Guide - the Budget Gaming PC

Solitaire

Hmm... a new model... the older Revoltecs were pretty revolting :P

And the next step up from the AF7 is a Xigmatek Gaia or Coolermaster Hyper 212 Plus. Both are great coolers yet very cheap for their class. Problem is I don't know if either are LGA1155-compatible

Sparks

700-odd is definitely a lot more tempting than 800-odd...
...but part of me is wondering if it'd be a better idea to invest in a good solid set of parts for the budget box now and upgrade the mobo and cpu later on (and retire the older cpu and mobo to a networked HDPC or even a NAS setup)?
Budget now and full-blown later on?
Hm.


(This is, by the way, what they call a nice problem to have )

Sparks

Yeah. I think the budget box now, but with more leeway for quality peripheral parts like the case, PSU and so forth, and come back to it in 6-12 months to replace the core from the athlon up to an i7.

IMH, I love the look of that super-flower PSU (flower-power? Oh dear....) you recommended, but the case? It seems.... well, a bit generic. Anything you guys have seen for reasonable prices that's solidly built, easy to open up and fit stuff to, and not the size of a refrigerator? Preferably built for quiet(ish) running?

Sparks

Solitaire wrote: »

Hmm... a new model... the older Revoltecs were pretty revolting :P

So I'm weird for thinking that the Revoltec Sixty 2 is actually a decent looking case?

Looking at the Lian Li's has anyone used the PC-A05NB or the PC-X900B cases at all?

IrishMetalhead

i would go for a fractal define r3 tbh it has nice subtle looks and is hella quiet:
Black: http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=36379&agid=631
Titanium: http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=36381&agid=631
Silver: http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=36380&agid=631

or an NZXT Phantom if your looking for something that looks flashy and is abit on the pricey side:

Black: http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=38376&agid=632
White: http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=38374&agid=632
Red: http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=38375&agid=632

Or a Silverstone Raven 2 for something more unique (also pricey):
http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=28596&agid=631

Sparks

Definitely not looking for flashy, I'm way too old for that
Solid construction, enough room to avoid tight fits while not being the size of a small fridge, and no sharp edges (I've lost too much blood and skin to those in the past) make up my criteria

The Fractal 3 looks like it'd fit the bill nicely - have you used one before?

IrishMetalhead

have built a computer using the define r2 for a client before it was a very nice case and brilliant for cable management and the r3 is just a revised version of that which is apperently alot better

Sparks

Brilliant. That sounds like a decent plan to me so. Emailed HWVS to get them to put in my proper delivery address, will order the bits and pieces next week and post up the end results when it's all put together. Thanks for the help IMH!

Tea_Bag

IrishMetalhead wrote: »

Or a Silverstone Raven 2 for something more unique (also pricey):
http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=28596&agid=631

thats a really interesting case. the whole bottom is made up of fans. cool:cool:

Sparks even though my rig is similar to the one you first wanted, gtx460 and athlon x3 (mines unlocked to a full phenom X4:D), and its able to eat anything i throw at it, Id recommend against getting it. Its fantastic value for money, and will no doubt be able to play most things outside of crysis acceptably for a while to come, but you'll wish in a year or 2 that you had spent that extra +- €250 and got an i5 2500k rig instead of starting from scratch again. athlon X3's are reaching their peak and a tripple core will become a bottleneck sooner rather than later.

4.6Ghz+ from the i5 on air (with no effort) with a 560Ti (which is apparently what it will take crysis 2 to max) or similar Radeon card means no upgrades of any kind needed for the foreseeable (read: +- 5 years) future.

and lastly, thanks for the Pulled Pork recipe. ive made it 3 times now and had some on pizza last night for dinner. tastiest meal i ever did make.:)

Sparks

The plan is to rip out the cpu and motherboard in 6-12 months Teabag, so it shouldn't come to that.

Objective is to be able to play COD4, Battlefield 3, Team Fortress 2 and Falcon 4.0 (and a small host of earlier games). The rig should handle that and the upgraded i7 rig should handle the upcoming games later on this year.

(And you're welcome about the pulled pork - try the chilli too! )

IrishMetalhead

i would get a different graphics card tho either a 6870, 570 or a 6950 would do nicely and should keep you fairly future proofed with games

Monotype

So what are you actually ordering Sparks?

