rig is hustla but you may be surprised by how wizzay tha $500 PC is able ta hang wit it in Crysis, Call of Duty 4, n Unreal Tournament 3."
Nope. That's called replacing a few parts in your PC (at most) after totalling your PS3.
I had a fairly high end, new rig (4GB of RAM, Vista Home Premium, Quad Core processor) and I was not satisfied with Crysis at all using a 8800GTS (384MB). At 1600x1050 (default resolution) it was just able to run with Medium - Low settings with some stuttering. I dropped in an 8800GTX Ultra instead (probably the only time in my life I'll ever be able to get away with buying a near top of the line card), and now I can run at High possibly even sneaking some things to Very High.
Once the article actually loads I'd love to see what they came up with for Crysis for less than the price of my video card (of course I'm secretly hoping that it's running at 800x600 on low with a bad framerate to justify my ridiculous purchases!)
This basically comes down to a GeForce 8800 GTX vs. GeForce 8800 GT. The problem is the 8800 was a high end part a year ago and the GT just came out.
So if you want to build/upgrade to a cheep gaming system pick up an 8800GT if not wait till the next high end chip hit's the market or buy 2 8800GT's.
FTFA: "There's a silly misconception out there that you need to spend $1,500 or more to own a decent gaming rig. This is just nonsense"
Sure, I know people that always buy top of the line right when it comes out. They actually care if they're able to get 71 fps in a certain game vs 68 fps. Not because they play it, but because it means something to them to have a high number.
But that's the exception, not the norm. People building their own systems like was done in the article aren't that retarded.
I was just forced into upgrading due to a motherboard that went bad on an old Athlon XP 2400 system.
A few hours of looking and a e4600 Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of DDR2 667, decent Asus MB, and a 512 meg Nvidia 8600GT...
$450 shipped. That included seating the processor and having them do the bios upgrade before shipping for $9. This from a reputable online service that many people have used for years. Even if I had to add a case, monitor, hardrive, dvd drive, key board and mouse, you're still looking at under $750 without a problem. And that would certainly qualify as decent.
Now, I got no doubt they spent a ton of time finding just the right stuff to eeck out all that little bit of tweaking.
But overall, no one thinks when building a system yourself you need to spend anywhere near that for a decent gaming system. For top of the line to have bragging rights over a meaningless fps score, sure. But not for something that'll play everything new just fine and be fine for years.
It's simply about buying mainstream stuff, instead of ultra-high-end stuff. Those high-end buyers PAY for the technology to be developed for all the mainstream users. But, games aren't made for a few people with high-end cards; they're made to play pretty damn well on what most people who bought any decent card/machine recently will have.
For 99.9% of people, buying very high-end stuff is a lot like buying a ferrari. Sure, it looks nice, but what practical use are you going to find for it?
It seems like console games and computer games have little if any distinction besides input method (controller vs keyboard/mouse). With USB coming standard on the next gen systems, why not "upgrade" your console with a keyboard/mouse? It wouldn't take much from game devs to allow this control scheme, especially for games that are going to see a PC port anyway. The whole PC gaming thing never made much sense to me. You can spend $500 on a console that performs as well as a computer at 3 times the cost. It is significantly more efficient both energy wise and processing wise.
Similes are like metaphors
If they just dropped that much on an X-box or PS3 they could have gotten something that keeps up with the gaming pc and is actually more fun to play. probably on a larger screen and would be guaranteed against obsolescence for a couple years.
You can get better results for the same cash.
The parent poster has a troll name and a flamebait attitude, but the comment was insightful. Five hundred buicks IS a lot of money! Hell, that's more than my car payment, or any other of my bills except my mortgage, and the mortgage is only another sixty bucks over this needless expenditure.
I doubt if it would cost five hundred bucks to replace every part in my computer. Now I remember why I quit gaming - DOOM 3.
Fucking elitists. Mod me down, "-1, he's not a rich boy".
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Now I remember why I quit gaming - DOOM 3.
Fucking elitists. Mod me down, "-1, he's not a rich boy".
Alternatively, you could have tried playing games that concentrate on stuff other rather than the shiniest graphics?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I feel silly for spending $1500 or so for a brand new build this January. Granted I decided to go midrange (don't upgrade very often - so want a good utility-price balance).
Congratulations! You will die a virgin.
