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PC Games (Games) Hardware

Building a $1K Gaming Rig 70

Posted by Zonk from the cheap-and-powerful dept.
Timmus writes "Firingsquad has posted an article on building a cutting-edge PC for gaming. The author manages to build an Athlon 64 3500+ rig with GeForce 7800 GT graphics and 1GB of RAM for $1,000. In the end they run benchmarks of the budget PC against a high-end FX-57 system to see how they compare. Surprisingly, the budget PC performs pretty close to the flagship system!" From the article: "Quite often we get emails asking which component(s) are 'the best' or, 'I have [x] amount of money to spend for my next upgrade, what do you think I should get?' It's impossible for us to answer these types of questions for you, simply because only you know what your needs are. Only you know how you use your computer, every person out there is different, even among gamers."
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Building a $1K Gaming Rig More

Building a $1K Gaming Rig

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  • And people are complaining about the high prices of the XBOX 360...

  • Firing squad (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FadedTimes ( 581715 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @12:27PM (#13447044)
    They should do this type of report every 3months, if not the information and prices get dated very quickly. I was suprised at what kind of system you can get with 1k these days.

  • ouch (Score:3, Insightful)

    by undef24 ( 159451 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @12:27PM (#13447050)
    $1k is the BUDGET system? I'll keep playing world of warcraft at 800x600.

    • Re:ouch (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @12:33PM (#13447105) Homepage
      Hmmph. $300 Dell and a Radeon 9250. All you need. DVD burners, etc. are nice add-ons, but not necessary in a gaming box. Built-in sound is good enough, built in RAM is good enough for any game (though not usually for productivity).
      • Built-in sound is good enough,

        Not true for all systems. My most recent build had a terrible amount of noise in the system. Pop in a sound card, all the noise is gone.

        • I found the same thing. Unfortunately I had to take the sound card out because of incompatibilities with games. So I went from a 7.1 sound card back to the onboard 5.1 motherboard chipset which was far more friendly with games like Doom 3. The noise can be minimised by always turning the volumes in software to 100% and relying solely on your speaker knob for your actual volume. Not that you have that problem anymore but I thought I'd share it in case anyone else is having similar problems.
      • What is "built-in RAM"?

        DVD-burners are ESSENTIAL for a gaming system, if only for backing up your profile, updates, mods.
        Sure, you can do without the £50 expense if you have a seperate system on the network to dump your backups to.
        How does "productivity" get better performance from "built-in RAM" than games do?
        (If my "productivity" is farming rare itmes from a game, they start to look pretty similar)

        And if you think the 256 RAM in a DELL is enough to run todays FPS games, you have LOW standards.

    • Re:ouch (Score:4, Informative)

      by UWC ( 664779 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @01:18PM (#13447589)
      Athlon 34 3500+ and a GeForce 7800 are NOT budget.

      A 3000+ at Newegg is $146 as opposed to the $219 for the 3500+

      A Chaintech GeForce 6600 card is $98 as opposed to the $383 7800

      That's $358 less right there. Brings their $1032 down to $674.

      And that'll play WoW without any difficulty at 1600x1200, I'd imagine.

      And you can drop in the higher-end components--or even a dual core Athlon--later on down the road. Or SLI your video card in a couple months for a decent boost, too.

      • the 6600 is a piece of crap compared to the 7800. that's one area where you don't want to skimp. it IS worth the extra dough.

        so now you have your 6600. 6 months down the line when you want to play a new game... you'll have trouble running it acceptably at a decent resolution with most effects.

