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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
Omitting details like drives and case is cheating quite a bit.
What about the types who are still running a system with IDE drives? Or their old case has dead fans? The cost starts escalating fast. If they built an all-new system for $500 that could play Crysis, maybe then I would be impressed.
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.
Amen. Can you believe that someone would go to Dell's website and pay an extra $200 for an Intel Core2 Duo Processor E6700 (4MB L2 Cache,2.66GHz,1066 FSB) instead of an E6600 (4MB L2 Cache,2.4GHz,1066 FSB)?
Friggin' amazing!
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)
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http://bridgehosting.net/cheap-gaming-rig ?
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.
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.