Some people play games, some people drink and smoke. To each their own fun. If you amortize the cost of the 500 dollars over the life of the usefulness of it, you would probably find that it was about the same amount of money other people spent on their hobbies.
Well the best price for that card in the UK (could only find one vendor with the EVGA one) is £172. That's about $350.
Rough figures:
Athton 64 X2 4000 = £42
Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H = £45
2x 1GB PC2-6400 = £80 (kingston, or £60 for cheaper brand)
GPU + CPU + Mobo + RAM = £339 (about $700)
--
http://bridgehosting.net/cheap-gaming-rig ?
These games seem to be heavily GPU bound.
What about a game like Supreme Commander? Which can bring a quad core processor to its knees.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
You better have 2 8800s in SLI if you plan on running Crysis with a reasonable frame-rates with graphics turned up enough to look better than Episode 2. Don't believe me? Try the demo.
It really depends on how much you make. If you're pulling 200 grand a year in pre-tax household-income, have no kids, don't have a huge car and house payment, and don't have any other serious hobbies or money-sinks... no, $500 isn't a whole hell of a lot for a system upgrade that'll last you for at least another year.
OTOH, if you're making $40k a year in pre-tax household income, have three kids, a large house and car payment, and you've got CC debt issues... yes, $500 is a significant, large sum of money. Context is everything, I guess.
In the grand scheme of "expensive hobbies", PC gaming is pretty tame. Compare it to automobiles, home theaters, some equipment-heavy sports, and so forth, and PC gaming looks reasonable enough. With the relative cheapness of RAM and CPUs these days, I'd argue it's even more affordable. That doesn't solve the "don't you have better things to spend your money on?" argument, but it does put the issue as a whole into context.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
...your still not getting laid though.
I thought that was outrageously expensive for a gaming machine!
The cake is a pie
I don't know where you live.. but my mortgage is more then 4 times that amount, and for that matter, my car payment is about $200 more too.. and I drive a freaking Toyota..
As for rigs, I spent a crapton.. okay maybe only $750 on my mobo, gpu and psu about 2 years ago, and that particular rig is still doing okay, granted only getting about 40 fps on UT3, but it works for me, at thats at 1600 x 1200 at med to med high settings. I do plan on finding another 7800 GT (I know its old) so I can run in SLI, that should hold me over for another year heh..
I My new laptop absolutely blows my desktop out of the water, with its little 8800 GS mobile chipset
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
They should have never gave you niggers money!
First, you really can't buy a board for much less than the $80 and expect it to work well. They all come with tons of features these days - you just have to decide which you want. Going cheaper nowadays doesn't mean same quality with less features - it means similar features with lower quality.
Second, there's some very good reasons for going with a board that includes onboard video. It gives you the potential to run more than two monitors (which is, I admit, very unlikely) but more important, if/when your main graphics card bites the dirt, you've got your onboard to fall back on while you wait for your replacement to arrive. That means that while you'll go a week without playing Crysis and UT3 at max settings, you'll still be able to do pretty much everything else.
That said, my take on the article is that they spent way too much on the graphics. You can stretch that $500 quite a bit further by going with a much cheaper card that'll still run the newest games just fine at reduced settings. I'd say this would get the job done, and still give you some space in your budget to upgrade your hard drive and something else, which could be pretty important in that P4/Athlon XP system from 3 years ago.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Actually, he would find that the $500 is a lot less than what other people spend on hobbies. That $500 upgrade should last you at least a good 18 months. People spend that much on beer or cigs in 6 months, and most hobbies cost more than that.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
ahh... never mind...
...not if he finds a girl that likes to play Eve.
Times are changing. Try not to make yourself look like some bitter old geezer who's behind the times.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Jeez, I don't remember the original nintendo costing anywhere near that amount (in interest adjusted dollars). What 10 year old kid can afford to go out and spend $500 on a gaming box (with barely if any games in it?). Time to pull out Monopoly & Chess.
If you're spending $500 on a gaming upgrade and consider that cheap... you got bigger problems than just having less $500 in your bank account.
How about playing the game of (real) life? Too challenging perhaps? Not fun enough?
The cpu which they quote newegg at $100... I just bought from newegg for $70 a month or two ago.
;) it's still $100 for xp. (what a ripoff) I'd suggest begging friends and relatives to see if anyone has a copy they don't need or an older computer sitting in the corner collecting dust with xp on it.
