Guide - the Budget Gaming PC

Monotype

I think a better PSU would have been a good idea, those low end corsairs aren't great.

BTW, I've had quite positive experiences with dabs. They're not the best when something is out of stock, but they have a good selection and delivery is fast when they ship. They fixed a problem I had with an order before pretty quick too. Haven't used their new system yet.

Scan are good too. I that hope you had a quick browse at the daily deals for savings!

Sparks

Monotype wrote: »

I think a better PSU would have been a good idea, those low end corsairs aren't great.

Oh, welcome to unpopularville

Scan are good too. I that hope you had a quick browse at the daily deals for savings!

I may have been weak and gotten a decent gaming mouse and keypad...

Solitaire

The CX500/600 aren't awesome but they're not bad either, they're perfectly safe unlike their archaic crossload-prone PoS little brother the CX430

Sparks

Ha! Dispatched from Scan this morning. [burns]Excellent....[/burns]
Incidentally, final build written up...

Trevor451

Do you guys think that a radeon 6850 with a athlon x3 450 should be able to run battlefield 3 good enough at HD res?

I am planning to upgrade my athlon x3 to a phenom x6 later just to future proof for more demanding games

IrishMetalhead

should be, the view distance may effect the cpu it but i don't see any problems why it wouldn't but upgrading to a phenom x6 is a good idea for future proofing regardless

Sparks

Sparks wrote: »

Ha! Dispatched from Scan this morning. [burns]Excellent....[/burns]
Incidentally, final build written up...

Arrived yesterday, assembled last night, POSTed clean first time Installation and "testing" with Crysis2 tonight Thanks for all your help guys!

IrishMetalhead

look forward to part 3 chap

IrishMetalhead

Solitaire wrote: »

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

only just noticed this coment from awhile ago and never replied to it :eek:

LGA1155 uses the exact same cooler mounts as LGA1156 so they bother are 1155 compatible.
But i'm sure between then and now you probably already found thaout

massy086

Sparks wrote: »

Arrived yesterday, assembled last night, POSTed clean first time Installation and "testing" with Crysis2 tonight Thanks for all your help guys!

now take it all out of the case drill some cable management holes and clean up the build the 300 once drilled is not bad for cable management @ this might help http://www.themodbrothers.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=545&start=0 but u can get a round hole saw bit in woodies instead of cutting squares much easy.r

cinnamono

Hi folks, I've finally decided to invest in a new gaming PC, 2 years after my old one died. I'd rather keep the budget low as I plan on buying a 40" LED TV too (which this will be hooked up to). I already have my case and drive intact from my old PC (and I'm sure the HD and PSU probably still work too, but I won't risk it) so it's just the components that I need.

I'd rather keep it around the €500 mark (wouldn't mind it being under it though, but not if it means lowering the ability), going up to €550 if necessary. Here's what I've got myself, from hardwareversand:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 Box, Sockel AM3 | 108,55 €
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 - Pro PWM Rev.2 | 15,73 €
ASUS M4A77TD, Sockel AM3, ATX | 64,12 €
Palit Geforce GTX 560 Ti Sonic, 1024MB, PCI-Express | 210,38 €
4GB-Kit Corsair Twin3X4096-1333C9A DDR3, CL9 | 37,53 €
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA II 16MB | 32,11 €
Super-Flower SF500A14A Gamer Edition 500W | 48,97 €


Total is around €540 with shipping.

So anything I need to pump up or can tone down?

deconduo

Get the Super Flower Amazon 550W PSU instead, its a better quality one.

This HIS HD 6950 is cheaper and better than the 560 Ti, but only by a small bit.

Samsung Spinpoint F3 is a better hard drive for the same price.

The rest looks good.

Sparks

IrishMetalhead wrote: »

look forward to part 3 chap

Just as soon as my mind comes back down from CoD:MW at 1920x1080@60fps
When your only benchmark was counterstrike running at 800x600@20fps it's a little bit wonderful

And I picked up a copy of Crysis 2 on friday, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what this machine can do when it's pushed to the limits

Washington Irving

Hey guys,

Bit of a PC noob here, looking to get into PC gaming and also in need of a proper PC (other one is a Dell desktop from 2003 :rolleyes:). Budget of about E600-700 (as close to 600 as possible). Would mainly be used for 1) Gaming 2) Multimedia/ HTPC 3) Browsing the web, office etc. in that order. Can anyone recommend a PC roughly along those lines, cheers

IrishMetalhead

looking to build it yourself or do you have some inline to do that for you?

