So you want to play the latest games, but your budget is limited. Still, you want a system your friends won't laugh at. You want to be able to play the current crop of games on reasonably high settings and hope to run this system for the next year or two without having to back off the graphics settings to "minimum." This section's for you.
As mentioned in the introduction, all prices are from Newegg. No special prices (e.g., after mail-in-rebate prices or combo prices are used if that can be avoided. You should be able to load these items in your cart and get them at or near the prices quoted.
CPU - There are two really good choices in the budget world at the moment in my opinion, the AMD Phenom II X4 810 at $145 and the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 at $150. Both are good at their stock values and both overclock reasonably. There are some reviews at Extreme Overclocking, Guru of 3D and Neoseeker. In general, the edge seems to go to the AMD Phenom II X4 810. Additionally, motherboards of good quality that can be paired with the AMD go for a bit less than those of the Intel counterpart. With this build, I've stayed with the stock cooler for the CPU. This processor is a 95W TDP model, so this is an area we may want to revisit later.
Motherboard - I've chosen a Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P as the motherboard for this build. At $85, it's still a reasonable overclocker. It has only a single PCI-Express X16 slot, so no Crossfire here. Also, it's reported that the AMD770 doesn't support multi-GPU configurations at all, so the 4870X2 and 4850X2 are not candidates either. After years of squatting solidly in the Asus camp, I've recently converted to the Gigabyte religion. The reason: their 2 oz copper PCBs (the Ultra-Durable line with "UD" in the model number) have run solid in my last three builds and overclock like nobody's business. They're just problem-free boards. In general, I'll always stick with the big four: Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and ECS, but right now, Gigabyte and I are dating. There are some reviews at Guru of 3D and Neoseeker. This motherboard has a nice layout - avoiding having anything directly under/behind the PCI-E X16 slot though the IDE socket is close. We won't be using any IDE devices for this build, but those upgrading and bringing along an older CD/DVD-RW/ROM drive might have an issue. The board does support several types of RAID and DDR3 1600 memory - both of which we're going to use. It's still a budget rig, but not slow. More information on this motherboard can be found at Gigabyte's web site.
Memory - In this component, I'm splurging a little by going with DDR3 memory over DDR2. We scrimped a little on the motherboard without sacrificing performance so that can be spent here. The fact is, the writing's on the wall for DDR2 memory; DDR3 is the new standard. Going with DDR3 gives a little performance boost here and creates the possibility of taking this memory forward in the future. I've gone with OCZ Reaper HPC 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) even though it's about $10 more than the cheapest available DDR3 1600 available. I've just had very good experiences with the OCZ Reaper memory. It overclocks well and the heatpipe risers look cool and keep the memory cool. This starts the system off with 4GB in two of the four memory slots.
Graphics Card - In the recent history, I've noted that a good match to the CPU is to get a graphics card that costs roughly the same to about 10-15% more than the CPU. This wasn't always the case, but seems to ring true for the last six months or so. For this rig, that would mean a graphics card in the $150-$173 range. This basically means either the ATI Radeon HD 4870 series or the Nvidia GTX 260 series. Interestingly, that would have been the ATI 4850 and Nvidia GTS 250 a few weeks ago, but graphics card prices have been falling rapidly.
I tend to lean toward ATI cards to go with AMD chipsets since AMD owns ATI and probably does most of their testing using ATI graphics cards. That's not to say an Nvidia card wouldn't work; it probably would. Narrowing it down to ATI still leaves a couple dozen cards in that price range. I went with the Asus EAH4870 Dark Knight DK/HTDI/1GD5 Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory. The Sapphire 100259-1GL Radeon HD 4870 1GB and XFX HD-487A-ZHFC Radeon HD 4870 1GB cards also looked very good - especially the Sapphire card with over 600 reviews on Newegg and a 5/5 rating. However, I liked the open fin design of the heat pipe cooler that would make a side fan in the case more effective. The Sapphire card was also $10 more (and $30 more if the current $20 rebate on the Asus card is taken as well).
Sound - For this build, we're going with the integrated sound provided by the motherboard. While I still prefer discrete sound cards, the difference isn't worth the cost in a budget gaming rig. Save that money and put it into decent surround sound speakers.
Case - This is a component that often gets the short straw because this is a place where some money can be saved. However, one can go too cheap and make the new PC build a miserable experience. There's nothing worse than having to tear everything apart just to be able to move one disk drive or add a new one. I've selected the Cooler Master RC-690-KKN1-GP (a.k.a. CM 690) black mid-tower computer case. I find a lot to like about this case.
Cooler Master calls this case the CM 690. You can find out more about it here and the manual is here. I expect this case to be in the budget build for a long, long time.