        in a gaming system, the video card is the number one componenet. cpu and ram come after that. a fast video card can override a slower cpu while the reverse isn't true.
        • 6600 will play any game 6 month from now above 25 fps. Mid-grade cards are best for budget....Plus 6 months from now that 7800 will be half the price and mid-grade itself
  • I loved my Kyro 2 [st.com] for the fact that a 50 dollar card at the time gave better peformance than a 60 dollar ATI or Nvidia. SIS, Matrox, ATI and Nvidia; is that really all? What other great graphics companies no longer exist? I can't think of any at the moment.
    • You like Kyro 2's? I'll sell ya one, though the GPU fan died and I lashed on a 486 CPU fan.
    • I liked that card too. It was cool, because some websites would misspell it "Kryo II," and I could tell people the card was named after me.
    • I'd hate to respond twice, but I got curious and looked it up. The people that made it, PowerVR [wikipedia.org], realized that the market was dominated by ATI and Nvidia, so they decided to concentrate on mobile solutions, rather than compete with giants.

      This is what happened, according to the article:

      The STM PowerVR3 KYRO II, released in 2001, was able to rival and beat out the costlier ATI Radeon DDR and NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS in benchmarks of the time despite not having hardware T&L. Unfortunately, as T&L hardw

    • Rendition (Made the Verite, featured FAST edge AA. Ran the first 3D-accelerated port of Quake. Absorbed by Micron)
      Oak Technologies (made the Warp 5, a tile-based chip much like PowerVR, which featured FSAA)
      Real3D (designed the i740 for Intel, intended to make AGP THE graphics standard. They were probably later absorbed by Intel)
      3DFX (One word: Glide. Now part of Nvidia)

      Oh, and the Kyro chip was made by ST Micro, with IP licensed from NEC / PowerVR.

      Matrox is basically down for the count. They will NEVER
      • I truely missed Matrox. Their classic G200 had 2D performance that were superior for desktops workstation for years. There was no fans, it never overheated. G200s lasted an eternity in a closed case PC. You can even upgrade the memory in a memory slot on the graphics card. To upgrade memory nowadays, you would have to basically buy a new Nvidia/ATI.

      • you forgot tritech. they made the paper-only pyramid 3d chip. it was very advanced for the time and way ahead of it's competitors.

        just an obscure company almost no one has heard of.

        http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tritech+pyram id+3d [google.com]
        • Funny you should mention Tritech, they bought the design for the Pyramid from Bitboys Oy.

          The design was advanced, but in the marketing department they were idiots. They actually did fab one of their designs in 1997, but few board builders bought it because they stupidly did not include a VGA core.

          Back in 1996, when 2D cards had either no 3D features, or had limited "FreeD" features that were cheap to bundle into existing designs (ATI Rage IIc, S3 ViRGE, Matrox Millenium s220), standalone accelerators like
    • They tried to push TBR (tile-based rendering) on the world...

  • PSU behind RAM and HDD? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by swatoa ( 743331 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @12:40PM (#13447197)
    I'd rank the PSU just slightly ahead of the case, but behind memory and hard disk drive in order of importance.

    I don't agree with that. The PSU is one of the most important components, in my experience. Then again, no one should really be buying crap quality HW in the first place.

    • Re:PSU behind RAM and HDD? (Score:4, Informative)

      by niskel ( 805204 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @01:01PM (#13447431)
      I must also agree with you. Almost a year ago I built my first 'from scratch' system. I took some advice from the guy at the store I was getting my parts from and he said the PSU that came with my case would be much more than adequate. After a few months and some hardware intensive games, I was always getting random crashes and lock-ups. I could never figure it out until I read a post on the Far-Cry forums about a guy having similar problems to me. It turned out he had a junk PSU. This persuaded me to take a look into the performance of my PSU. Lo and behold, as soon as I started playing any games, the voltage levels were going up and down like pogo sticks.

      The moral of the story is that no matter what anyone says, budget PSUs are useless. Now I wouldn't get a new system without spending at least $100CDN on a decent PSU.
      • you don't need a "boutique" psu.

        an antec or other mid-range 400+watt ps is more than enough. i know, i've used it in several systems i've built.

        if it costs less than 80 bucks, it's not worth putting in a computer you care about. you can still use the cheaper ones for junk computers and where the power draw is low.
      • Cheap PSU's will also fry a good Motherboard. Your PSU is very important. If it's broke....the rest of your components are rendered useless.
      • Handles dual SATA and GF6800 fine here.

