The $500 Gaming PC Upgrade

sand writes "Building a powerful PC for gaming doesn't have to be expensive. In this article, FiringSquad spends $500 on a gaming upgrade, and compares its performance to that of a high-end Core 2 Extreme PC. The Core 2 Extreme rig is faster, but you may be surprised by how well the $500 PC is able to hang with it in Crysis, Call of Duty 4, and Unreal Tournament 3."

Duh

[BrianRoach]

Newsflash: If you buy the last generation of hardware, and not the top-of-the-line video card, you'll save money!

I've been keeping my PC about one or two cycles behind the bleeding edge for this reason, and it plays games just fine ... you just can't crank ALL the settings in some of the newer games.

- Roach

Re:500$ inexpensive?

[ByOhTek]

For a good performing gaming PC, as many have stated, that's downright cheap.

A bigger complaint would be:

They chose the AMD690 motherboard chipset. The big reason? The one they went on and on about? Dual digital [video] outputs (DVI + HDMI). They also had a discreet video card. Call me nuts, but if you use the DVI/HDMI output on the motherboard, you aren't going to be getting the goodness from that $250 graphics card you just picked up, are you (barring two monitors I guess).

Seriously, they could have saved some $$, or gotten a board with a better set of features, excluding it's graphical output.

It's an upgrade I guess....

[Seakip18]

I think they wanted to call this a cheap build, but saw that it equated to another normal build. So they removed things like an optical drive, hard drive, case, power supply, speakers, and a monitor to "reduce the price" and make this an "insanely cheap upgrade!"

Honestly, I'm sure half the nerds on this site could build an entire SYSTEM that'd put this upgrade to shame at that price.

Who spends $1500 for decent ?

[Liquidrage]

FTFA: "There's a silly misconception out there that you need to spend $1,500 or more to own a decent gaming rig. This is just nonsense"

Sure, I know people that always buy top of the line right when it comes out. They actually care if they're able to get 71 fps in a certain game vs 68 fps. Not because they play it, but because it means something to them to have a high number.
But that's the exception, not the norm. People building their own systems like was done in the article aren't that retarded.

I was just forced into upgrading due to a motherboard that went bad on an old Athlon XP 2400 system.
A few hours of looking and a e4600 Core 2 Duo, 2 gigs of DDR2 667, decent Asus MB, and a 512 meg Nvidia 8600GT...
$450 shipped. That included seating the processor and having them do the bios upgrade before shipping for $9. This from a reputable online service that many people have used for years. Even if I had to add a case, monitor, hardrive, dvd drive, key board and mouse, you're still looking at under $750 without a problem. And that would certainly qualify as decent.

Now, I got no doubt they spent a ton of time finding just the right stuff to eeck out all that little bit of tweaking.

But overall, no one thinks when building a system yourself you need to spend anywhere near that for a decent gaming system. For top of the line to have bragging rights over a meaningless fps score, sure. But not for something that'll play everything new just fine and be fine for years.

It's all about mainstream vs. high-end.

[CarpetShark]

It's simply about buying mainstream stuff, instead of ultra-high-end stuff. Those high-end buyers PAY for the technology to be developed for all the mainstream users. But, games aren't made for a few people with high-end cards; they're made to play pretty damn well on what most people who bought any decent card/machine recently will have.

For 99.9% of people, buying very high-end stuff is a lot like buying a ferrari. Sure, it looks nice, but what practical use are you going to find for it?

Re:It's an upgrade I guess....

[bcwright]

Fans aren't very expensive unless you have an oddball case. And even if you aren't upgrading, you'll have to keep up with replacing the fans if you don't want your rig to burn up. The IDE drives can be more of an issue, however most motherboards still support 1 IDE connection (=2 devices). Unless you want more than 1 hard drive and 1 CD/DVD that's enough - and if you do want more, there are still a number of options; a few motherboards still support 2 IDE connectors, and even if the one you choose doesn't, an IDE controller for your old drives only costs about $20-25 assuming you don't need RAID (which IMHO is kind of overkill if you use the PC primarily for gaming). Even if you decide to upgrade your hard drive to SATA you can get a 250 GB HD for under $65, or less than $45 if you're satisfied with 80GB. So even if you have to replace components like the hard drives you're looking at well under $600, and possibly still under $500 depending on the options you choose. Somehow this doesn't strike me as the costs "escalating fast" compared to the traditional pricing for gaming PC's.

Re:500$ inexpensive?

[pthor1231]

Some people play games, some people drink and smoke. To each their own fun. If you amortize the cost of the 500 dollars over the life of the usefulness of it, you would probably find that it was about the same amount of money other people spent on their hobbies.

Re:Duh

[sm62704]

The people designing these games are losing money (maybe in this case "loosing money" would be appropriate) for what? I just don't get it. The elitist attitude is what got me to stop playing PC games in the first place.

In 1990 when I first started playing games on a PC, a computer like the one in my living room now took a dedicated building and was called a "supercomputer", yet I can't play a new game on it. And the new game cost sixty bucks.

Now, I used to be into gaming; some of you may remember the old Quake site th Springfield Fragfest. But here's where the absolutel stupidity of the game designers comes in: they design for the next generation of machines. This gains teh hardware manufacturers dosh, at the expense of game designers who can't even sell me a game any more, let alone Joe Normalguy.

A game called Screamer 2 is an excellent example of why their designing for the next generation is stupid. When it came out (1997 IIRC), there wasn't a single PC in existance that could run it at its highest resolution. Today it would be a piece of cake - except that it is written for DOS and my Audigy isn't supported. No sound.

I still get Road Rash (1995) out once in a while. A fun game is fun. Developers, by designing for the next generation of equipment, are shutting out this generation of equipment, as well as most of their possible audience. Design for this generation of equipment and sell the games for $15 instead of $60 and you'll sell a hundred times as many.

-mcgrew [kuro5hin.org]

Re:500$ inexpensive?

[jedidiah]

...not if he finds a girl that likes to play Eve.

Times are changing. Try not to make yourself look like some bitter old geezer who's behind the times.

Re:500$ inexpensive?

[Lumpy]

Yes but they go to insane levels.

Unreal tournament 3 plays just fine at sane levels on a Throwaway P4-3.0ghz with a Geforce 7900GS video card, yes the incredibly slow AGP interface as well. I've been playing it on what amounts to a $250.00 computer all week.)

now if I turn on all the goodies I can make it slower on some of the more expansive and detailed arenas.. but some of the simpler short distance line of sight it still plays decently until you have 4-5 bots in the room all firing rockets like madmen.. (override settings and have 30 bots in one of the small 1 on 1 arenas... it's a hoot!)

Am I playing with all setting all the way up and at 1920X1200? not a chance. but it still plays just fine on a 1024X768 15" monitor with enough settings to make it look incredibly good.