I also bought a new, oem 1900xt (look it up on your favorite hardware review site) for $100 from newegg. IMHO a pretty good deal. Certainly the best card I could find for the money.
If you need good stuff for cheap and are desperate - craigslist (if you're near a big city) or ebay can help you out. I got a $120 power supply for $50 off craigslist and a motherboard and 2 gigs of ram... normal cost about $160 for $60. All of those have worked flawlessly so far.
The most expensive thing you're going to have to find to play games is windows. Even with Newegg's sneaky "feel free to claim you're oem" policy (at least last time I checked
Finally, if you can handle a crt you can get a 17 inch monitor for free on craigslist or buy a 19 inch for around $10-$30.
Yes but they go to insane levels.
Unreal tournament 3 plays just fine at sane levels on a Throwaway P4-3.0ghz with a Geforce 7900GS video card, yes the incredibly slow AGP interface as well. I've been playing it on what amounts to a $250.00 computer all week.)
now if I turn on all the goodies I can make it slower on some of the more expansive and detailed arenas.. but some of the simpler short distance line of sight it still plays decently until you have 4-5 bots in the room all firing rockets like madmen.. (override settings and have 30 bots in one of the small 1 on 1 arenas... it's a hoot!)
Am I playing with all setting all the way up and at 1920X1200? not a chance. but it still plays just fine on a 1024X768 15" monitor with enough settings to make it look incredibly good.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The thing is, actual gameplay is influenced by your graphics card. Loading between levels might be annoying with an old HDD, but most games don't do much disk access during active gameplay.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Midwest, where house prices haven't quite gotten as insane as elsewhere. Also I live alone (usually) so don't need a mansion. And I bought my very nice car used.
My biggest expense is crack whores.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
See, that's where they're making their mistake. Not gamers, but developers. The developers are only selling to hobbyists, when they could be selling to people just looking for a little recreation.
I never got into the MMOLPs because I was afreaid of being sucked into the addiction. Instead of selling crack, game developers should be selling twinkies.
With crack in them. They're shooing away many people they could get hooked.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I wasn't after the shiniest graphics, I was after a sequel to a fifteen year old game I'd loved that would no longer play on my present day equipment. Its developers were after shiny graphics, alas.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That's true, but $200k is a bit outside median income while $40k is solid lower middle class, where most people are. Yeah, there's a market for yachts, but you can sell a lot more bass boats. Most of the computer game companies are selling yachts and bass boats are scarce.
As to hobbies, well, it's not often that one is forced to but new equipment for that home theater. But my point wasn't a slam at gamers by any means, it was a staetement that the game developers could make a hell of a lot more money of they'd stop being elitist.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
So who is kind of a redundant question. As for the over the top fps competitive players or people with disposable income come to mind. I used to team/clan and the players willing to drop more money on their systems got better performance at key moments (like tight combat with lots of effects/explosions). Of course I err on the frugal side myself, but I never gave much thought to anyone over-specing their system.
Quack, quack.
Most people don't seem to see why this number is so special: it's about the cost of an X-Box 360 with all the bells and whistles. Sure, they left out a case, monitor, speakers, and input. But compound to the cost of an X-Box 360 the fact that you have to buy controllers, an HD-TV, and a Live account. The point that should be taken home is that if you put your brain to work, you can build a system that's cheaper, more powerful, and plays better games than the consoles out there right now. This is the first time this has really happened: consoles from a generation or two ago were always rather cheap.
I have a 1600x1200 LCD (for desktop purposes) and when I play games, I like to be able to play them at native resolution of the LCD as they can't scale down to resolutions the same way a CRT can. So for that, a fairly hefty video card is required. Other than that I agree with you, people take it to extremes.
Random and weird software I've written.
I actually disagree with your main premise. Many game companies are selling cheap, "casual" games that have low system requirements and broad appeal. Those would be the bass boats you're talking about. It's just that the "yacht market", so to speak, is a lot more visible, because those boats are a lot more impressive than some bass boat. And when you start shifting down those yachts to make them less "elitist" (whatever the hell that means in the gaming context), you wind up with a bass boat. High-end games require high-end hardware - you can't make a purse out of a sow's ear.