        You want a good name with good components, not just something that's expensive. Lots of places put black paint and go-faster stripes on Tawainese shit and sell it for lot$.

  • It's not as pretty as this article... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Txiasaeia ( 581598 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @12:57PM (#13447398)
    ... but in a previous /. story about a 360 bundle costing $1200, one poster made the comment that you couldn't build an average computer with eleven games for the same price. I proved him wrong. [slashdot.org] In the above link I also used a good PSU, which this story's author neglected. Please don't mod this post up; I'm not looking for karma.
    • I don't care if you're looking for karma or not. I mod posts up (or down) to make it easier for other readers to find the interesting, relevant comments, and to skip the crap. If something you posted is worth reading, then it needs to be modded up so the folks that skim at 4+ or 5+ will see it.

    • Re:It's not as pretty as this article... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Please don't mod this post up; I'm not looking for karma.

      I don't think you need to worry about that, you pompous asshole.
    • Except he didn't and you didn't either. He said you couldn't build a "high-end" machine plus 11 games for $1200. That's "high-end" not "average" - and that makes sense seeing as you're comparing to a Xbox360, which, right now, is a seriously powerful piece of kit. Your machine spec includes a 6600GT, which whilst a fine card (I have one) is entirely outclassed by the graphics hardware in the 360. Your CPU is an Athlon 64 3000+, same argument applies. Your games are also rather "varied", HL2, UT2k4 etc are
      • 1. The PC may not be hihest end but it'll play any game you throw at it, very likely at full details.
        2. Noone said the 11 games that come with the X360 are any good.
      • He said: "Show me a high-end gaming PC with 11 titles for $1,200. Geez. You pay that for an average PC without any good software."

        Software choices: I threw in a little of everything, including strategy games, RPGs, sports games, and shooters. Mostly I was including as many $50 games as I could, balancing it out with older $30 games that are still a lot of fun, both single and multi.

        As for your other concerns with the processor and video card: you forget that while consoles are static machines, the PC g

  • ArsTechnica has a similar Guide (Score:5, Informative)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope.gmail@com> on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @01:13PM (#13447545) Journal
    Which can be found here [arstechnica.com].

    While they don't do benchmarks, it's updated every month and includes 3 different PCs designed for different people's needs. For people who complained that $1k is too much, they've managed to spend $500 on their cheapest PC (if you don't count a monitor, which firing squad doesn't include in their system). The $500 PC will also run WoW, San Andreas, HL2 just fine as well.

    If you thought $1k was too much to spend on a box, definitely check it out (the updated every month thing is also very nice).

    • About a year or so ago I built my first from scratch pc with a few recycled parts from an older dell I had upgraded. I am pretty ignorent about the stuff thats coming out with hardware in terms of motherboards, ram types, ect ect. So I pretty much knew what I wanted out of a system but didn't know the specifics to get. I kept looking for good pc buying guides but they were all either super machines or ultra budget machines.

      I found the ars guides and their hotrod box was exactly what I was looking for in a p
    • Sharky Extreme [sharkyextreme.com] has created guides like this for several years. They used to update each one monthly, but have since switched to updating each one every four months (staggering the extreme, mid-range, and value).

      They also give options between AMD and Intel and among video card manufacturers, as well as advice when shopping (e.g. check the dead pixel policy for LCDs).