Power Supply - Since this is ostensibly a single graphics card build, we don't need to put a 1000W power supply unit (PSU) in this build. On the other hand, it is not a good area to scrimp on the PSU either. A poorly designed, overloaded/underpowered power supply can manifest itself in a new build as all sorts of problems. If it drops power on one of the 12V rails, the graphics card can malfunction or a disk drive could get corrupted. A bad PSU can appear to be faulty memory or a faulty motherboard as well. We don't need to go top end, but we do need a name we can trust. My short list of PSU suppliers in my personal order of preference includes PC Power & Cooling, FSP Group (Fortron), OCZ Technology (who now own PC Power & Cooling), Enermax, Corsair, BFG and Antec. I also hear good things about Cooler Master, Mushkin, Thermaltake, XClio, Zalman and some of the new Rosewill PSUs, but I've never used them personally.
Let's do a back-of-the-envelop estimate of power consumption for this build. The two main power using components are the graphics card and CPU (in that order). What we're interested in is the worst case power requirements. The AMD Phenom II X4 810 uses up to 170W according to this Guru of 3D article. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 (512MB) uses up to 152W according to this Tom's Hardware article. Those two components alone total up to 322W. The Radeon HD 4870 included in this build is a 1GB model rather than 512MB. If we allow an extra 18W for the extra 512MB of RAM, we can just go with 340W (so far). Finding the exact power requirements of the rest of the components - the motherboard, disk drives, DVD-RW drive, memory and fans is somewhat trickier as the values can be hard to find. Based on several articles such as [1], [2] and [3], I'm going to use 50W for the motherboard, 15W per disk drive, 20W per DVD-RW drive and 15W per RAM DIMM. This comes to 50+(2x15)+20+(2x15) or 130W. Combined with what we had before that's a total of 470W. Assuming we want no more than a 70% load on the PSU (50% is a good target, too), we need at least a 670W power supply.
Given that all of the calculations are worst case, a PSU 650W to 700W range should be a good fit. There are several good candidates in this range, but the OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W PSU comes in slightly cheaper than the rest. I have the OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI 700W power supply in my gaming machine, and I like it very much.
Hard Drive - Picking the hard drive for this system is easy if I want to stay with a single drive. The Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM drive is a great drive with 1TB of space for under $100. The motherboard, however, supports RAID 0 (as well as 1 and 0+1) and RAID 0 striped drives truly make a system run faster. With that in mind, I decided to go with a pair of Western Digital RE2 WD7500AYYS 750GB 7200 RPM hard drives to be used in RAID 0. I try to impose a limit of $900 on the build and going with these pushes me over slightly - even before shipping. The bright side is we have 1.5 TB of disk space running on a pair of RAID-rated hard drives with a 5 year warranty. These are serious drives. You can find out more about them at Western Digital's site.
DVD-RW - DVD/RW drives are truly commodity items. Still need one for loading Windows though. I went with a retail version in order to get the software. For this, I chose the new Lite-On Black 24X SATA DVD writer with LightScribe. There's others out there that are just as good. If you happen to have a copy of Nero or Roxio CD Creater, feel free to go with another one.
Operating System - For this, we go with the venerable Vista Home Premium 64-bit version. This particular version is for system builders, which means you get to do your own product support. I'm not sure how that's any different than the retail version when it comes right down to it. I always end up tracking down my software issues myself. There's just so much info available on the web I've never found the need to use the Microsoft telephone support system. This particular version is $10 more than usual because it includes an upgrade coupon to Windows 7.
| Component | Description | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Phenom II X4 810 | $145 |
| CPU Cooler | Stock | $0 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 | $85 |
| Memory | OCZ Reaper HPC 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 | $96 |
| Graphics Card | Asus EAH4870 Dark Knight Radeon HD 4870 1GB DDR5 | $150 |
| Sound | Integrated sound on motherboard | $0 |
| Case | Cooler Master RC-690-KKN1-GP Mid Tower | $70 |
| Power Supply | OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W Power Supply | $85 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital RE2 WD7500AYYS 750GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive (Times 2 for RAID 0) |
$140 |
| DVD/RW Drive | Lite-On 24X SATA DVD Writer with LightScribe | $33 |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit with Windows 7 Upgrade | $110 |
| Total | The final damage less shipping | $914 |
I exceeded my self-imposed limit of $900 that's usually my bar for a "budget" system. (It didn't help that Newegg raised the price of the OCZ Reaper memory by $6 just one day after I did the original estimate.) That said, this is a bit heftier that the average budget gamer. With DDR3 memory, RAID 0 hard drives, a fast CPU and a very competent graphics card, this system should keep anyone happy. If you have a Newegg account, you should be able to see this saved wish list with these components. If you build this system (or one based off of it), I love to hear from you with any tips, problems, praises or jeers you have by emailing me.