Don't be fooled by the i5/i7 naming, the 2500K is easily as good as the high end i7s and overclocks extremely well.
If you go for the budget build now, the new intel socket is due at the end of the year. I think that a good PSU could last you through two systems and save money in the long run. If you want to play the current games as best as you can for the money, definitely focus more towards the graphics end.

You can see in the estimated specs that focus is very heavily on graphics cards.

An athlon X4 overclocked to the mid 3-4GHz range should give you similar power to the 2.66GHz i7 920 BTW.

Sparks

Monotype wrote: »

So what are you actually ordering Sparks?

The budget build, mk2.
Which is a mix of my original build and IMH's recommendations:
CPU|AMD Athlon II X3 445|€63.19
Cooling|Artic Cooling Freezer 7|€15.73
Motherboard|ASRock M3A770DE|€54.10
RAM|4GB Mushkin Silverline Stiletto|€33.64
Graphics Card|Gainward GeForce GTX 460 Golden Sample|€186.21
HDD|1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3|€46.61
Optical|Samsung SH-223C DVD+RW|€16.61
Case|Fractal R3 (black)|€91.69
PSU:|Super-Flower Amazon 550W|€51.47
Shipping||€30
Total||€589.25

It's over my initial budget, but I'm convincing myself that I can just look at the first digit and be happy enough because I've futureproofed myself and therefore saved money in the long run
(I'm ignoring the voice in my head pointing out that I could just play Angry Birds instead and save even more money )

You can see in the estimated specs that focus is very heavily on graphics cards.

Yeah, but looking at Tom's DirectX11 performance graphs, the top slots are mixed between 480s, 560s and radeons. I'm not really convinced that the 560s are worth the extra €40-80 they're charging, and really not convinced the 580s are worth the extra €200 or so they're charging. There's 2Gb on the 460 card in that build, I'm thinking that should be enough to last a year or two before it becomes too underpowered The bigger question is whether that GTX460 with 2Gb at 700MHz is going to be better than the Gainward GTH version with 1Gb at 800Mhz. I'm thinking that having more room on the card beats being able to shuffle stuff on and off the card more quickly though.

Sparks

*ahem*
Yes, just realised I had number blindness and was reading 480 as 460 because I was focussing on the 560s and 580s at the top end
Maybe the extra 20-30 euro for a 560 is worth it after all

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti OC
• Palit Geforce GTX 560 Ti Sonic

I'd lean towards the Palit myself because of the extra cooling (being paranoid about overclocking stuff). Any thoughts?

Monotype

I think you'll be pleased with that choice. The 460 is a very good choice, but at that price, there are better choices even if it is the golden sample version.

If you wanted to save money, 6870s are dipping as low as €165, but I think that the 560 should last you a long time.

BTW, 2GB on a card is not much good to you unless you have resolutions above HD.

Jonathan

Have you an aversion to ATI or do you need CUDA?

Sparks

I tend to lean heavily towards nVidia for 3D stuff because of some really fun times trying to get ATI cards to work under linux. These days, that fun is hopefully a thing of the past, but since the card will one day wind up in a linux box (the guts of this machine are getting ripped out in 6-12 months to be replaced with an i7 core while the Athlon goes on to run a HTPC setup and the graphics card will eventually get pulled for that as well) the old prejudices die hard

IrishMetalhead

your completely right no point going for a previous gen card when you could easily afford a newer and much faster card so id have to say go for the palit 560 aswell but the gigabyte come facotry overclocked so it'd be slightly faster

Sparks

Yup, so now I'm just waiting on hwvs to get back to me about entering the full delivery address and I can hit the order button... (what are their delivery times like for dublin normally?)

Sparks

Hm. The Mushkin memory's not in stock, so swapping that out for a 4GB-Kit DDR3 Crucial Ballistix PC1600 CL8. Heatsinks on the memory chips. That's new since I did this last. I like it.

Tea_Bag

Sparks wrote: »

Hm. The Mushkin memory's not in stock, so swapping that out for a 4GB-Kit DDR3 Crucial Ballistix PC1600 CL8. Heatsinks on the memory chips. That's new since I did this last. I like it.

thats faster ram @1600mhz and CL8 but it is alot more expensive.
heatsinks on the RAM make you look 1337 but would make no difference unless you OC the ram to 2000mhz+

Monotype

Cheaper, similar timings and same speed.
http://www3.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=38484

Or something cheaper if you're budget is as tight.
http://www3.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=33951

Edit: actually, that's what you had earlier; it's back in stock.