Washington Irving

IrishMetalhead wrote: »

looking to build it yourself or do you have some inline to do that for you?

Yep, have someone to build it for me, just need to source the parts myself. Only have a basic knowledge of manufacturers/ parts

Brian

How does this look for a hobo build? http://i.imgur.com/ekFRj.png omission of optical drive is intentional, but feel free to point out any other things that look wrong..

Monotype

There's cheaper 2x2GB RAM kits from about €4 cheaper.

Maybe spend an extra €8 to get the asrock 770 board which has basic SATA 6Gbps and USB 3. By basic I mean that not all the ports are 6Gbps, which is the luxury of the more expensive boards.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=34992

You could get away with 450W if you needed to cut back.

The OEM X2 220 is €11.38 cheaper and only 0.2GHz slower. I notice that it also has 2x512KB cache while the 250 has 2x1MB. This might be a slight disadvantage or you could be very lucky and get one with disabled unlockable cores rather than the dual core.
Either way, I think some overclocking would make up the difference easily enough. The only thing is that you'd need a heatsink. Maybe you or somebody you know has a spare, or get an equivalent €5 one from HWV.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=36701

IrishMetalhead

one thing i' like to point out, why spend extra on buying 2 speperate 2GB kits of corsair valueselect which arn't great great at all to begin with when you can get a better kit of mushkin 4GB for less and is much better and better quality then thos value RAM kits by Corsair.

http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=33951&agid=1192

Edit: oops only just noticed Monotype pointed that out before me >.<

Tea_Bag

Monotype wrote: »

There's cheaper 2x2GB RAM kits from about €4 cheaper.

Maybe spend an extra €8 to get the asrock 770 board which has basic SATA 6Gbps and USB 3. By basic I mean that not all the ports are 6Gbps, which is the luxury of the more expensive boards.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=34992

You could get away with 450W if you needed to cut back.

The OEM X2 220 is €11.38 cheaper and only 0.2GHz slower. I notice that it also has 2x512KB cache while the 250 has 2x1MB. This might be a slight disadvantage or you could be very lucky and get one with disabled unlockable cores rather than the dual core.
Either way, I think some overclocking would make up the difference easily enough. The only thing is that you'd need a heatsink. Maybe you or somebody you know has a spare, or get an equivalent €5 one from HWV.
http://www2.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=36701

i believe the OEM athlon X2's are built on sepron chip tech, and therefore dont have any unlock chance at all.

Baza210, it would be well worth your while spending an extra ~€15 getting the
athlon X3

thats atleast 1 extra core and potentially a quad core for very little money.
mine unlocked to a Phenom X4 with full 6mb L3 cache and all.

gaming is soon going to require a minimum of 3 cores to run well, as the porting of games from the xbox continues.

crimsonfire

Hey guys, I'm by no means a noob but haven't much experience in buying and installing my own components. Put new RAM sticks in my old laptop and installed a new graphics card in my PC a few months ago but thats it. My computer has been a trusty gaming rig for a year now and it handles nearly anything I throw at it (albeit noisily) but I've noticed it starting to seriously labour and make a racket when I play games like Fallout NV or Mass Effect.

Here's my current configuration:

Pentium Dual Core E5300 @ 2.6Ghz
Sapphire Radeon HD 5750
MSI G31TM-P21 socket 775 mobo
2x2GB DDR2 RAM

Thats the stuff that matters anyway. I'm looking to replace the CPU and motherboard which will also mean getting DDR3 RAM most likely.

After a quick look I've come up with this:
The intel option CPU http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=41220&agid=1617
Mobo http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=37657&agid=1305
Bit pricey but could handle comtemporary games for two years or more.

The AMD option CPU http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=26625&agid=1242 I would get the 965 but it doesn't seem worth the extra money.
http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=31603&agid=1232 This mobo might be more than I need but I'll be buying this all piecemeal over a few weeks so it'll spread the cost hopefully.

