Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: Buy Or Build a High End Gaming PC?

Posted by timothy on from the time-to-stalk-craigslist-for-the-discards dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Looking at some Black Friday ads, I'm seeing some good deals on Alienware and other gaming rigs that would be cheaper than building them from scratch. If you built or were to build a high end gaming rig, what would you suggest? Or would you just get a prebuilt system and customize it to your needs? I'm not looking for cheap, I want best quality and performance, but not overkill that would rival supercomputers and at the same time break my bank account. It would be a Windows system to keep my family happy, but possibly dual boot with Linux to keep me happy. It will be located in the livingroom hooked up to a regular monitor and the big screen TV, replacing a budget PC that's in there now.

1 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Update to question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you're building a "high-end gaming PC" as the summary asked about, you are never going to save money buying it. Never. Not. Ever.

    Here's how I usually budget and build a gaming desktop:
    - Motherboard: $250-ish. No more than $300. Always full-ATX unless there's a specific need for a smaller board. Always ASUS, but that's personal preference.
    - CPU: $300 because Intel won't let this price point go. This is always where the top-end i7 lands. I never buy AMD anymore. I wish their glory days would return once again, but I don't think it will happen anytime reasonably soon. It's unfortunate, but that's life.
    - GPU: $300. Maybe allow up to $350 if there's a really good deal on something that's normally way more than that. Always nVidia. I've had good results with EVGA cards. I've had poor results with ASUS. Don't bother doing an SLI/Crossfire setup. If you had money to spare, you wouldn't be asking if it was cost-effective to buy vs. build.
    - RAM: $150. Get whatever spec is cheap and compatible with the motherboard. Get at least 16GB.
    - SSD: $150. That's currently about a 512GB drive.
    - HDD: $100. That's currently about a 2TB drive. Use this as a slow bulk storage space and a place to put the swap partition so it doesn't wear-level your SSD to its grave.
    - PSU: $100. Get the minimum that will power everything. Likely this will be around 650W because video cards and Intel CPU's are power hogs.
    - Case: $150. Get a decent brand like Antec, Cooler Master, or Corsair. Your un-cut knuckles will thank you.
    - Other hardware: $250. Use this budget for optional stuff like optical drives, flash card readers, hot-swap bays, keyboard, mouse, monitor, and any accessories or bling you want to add right away.
    - Windows: $140. Get the Pro version. Always. Just get OEM, as there's nothing special about the retail version anymore. They all activation-lock to the first motherboard you install to.

    That comes to about $1900 plus a couple hours of your time to put it together and kick off Windows Setup.