      I don't always agree with them (for intstance, I would spend the extra $10-$20 to get CAS 2.5 memory instead of the CAS 3 value select memory,
  • This guy apparently hasn't had long term experience with building gaming machines, or he would have put the PSU way up on the list. A good 450W+ Enermax would be my choice. Yes you can go with CAS 2.5 ram without sacrificing tons of performance, but really where you should think about cutting costs is on the graphics card. A 6600GT PCI-X would be a much better idea to keep in budget than some offbrand economy PSU that might end up frying some of your more expensive components. I would definitely put the

    • Seasonic power supply=quieter, more efficient (Score:4, Informative)

      by spineboy ( 22918 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @03:07PM (#13448444) Journal
      I have had excellent results with seasonic power supplies. They are built like a tank and have up to 80% efficiency, which will pay for the power supply in less than a year if your computer is usually on. Seasonic is also recommende by silent computing for an inaudible 21 dB noise level - prolly one of the quietest fan cooled power supplies out there.
    • consider that pci-x motherboards cost in the range of 3-500 bucks, i'd say you're better off with a pci-e video card.

      yeah, pci-x != pci-e.

      plus everyone and their uncle swear up and down that a certain brand of hard drive is completely terrible etc etc. that's because the statistical sample is exceedingly small. all brands (with the exception of the deathstar) have about the same failure rate. but if you care about reliability, go for the enterprise drives; they come with 5 year warranties and are certified
      • oops yeah you're right, I always get the 2 mixed up.

        As far as hard drives I think it's really just up to the model. I had a bunch of 10GB maxtors and I went through at least 5 or 6 that all died within a month of normal use. I've had western digitals that lived for 5 years+ and never had a problem, and I've had some that started having problems right out of the box. I have pretty much given up on the hard drive game. I have come to believe that a lot of it has to do with how they are handled during ship
    • Check out Crucial for refurb video.
      crucial [crucial.com]

      The only place I'd trust that'll beat Newegg's prices [sometimes]

  • I think there are many people out there feeling they need to buy the most expensive equipment to get the best performance.

    The Athlon FX and most expensive ATI and nVidia cards sucker these people in thinking a great gaming system costs $3000+.

    For $1000 US, that would be a high end system for me. I was looking to build a system for under $1000 CDN. And the Geforce 7800 or ATI x850 does not fit into that equation, or are even necessary, along with the AMD FX chips.

    The AMD 3800+ 64 is more then adequate

    • All this guy did was build a highly respectable gaming system, one that will be more then adequate for those people with more brains then money.

      I agree with your point, but upgrade frequency can be an issue also. I used to enjoy upgrading my PC but after doing it about 5 times now I'm starting to get tired of it. It's stressful removing all the sensitive components, worrying about scratching the motherboard with a screwdriver, or blowing a transistor with a static shock. Just applying the AS5 to the cpu/
    • there was a sale a week ago on x800xt cards. these are essentially the same as an x850xt and cost 250 bucks. a little clock escalation and you'd get a screaming performer for current and future games.

      learning to look for deals and not buying the retail brick and mortar 500+ overpriced last-gen cards is the secret to gaming on a budget.

      p.s. the a64 3800 1MB l2 is a fast-a** mother of a cpu.
  • That's a hell of a lot of money for a computer when a new dell or emachine can be had for $300. The newest part in my computer is 4 years old (geforce 4) and I have yet to find a game that won't run acceptably.

  • Prices (Score:2, Insightful)

    by non0score ( 890022 )
    I find it funny how some people complain about the $1000 price tag on a moderate PC. These are the same people who seem to overlook a lot of the important, but subtle, details. To illustrate my point, let's compare the subtle differences between a budget PC and an XBox 360 (or any consoles within the last 5 years) that people tend to overlook.

    1. Warrantee. That's right, you get a 30-day warrantee on your XBox 360 based on the date of the receipt. On the other hand, you get a 1-3 year warantee on your (ret

  • I've been doing this for years, guys. Its called research. You look at what you want, "stuff to blow up cool". Then, you find out what blows stuff up cool. You go back a half a step or so where you're not being gouged by bleeding-edge prices, but the performance difference is close to negligable "Look! I only get 150fps instead of 190fps in ut2004 with everything turned on!".

    I build ALL my gaming rigs for $1,000 or so. And they all rock. You just need to know where your bottlenecks are, and what you can do

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