I also disagree with your secondary premise - HT enthusiasts are always looking for the next best thing, and they spend money to do so. There's cool new gear coming out every year, much of it quite expensive.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Well, my home built computer of three years still manages to play most things like a champ. I picked up all the parts for a bit over $1200 if I recall, and that included a monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse. The one upgrade I did was from an ATI X800XL to a 7950GT.
Really, all you have to do is lop down a decent chunk of change when you feel comfortable with it, and then just do smallish to medium upgrades throughout the years. Hell, the upgrade I'm looking at the most right now is actually swapping out my hard drive for several SATA II in a RAID 0 (I don't REALLY need parity as I tend to keep all of my important documents backed up).
You don't NEED to spend a lot on upgrades, but you should probably be willing to spend a good amount on the initial build of a computer.
This is using current-gen hardware - namely the 8800 GT GPU, which is so new most places haven't even got stock in yet, or have sold out of their first shipments. The processor isn't as cutting-edge, but is still current generation.
Their point is that current-gen has multiple price points, some of them more accessible than others.
(I'm in the process of upgrading a 3 year old PC (6800 GS / Athlon 3000) so paying attention to how not to spend a billion dollars on the thing)
I had the exact same thought when reading the article. For a second I thought, "Did I somehow miss-out on some technological advancement where you can now connect a monitor to a motherboard, yet still use the processing power of the GPU?" On a related note, I have a question I would love for someone to answer: What happened to VGA outputs on video cards? I'm actually looking for build a new (gaming/HTPC) system, but must have a GPU that outputs to VGA, as my monitor (a 50" Panasonic Plasma) accepts only VGA & component. Sure, I could buy an add-on card for $150 that allows the monitor to accept it, but that seems like a lot of wasted money for no actual increase in quality. So, is this something I can even accomplish? Seems like every decent card has DVI only. Is this the way of the future?
Most motherboards for AMD Athlons are based on the latest chips from either nVidia or ATI/AMD which usually feature SLI/Crossfire, etc. and a big amount of SATA channels. In theory, motherboard makers could provide more IDE ports by soldering additional controller on the motherboard (and that used to be the case a couple of years ago, when IDE was king and chipsets only provided 2 channels), but they aren't doing it any more, partly to keep the cost down and partly because IDE is falling out of fashion.
If you want more IDE channels with an Athlon CPU, what you could do is stick to older VIA chipsets. You can find chipsets a few generation before (almost the same as when the first Athlon 64 appeared), that will still feature acouple of IDE channels. And the best part : because those are a generation or two older, they cost a lot less than the newest ATI/nVidia based.
(Also, thank to the Athlon design, where the CPU itself handles the tricky bits like memory IO, and where the motherboard "talks" to the CPU with a pretty standardized HyperTransport bus, you can mix older chipsets and have them function with latest processors).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think about the time 386/486 Intel processors came along and people started counting Mhz is when I began encountering games that were too demanding for my PC. However, considering that I was still young and thus didn't have the money to upgrade I was stuck. The difference to today, however, is that you could do a moderate upgrade and immediately have a machine that runs all the current games well.
I think one of the bigger limiting factors back then was if your machine still ran only CGA or EGA when games supporting VGA/MCGA entered the market. Or worse, a few years later when those 3DFX cards entered the market. By and large, however, I think developers tended to ensure that games at least ran well on current machines.
This isn't the case today. Developers seem to develop games specifically to overwhelm the top machines available today. It's like they all have this insane mindset that people are still going to be playing these games 2 or 3 years from now when the majority of consumers actually have PCs capable of running these games at full detail. The problem is, that the life-cycle of a game doesn't go much beyond 6 months, and that's even for a good one. So what's the point?
So it seems like developers want to turn their games into benchmarks for PC performance. This certainly seems to be the trend. Nowadays any game comes along that most current PCs cant handle and almost immediately it shows up in performance testing. I attribute some of this to sloppy programming, but I also get the impression that these developers find the most convoluted and inefficient way to produce some visual effect. It's like they're relying on the hardware to support their code.
What I don't get is how they're able to turn a profit. I go through cycles with my PC purchases, directly related to how my PC handles contemporary games. When I upgrade my PC I'll pick up a few games. I eventually start hitting a performance wall where my PC has trouble running a current game well, so my game purchasing stops. The thing is that the PC still does everything else exceedingly well, so I have no practical reason to upgrade. It's the situation I'm in now. I have a 3Ghz P4 that does everything extremely well, except play current games.