Not an enormous difference in price at the end of the day between an AMD or an Intel platform. I guess it comes down to performance and upgradability for me. Intel wins on the former, AMD wins on the latter. Tough choice.

I'll worry about my RAM and cooling later.

Tea_Bag

Well, if you're ordering from HWVS then buying it over several weeks is going to be very costly, as its a €30 flat shipping rate per order from them.

tbh, not knowing your budget, id recommend getting an intel quadcore q6600 CPU (from adverts.ie or similar secondhand, as its EOL) which will work with your current Mobo, an after market cooler and OC'ing it (if your PSU allows)
just an edit: dont spend much more than €70 on the q6600. they're worth that at most.

what resolution is your monitor?
your bottleneck is then going to be your GPU. the HD5750 is quite dated and long in the tooth now. OC'ing it to HD5770 levels and you could get another year or 2 out of your PC. save maybe 700 over the next 2 years and start again from scratch with something decent.

crimsonfire

Well ive been looking to get a new mobo and CPU for a while now as my current ones are quite simply rubbish. My graphics card (which ive only had six months or so) sits less than an inch away from my wireless card blowing hot air at it which until now hasnt caused problems but im still not comfortable with it. A micro ATX board in a mid height case just doesnt make sense to me.

Didn't know that about HWV. It seems the cheapest I've seen otherwise. The 5750 is a bit old but I only have it a little while and it does me just fine for the time being. My monitor is 19 inches and I have a 22 inch LCD tv hooked up as well but I dont game on that as games dont look great on it for some reason. PS3 games look great but not PC.

Ryan451

My brother needs a new computer and i have put together something. I'm by no means a professional at putting these things together but after you guys helped me before i have picked up a few things.
Anyway we would like to keep it under E650 and want to order off HWVS cos they were good the first time.

Anyway i threw something together and im not sure if everything is compatible or not and any other advice will be gladly accepted
Thanks in advance.

deconduo

You can get the newer version, the Asgard III for only €1 more:

http://www3.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=43210&agid=633

You'd be fine with the 450W SF Amazon too, would save you €10. Same with the RAM, there's practically no difference between CL7 and CL9, and the CL9 kit is €10 cheaper as well.

The rest looks grand.

Tea_Bag

interesting that the WD 6gb/s is cheaper than the samsung F3 500gb by 2 euro. Id probably still go with a samsung F3 though. reliable and fast. SATA3 has no bearing on a HDD anyway.

oh god is that the GTX460 SMART edition?

stay away!!

it performs worse than the 768mb model and has no OC potential. its a crippled 460.

you're much better off throwing the €20 you save through decenduo's suggestions into this GTX460, which comes a little OC'd out the box

deconduo

Tea_Bag wrote: »

oh god is that the GTX460 SMART edition?

Good catch, I completely missed that :mad:

That SE is so fcking annoying.

Tea_Bag

deconduo wrote: »

Good catch, I completely missed that :mad:

That SE is so fcking annoying.

to be fair the only reason i spotted it was because of the price. i paid 150 pounds plus delivery for my GTX460 768mb and at the time it was a bargain which went to a +-2000 degrees on HUKD (when it launched). my heart sunk a little when i saw 120 euro for a 1gb model only a few months later, but i figured there might be a catch. i didnt actually know that it also came advertised as Smart Edition, and only as SE (i thought standing for second edition)

Unregistered.

Tea_Bag wrote: »

.... i didnt actually know that it also came advertised as Smart Edition, and only as SE (i thought standing for second edition)

S***e Edition.

Ryan451

Tea_Bag wrote: »

interesting that the WD 6gb/s is cheaper than the samsung F3 500gb by 2 euro. Id probably still go with a samsung F3 though. reliable and fast. SATA3 has no bearing on a HDD anyway.

oh god is that the GTX460 SMART edition?

stay away!!

it performs worse than the 768mb model and has no OC potential. its a crippled 460.

you're much better off throwing the €20 you save through decenduo's suggestions into this GTX460, which comes a little OC'd out the box

Oh, thanks man, would never have found that