Sparks

Monotype wrote: »

Edit: actually, that's what you had earlier; it's back in stock.

Feck, that was fast; it was only out of stock this morning....

Sparks

Argh. Okay, officially annoyed at the ordering process for HWVS now. Feck that. Bank transfers and days of waiting. I was hoping to get the order in today and with me before the weekend. Went to dabs.ie, worked off the spec we put together on HWVS, replicated the core of the system easily enough (change in case and PSU), for about the same price, all parts in stock now bar the motherboard which is saying 1-2 days:

ASRock M3A770DE/A/ASR AM3 AMD 770 DDR3 ATX |€53.40
AMD Athlon II X3 445 3.1GHz AM3 1.5MB L2|€63.29
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 CPU Cooler|€17.27
Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F3 7200rpm SATA 3Gb/s 32MB|€48.00
Best Value GeForce GTX 560Ti 1GB PCI-Express HDMI Palit|€234.15
Corsair Memory DDR3 1333MHz 4GB kit of 2x240 pin DIMM"s, Unbuffer|€41.93
Antec 300 Three Hundred Case Black|€55.79
Best Value Samsung 22X S-ATA DVD Writer - Black|€15.10
Akasa 550W Dual 12V Rail PSU|€55.91
Delivery|€17.73
Total (inc VAT)|€602.57

So two questions - How's that PSU look, and how are dabs.ie about stock level information? Is it 1-2 days, or "some day, some time, maybe"?

Solitaire

PSU is rubbish, and in Dabs "1-2 days" means "somewhere around the death of the universe" :pac:

Amazed at the prices though... how the heck are Dabs so cheap all of a sudden? :eek: Are those prices sans VAT?

dkmedia

Solitaire wrote: »

PSU is rubbish, and in Dabs "1-2 days" means "somewhere around the death of the universe" :pac:

Amazed at the prices though... how the heck are Dabs so cheap all of a sudden? :eek: Are those prices sans VAT?

Just to let ye know, dabs.ie is in a mess at the moment as far as refunds & ordering goes. They upgraded their system in the past week or two and things have gone downhill.

Their customer service is terrible at the moment as well, taking 2 days for a reply to emails and half baked responses.

Anyone else getting "General Error" when trying to order with them?

Sparks

Was afraid of that, dabs weren't very good at the whole "being accurate" thing about stock timings even before dabs.ie. And the website stuff just makes it even less attractive a prospect.

So with dabs.ie ruled out, I went to scan:

Antec 300 Three Hundred|£46.60
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 Classic, DDR3 PC3-10666 |£38.54
Samsung SH-S223L|£16.90
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2|£15.58
1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3|£38.98
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3 |£57.32
AMD Athlon II X3 450|£58.14
500W Corsair CMPSU-500CXUK Builder Series|£44.96
Gigabyte GV-N560SO-1GI-950 Super Overclock|£217.87
Total (inc VAT, carriage)|£559.55 (€640ish)

Different motherboard maker, but gigabyte aren't exactly a dodgy maker
and it's the same chipset and general spec as the ASRock. Slightly
different graphics card - that's actually the one I really wanted to
find, but couldn't on the other sites, so I'm happy at the little price
hike since it comes in nearly 10% faster than the other GTX560 cards in
Tom's benchmarks. And different case, but that was the difference
between €630 and €680 I'll just have to resign myself to looking at
the screen instead of the lovely case

Everything in stock, payment by credit card, should all be fine, right?

Sparks

...and ordered. So next person to tell me "Oh no, you didn't waste your money on *that* did you?" won't be popular
Thanks to IMH and Monotype for all their help, I'll let you know how the build goes...

IrishMetalhead

nice choice on the case =D
the antec 300 looks just lovely espiecally if you get to add to 120 blue led fans to the front to make it look like a min 1200
motherboard look decent too altho the 8pin is located in such a stupid location but other than that it look really solid

Sparks

Excellent!
Given that the last gaming rig I had was a decade ago and could just about manage counterstrike at 800x600@20fps, I'm seriously looking forward to what this rig will be able to do
I'm hoping for mind-blowing