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 unless explicitly specified otherwise. 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. I had hoped the new Core i3s and i5s would be introduced at prices low enough to get them on the budget build list. Now that I've seen them, the Core i5 750 would still be my Intel budget CPU of choice. The good news this time: CPU prices have come down and my case of choice went down by $10. The bad news: The Nvidia GTX 260 - my staple card for budget gaming - seems to be in short supply and prices have risen .. a lot - like $40-50. Memory and disk drive prices also rose slightly, which didn't help my goal. Motherboard prices seem to be holding steady at least. My self-established goal is $900 if possible, with an absolute maximum of $1000. That said, if you do have a few more dollars to spend, check out the bonus build.
CPU - This is the one ray of sunshine this time around. The AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition price has dropped to $162. That's only $19 more than the AMD Phenom II X4 810 cost when I chose it for the previous budget build. The version chosen for this build has the new C3 stepping, which reportedly has better power consumption and higher overclocking headroom. When the original AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition was introduced in April 2009, its cost was around $245. With this build, I've stayed with the stock cooler for the CPU. This processor is a 125W TDP model, so this is an area we may want to revisit later. (We will not be overclocking in this build, but add a good 3rd party CPU heatsink/fan, and it's certainly doable.) Motherboards of good quality that can be paired with the AMD go for a bit less than those of the Intel counterpart, so it makes sense for a budget build. There are plenty of reviews for the 955 BE because in many benchmarks, it gives the $300 Core i7 920 a run for its money. A few are found at TechSpot, Overclocker's Club and HEXUS. These are reviews of the original 955 BE from April 2009.
Motherboard - I've chosen a Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P as the motherboard for this build (for the third budget build in a row). At $80, it's still a reasonable overclocker, and with the AMD 955 BE, we need the extra TDP handling this board has. It has only a single PCI-Express X16 slot, so no Crossfire here, but then budget builds don't usually include multiple graphics cards. Also, it's reported that the AMD770 doesn't support multi-GPU configurations at all, so the 4870X2 and 4850X2 are not candidates either. 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. It's still a budget rig, but that doesn't mean it has to be slow. More information on this motherboard can be found at Gigabyte's web site.
Memory - The writing's on the wall for DDR2 memory; DDR3 is the new standard. The Gigabyte motherboard uses up to DDR3 1600 memory. Going with DDR3 gives a little performance boost here and creates the possibility of taking this memory forward in the future. In order to keep the price right at $80, which is the same as the last build, I'm going with 4GB of Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333 (as a two by 2GB kit). This starts the system off with 4GB in two of the four memory slots. This makes me grumble in that this is CAS 9 memory and a couple builds ago, CAS 7 DDR3 1600 memory was the same price. This prices going up crap has got to stop. If you look around, you can likely find at least CAS 8 DDR3 1600 memory by OCZ or Corsair that with a rebate that drops it in the $80 range. If you find it, take it.
Graphics Card - I'm really grumbling here. Just plain grumbling. There's a shortage of Nvidia GPUs across the board. There's a shortage of ATI GPUs as well, but it's not as bad, and ATI GPUs always seem to be in short supply. A couple articles I found say this is due to increased demand [Reuter's][Firing Squad], but I suspect Nvidia expected to have switched their demand to their new Fermi boards in early January. Nvidia says that they always planned to release Fermi-based GPUs in March 2010 although many believed it would be released during the January 2010 CES. What's the real story? Ineptitude in determining market demand for their current products or the inability to hit manufacturing target dates for their new ones? The bottom line is the GTX 260 and GTX 275 graphics cards are very hard to find. (At this writing, Newegg doesn't have a single GTX 275 card in stock.) Even the pricey GTX 285s are only in limited supply. Because of this, prices are rising. I bought a GTX 275 card for my own rig for $219 with an additional $15 rebate. Some GTX 260s are selling for that, now - or they would be, if they were in stock. This forced a hard decision in the budget build.
I find a good match of graphics card to CPU is to get a graphics card that costs roughly from the same cost as the CPU to about 10-15% more than the CPU. This is likely to change at some point, but it's been holding for a while now. In the case of the budget build, I generally try to keep the CPU right around $150, which would mean a graphics card price from $150 to 172.50. So, even though I've splurged with a $162 CPU, I still want to keep the graphics cost around the level. Ideally, I would like to stay right at or less than the $165 price of the GTX 260 I used in the last build. Since the GTX 260 moved way outside of this range (the cheapest one in stock being $190), I could fall back to the ATI 4870. Two problems with that: 1) It's already been end-of-lifed (EOLed) by ATI (as it's a year old GPU), and 2) the cheapest one available that I would buy is $170. Instead, I've chosen to go with the SAPPHIRE 100283-2L Radeon HD 5770 1GB right at $165. This irks me because it's both slower than the 4870 and the GTX 260 in most benchmarks. It does, however, have DirectX 11 support, which might become important in the next year. It's not a bad card at all, just not what $165 bought a few months back. <Grumble>
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 in a budget build because this is a place where some money can be saved. However, one can go too cheap and make building the new PC 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. For this build, I've again selected the Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case, which has had a $10 price drop to $60. The Illusion is a step up from the regular Antec Three Hundred because it includes the two front Antec TriCool fans. I've done a build with the Antec Three Hundred, and I find a lot of things to like about it (many of which were the same or similar to the Cooler Master case).