The last time I took a risk was with Supreme Commander. That turned out to be such a massive disappointment because of the utter crap performance that I uninstalled it within days. I might as well go back to playing Total Annihilation which provides just as much fun with suitably large armies and will still run flawlessly.
A lot of these new games certainly look impressive. But they don't really look that much better than, let's say Half Life 2, and that will run well on my PC. I'd be looking at a 300% expense over my current PC to net maybe a 25% improvement in quality. And then be screwed in 6 months when whatever comes out then failed to run at a suitable framerate on my new PC. And I'm skeptical about a $500 PC running anything available today acceptably well and with decent visual quality.
Nevermind. I'm an idiot. Somehow I failed to notice that these newer cards often include the appropriate adapters. Ignore me and move along.
Actually, even though SC is somewhat designed to take advantage of multi-core processors, it doesn't use them very well. Check the gaspowered games forums, you will see people writing apps to re-thread the dll/game cpu affinity. On my own Q6600, it runs 100% on one core, and about 20-30% on another. The other two cores are not used at all. Multi threaded programming isn't easy, and these quickie games are almost never designed to take advantage of threads and different cores. Hopefully it will change as more are more people get these processors. Simple things as putting AI,UI,and game logic on different cores would make a huge difference.
we are willing to accept.."
8800 gt 512mb $230 (prior best bang/buck: x1950xt 256mb $170)
open box g35 based motherboard $75
e2140 oc to 3-3.2ghz on stock cooling ~= e6800 in performance $60(usually found for $75, but $60 is around)
2gb generic ddr2 $50
500gb sata $75
dvd burner $35
seasonic 400watt 85%+ efficiency $60 (check out vendors at 80plus.org)
$585
skimping:
8800 gt 512mb $230
open box g35 based motherboard $75
e2140 oc to 3-3.2ghz on stock cooling ~= e6800 in performance $60
1gb generic ddr2 $25
ebay 250gb sata $20
dvd burner $30
ebay 400-500watt but regular inefficient $20
$450
skimping further:
8800 gt 512mb $230
ebay 939/am2 pcie motherboard $20
ebay athlon64 4000-xxxx $20
1gb generic ddr2 $25
ebay 250gb sata $20
dvd burner $30
ebay 400-500watt but regular inefficient $20
$345
and further:
x1950xt 256mb $170
ebay 939/am2 pcie motherboard $20
ebay athlon64 4000-xxxx $20
1gb generic ddr2 $25
ebay 250gb sata $20
dvd burner $30
ebay 400-500watt but regular inefficient $20
$305
further..:
ebay 7800gtx or equivalent $70-100
rest of system same as above
$205-235
1st setup is top of the line performance only beat by gtx/sli & higher oc'd core duo/quads
2nd same except some delay/chop/performance drop for some games because of 1gb
3rd loss in cpu dependent games
4th most things should play well
5th many play well, others dialed down, some not so hot
DVI's a superset of analogue VGA - it carries VGA-style analogue signals in addition to the more modern digital stuff, so adaptors are cheap and simple to make.
A few years ago, I didn't realise they're generally included with graphics cards - so I've ended up with a surplus of DVI-to-VGA adaptors. Oops!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Another thing they don't even mention is that if you're going from a typical system from 3 years ago to one using the parts they priced, you're going to have to upgrade your power supply to. Unless of course you went way extreme and bought a honkin' big 500watt model back then, in which case you *might* be ok, but that won't be the case for most people. So unless you want to skimp and buy a cheapo PSU that may or may not last you a year, you'll be shelling out over $50 for that too. Keep adding in small things like that, and you're not spending $500 - you're spending $750.
