The Budget Gaming PCJanuary 7th, 2006Gaming is an expensive hobby. That is a fact. Every few months it seems a new PC game is released that pushes current technology to its limits and sends hardcore gamers off shopping to buy the latest and greatest video cards and RAM upgrades. All so they can play their games at the maximum settings possible in ungodly resolutions. Good for them. They can afford it. Here is the problem. Most gamers are not willing or able to spend hundreds every few months to have top of the line gaming PCs. Thats why this guide will focus on the rest of us poor bastards who may not be able afford top of the line, but still want a decent gaming PC at an affordable price that can handle the newest games. The goal of this is to build a respectable gaming PC for $500 (Don't laugh!). Will it be able to play F.E.A.R at 1600x1200 with max settings and 16x AF? Hell no! Though it may give you enough performance to enjoy it at 1280x1024 with medium settings. All of these components can be obtained from many places for various prices. My personal favorites are Newegg, Mwave and ZipZoomFly, so all prices are based on the cheaper of those vendors and does not include any specials, rebates or one-day-only sales. We will be looking at core hardware components only. Those being the motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, hard drive, and power supply. The final price will not include the PC case, operating system, optical drives, mouse, keyboard, or monitor (we are assuming you can scrap these from your current PC). Before we do anything a decision must be made. AMD or Intel. We chose AMD simply because they offer similar (or better) performance than Intel at a lower price. Now lets begin!
The Bottom LineOk, so the budget didn't quite hold. We only went over by $22.17, mainly to include a good quality power supply and a gig of RAM. You should compare prices locally and online before you buy anything. You may be able to find good deals that would drop the total price allowing you to spend more in other areas. Some may decide that they would rather have more hard drive space than what we chose. That would have driven the price up and is not necessary for a good gaming experience so we stuck with an 80GB model. You would be better off waiting on a good hard drive deal. Maybe wait for one of the free after rebate hard drives and buy two for a RAID setup. The components listed will give you a very good price to performance ratio. Will this system be able to play games released months from now. Maybe. Maybe not. What it will provide is a decent gaming experience with room for upgrades in the future if you decide to splurge or have some extra cash that you would rather not spend on frivolous things such as food or shelter. |
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Nvidia's latest and greatest GPU series has finally arrived! The RTX 3080 provides more performance than the 2080 ti for hundreds less.
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