You can find out more about it here and the (English) manual is here. I expect this case to be in my 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-envelope 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 955 Black Edition uses up to 182W according to this Guru of 3D article. That's the total power consumption of the system though, not just the processor, so the graphics card uses a little. We're interested in worst case though since that's what the PSU has to be able to supply. The Nvidia GTX 260 (1GB) uses up to 108W according to this Tom's Hardware article. Those two components alone total up to 290W. 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 aren't always published. 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 420W. Assuming we want no more than a 70% load on the PSU (50% is a good target, too), we need at least a 600W power supply.
Given that all of the calculations are worst case, a 650W PSU should be plenty. Interestingly, the best PSU still seems to be the same OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W PSU picked for the last build. This is the same PSU as in the last build list, but with another $5 price increase making it $85, which makes a $10 hike since last summer. I have the OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI 700W power supply in my gaming machine, and I like it very much. As of this writing, there is a $25 mail in rebate card that makes it effectively $60.
Hard Drive - This has been a bad couple of months for my picks on hard disk drives. I suggested last time that if you wanted (or could only afford) a single drive, go with the Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA drive, which has 1TB of space for $100. The motherboard supports RAID 0 (as well as 1 and 0+1) and RAID 0 striped drives truly make a system run faster, so my suggestion for the last build was to go with a pair of Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive drives. Unfortunately, their price went up $10. Again, we need a pair for RAID 0, so that's a $20 increase in the cost.
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 Lite-On iHAS-324-98 24X DVD Writer with LightScribe Model 1270i. There's others out there that are just as good. If you happen to have a copy of Nero or Roxio CD Creator, feel free to go with an OEM drive.
Operating System - Here we go with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM version for $105. 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.
| Component | Description | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition | $162 |
| CPU Cooler | Stock | $0 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3 | $80 |
| Memory | Corsair XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 Model TW3X4G1333C9A | $80 |
| Graphics Card | SAPPHIRE 100283-2L Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 | $165 |
| Sound | Integrated sound on motherboard | $0 |
| Case | Antec Three Hundred Illusion black mid-tower | $60 |
| Power Supply | OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W Power Supply | $85 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive (Times 2 for RAID 0) | $160 |
| DVD/RW Drive | LITE-ON Black SATA 24X DVD Writer | $30 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $105 |
| Total | The final damage less shipping | $931 |
I again exceeded my self-imposed limit of $900 that's usually my bar for a "budget" system, but given all the prices that have gone up since the build last October, I'm happy to still be under $1000 for a system with this much power. We've bumped up the CPU, but downgraded the graphics card. The latter does not make me happy. I expect the situation will improve, but not likely until the Fermi boards are out in the 2nd quarter (at the earliest) of 2010. Keep in mind, this build is not intended to be the rock bottom build that can play average games. With DDR3 memory, RAID 0 hard drives, a fast CPU and a decent graphics card, this system should run any game out there fairly well. If you build this system (or one based off of it), I love to hear from you with any problems, praises or jeers you have by emailing me.
Bonus Build! - What I was really hoping for when the new Core i5s came out was to be able to use one of those models and a P55-chipset (LGA 1156) motherboard in the budget build. I hoped the same thing again when the Core i3s came out. Intel hasn't been competing in the under $1000 build nearly as well as they could. I'm still waiting. The closest thing to the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition used above is the new Intel Core i3-540. It costs $145 or $17 less than the AMD 955. However, most tests/benchmarks I've seen to date show it lagging significantly behind both the AMD 955 and the Intel i5-750. With the price drop of the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition to $162, there's much less of a clear reason to go with the Core i5 750.
CPU - The substitution here is the new Intel Core i5 750. Theres a very good review at Guru of 3D that shows that the Intel Core i5 750 sometimes beats and sometimes loses to the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition. Given that it's $37 more and that the P55 motherboards tend to cost more than AM3 motherboards, the reason to go this route is not as easy to justify as it was in the last build. Still, it's the Intel processor to choose for a budget gamer.
Motherboard - The substitution here is a motherboard compatible with the Intel Core i5 750. I'm basically choosing the Intel Core i7/i5/i3 equivalent to the Gigabyte motherboard chosen for the AMD 955 above. It costs more than the AMD counterpart. It has a few more ports on the back than the AMD board, but not enough to justify a $25 increase. It is a newer product with fewer competitors, so this difference will likely disappear in the future.
| Component | Description | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5 750 | $200 |
| CPU Cooler | Stock | $0 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 LGA 1156 Intel P55 | $105 |
| Memory | Corsair XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 Model TW3X4G1333C9A | $80 |
| Graphics Card | SAPPHIRE 100283-2L Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 | $165 |
| Sound | Integrated sound on motherboard | $0 |
| Case | Antec Three Hundred Illusion black mid-tower | $60 |
| Power Supply | OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W Power Supply | $85 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive (Times 2 for RAID 0) | $160 |
| DVD/RW Drive | LITE-ON Black SATA 24X DVD Writer | $30 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $105 |
| Total | The final damage less shipping | $990 |
This build definitely exceeds my self-imposed limit of $900 at $990. This bonus build was introduced in the last budget build. At that time, I thought it was well worth the difference. This time, the $60 difference in price versus the increase in performance isn't that clear. In fact, there may be no increase in performance. Still, it you're a true blue Intel fan, this is probably the way to go for a budget build.
If you do build this system (or one based off of it), I love to hear from you with any problems, praises or jeers you have by emailing me.