Long story short, for me when I look at the difference in graphics card performance between $100 and $250, I just see so many other upgrades I'd rather have for that $150. IMO the $250 8800 is a midrange card belonging in a $1000 system, not a budget card.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Plan B, keep old rig and play even older games. X-Wing Alliance runs realy good on a 1900XP Athlon with 1-and-a-quarter GB and an Geforce 7200. Plus older games I find have better gameplay.. kids todays with their anti-aliased fluid dynamic particle systems and cell processors, sorry this ol'timer does go on.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
According to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html I would say there are better deals than the X2 4000+ (The Q6600 is only $270 and can overclock nicely)
Everyones financial situation is different but $500 as an upgrade to a system is not a lot of money if you budget it over the life of the upgrade. If you take $500 and spread it over 12 months, you are looking at $41.67 per month. Likely these upgrades will last you a couple years if you don't "need" to play future games with everything turned way up. $41.67/month may not work for everyone so calling it inexpensive is going to be a relative term. Compared to the traditional gaming systems, $500 is inexpensive. If your income level can't support $41.67/month for a year, then it is "expensive" relative to your disposable income. If you don't have that level of disposable income, then likely you'll have to save up longer and try to extend the life of an existing PC.
As someone who recently purchased Lenova desktops (3000 J115 series) for about $500 + a nVidia 8600 GT for $110, I'd like to say that you could probably reduce the $500 to $350 and still get a decent gaming system. I'm able to play World of Warcraft with the settings all the way up on at 1440 x 900 (native resolution for the LCD included with the Lenova system).
Jim
Not sure if anyone else pointed this out, but why would you be concerned about a mobo that has integrated graphics? I would think that if you are purchasing an 8800GT you would want something more than a PCIe x4 slot when you can easily buy a board that has x16 available. And would I really care that my mobo has a built in HDMI and DVI connector when I have a dedicated GPU with its own connectors? Sounds like he is just repeating picks for some other el cheapo system build and claiming its for gamers.
The best hardware for the price is always, always 'top-of-the-line minus ONE'.
I fully agree with this generalization, but sometimes you can go a few notches below the 'top-of-the-line' and still get huge performance. The best thing I found in the article is their recommendation of the AMD 4000 ($75.00 @ NewEgg) cpu over the higher end 5600s and 6000s. Using the 'minus-one' strategy, I planned on replacing my Athlon XP 3200 system with one based on the Athlon 64 M2 5200 ($119.00 @ NewEgg). So this article is giving me confidence going with a processor that's $50 cheaper.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
All you have to do to avoid even paying $500 is play CS all your life. Saved me a lot of money. :)
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
I built a machine for my family a few years ago. I bought an SLI mobo and only ONE of the SLI video cards. My plan was that ... while this card would be expensive NOW in about a year it will be cheaper and I can buy the 2nd of the 2 and get better video performance as an upgrade.
... now I'm wondering which is better.. a single 8800 card referred to in the article or these dual SLI 6600 series cards.
A few things were wrong with that.
a) the price of this particular card didn't drop that much
b) there appear to be some goofy bottlenecks in the dual mode SLI that are still keeping it down.
It's a 6600 series card (two in SLI mode) and
Let's say a $500 upgrade lasts me two years. If you break it down into monthly payments (since you seem to like comparing it to montly car and mortgage payments), that's roughly $21 per month.
I can still play Oblivion on my 5 year old Dell (2.66ghz Pentium4, 1GB ram, 533mhz FSB) with a Radeon 9600 XT, mind you it was running at 800x600 with medium to low settings, but it was still very playable. My high end gaming rig is too heavy to carry around, so I used to bring my old Dell over to my friends house for some lan games, and it could handle Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 quite well (did I mention it's a 5 year old PC?)
This could not have come at a better time as my motherboard (GA-M55plus-S3G) just died. Didn't even know there was anything other than nvidia/via (mostly nvidia ) that I could buy. SO now I get to look at boards with an AMD 690G/V chipset.
GA-MA69GM-S2H just seams ok, a bit to much flash, and I hate hate hate realtek nics. What happened to 3com or other nics?
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I recently upgraded. Being a full time student, I focussed on getting the most bang for the buck. I did not put in a graphics card yet since I don't have time to game for a few months. I will get whatever is a good deal when I do since prices drop all the time. But for the sake of price, here are the specs.
ECS P4M900T-M + E2140 = $89
RAM 2GB (5300) - $40
7900GS - $99
Case + KB + Mouse Combo - $35
Reused extra drives from earlier machine.
Don't believe the prices? That's because I built it using items on sale and with rebates. It will not do Crysis justice but should play just about any other game on my meager 17'' monitor but still provide at least as good visuals as the newer consoles.
Total - $268
Hopefully my old one will get me $150-$200 on Craigslist to offset further. So what did I spend to stay current? Around $100. PC gaming is not expensive unless people want to play the latest games on a large display.
Spend the money to beer and your computer faster than you can handle! "In the game of chess you can never let your opponent see your pieces" - J
In the game of chess you must never allow your opponent to see your pieces.
Talking about the Gigabyte board from the review: its DVI adaptor carries ONLY digital signals - you can't use an DVI to VGA adaptor to "power" an analog monitor thru the DVI connection.
Anyway, you still have the VGA output on board
...I have a 3Ghz P4 that does everything extremely well, except play current games.
I would say this article was meant for you?
Having morphed my single processor crappy video card unit through five iterations to a all but the last bleeding edge setup, I can tell you that even a modest upgrade to a dual core processor on sale plus a better video card will not only allow you to play todays games but will allow you to crank up the detail in your beloved older games.
I can never go back to my old system after seeing it the way the developers intended: Settings cranked all the way up.
Purchase the Orange box game then benchmark it on your current system, then find a friend who has a gaming rig or perform the above mentioned upgrades.
Then you will see what the fighting is all about!
I just bought a new computer last month. Total price, converted to US dollars, was $1482.
:)
:)
That might seem like a lot of money, but considering I don't have any kids, no car and a pretty decent salary I figured I could afford it. Not to mention, I hadn't spent a dime on computer parts since 2003, and with the Orange Box coming out, well.. You do the math
If your hobby is PC gaming then no, $500 is not a lot of money. It's actually a very good price for upgrading your PC to play the latest games. I'd actually worry more about the prices of the games themselves
Blog -
I assume that "hanging in there" means that the system isn't top notch, but is adequate to play a decent round. That's fine if you are a casual/weekend gamer. For us hardcore gamers a few thousand dollars is well worth it. I play 40+ hours a week (mostly COD:UO MP) and I can definitely tell the difference between "hanging in there" and beating the crap out of everyone.
Hell, guys, my vid card cost more thatn $500.
Just two months ago I finished my summer employment before heading back to university and after much painstaking calculating, I found I had enough cash to equip myself with a new PC for that all important "Stay home playing games instead of going to class" factor. I budgetted myself £800, this being the price of my previous gaming rig a few years ago. I am now the proud owner of a Quad Core 2.4ghz Intel CPU, 2gb of RAM, 500gb HDD, swanky Asus mobo with all the extras and a 8800GTS 640mb graphics card as well as the usual keyboard, mouse, opticals etc. The only salvage was my nearly new Hyundai monitor ( a birthday gift) and my trusty 4.1 speaker system. The result? So far, I've found nothing that can challenge it to any degree. The SupCom stress test rolls smoothly with a score that's by no means the highest but still far in excess of the average, Episode 2 and it's counterparts barely even caused it to look round and the Crysis demo is maxed out and running sweet as a nut at 1440x900. This came in to the grand total of £700, including a case and PSU. Given current exchanges, that's nearly 1400$ but I'm still deeply in the black financially using nothing but my earnings as a freezer stocking monkey at the local supermarket. Hell, I've got 500$ in a sock under my bed. Surely it cannot be that hard to budget in a relatively epic machine into the monthly bills when you've got a real job?
Graphics hardware is Way behind.
http://www.idfun.de/temp/q4rt/
Ray Tracing requires a huge amount of hardware. After that is being drawn > 30 fps, then we can move on to Sub-surface scattering so that marble and milk look right.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Or you could buy a dedicated game system that hooked in to the big screen TV set.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I tend to buy the top of the line everything when I buy a computer, and it generally lasts me about 2 years. 2 years ago I put this computer together, AMD 3200+ x64, 2 GB ram, ASUS a8n-sli-deluxe with a gf7950 GT and 3 160GB SATA2 drives (I was going to RAID them but while the onboard chipset supports it, IO became a huge bottleneck). At the moment I'm only playing WoW and Hellgate London but both are running maxed out settings without any problems (aside from Hellgate's buggyness).
I played Vanguard for awhile too, at midrange settings it handled the game at around 40 fps (but this was during beta and from what I've heard they've done TONS of optimization since I last played)
Point is, I could probably build this computer now for a couple hundred and it works very well. It seems game manufacturers are getting better at supporting other than top of the line hardware lately. I'm sure I've spent more than $1500 on beer or gas or eating out instead of cooking dinner because I didn't feel like it or whatever...
The Answer