Need a Budget rig

[Ronin]

I need a budget rig anywhere from 500-1000 for my friend who wants to play Fps style games(COD4-COD5 type of games)
He needs everything sans Monitor(using a 19") but he might consider getting a 22" down the road. Thanks for any advice. Oh and its more price performance than strictly performance.

Im thinking
q6600
asus pro
gts 250-gtx 260
ocz modxstream 700(for 70 dollars AR right now)
dominators 8500
cm 690 or antec 902
and an HD
a sammy drive
include an OS copy of xp just in case.

good ? gotta be less than $1000. IF you can try and shave off as much as possible without sacrificing too much I'll consider that too. Thanks

[Realityshift]

Drop the quad for a dually, or go AMD x3, quad is a huge waste for a gaming rig.... For a 22" id go with a minimum GTX 260, but for 19" the GTS 250 would work just fine. Drop the ram for G.SKill you should save some money and get better quality ram IMHO. Should take a look at the new CM Storm Scout case, its a nice mid ground between the CM 690 and the 902. For HDD make sure you grab a WD 640 black.

I just put together a build for my brother, without an OS it came to just under $1000 after tax and shipping...

P2 x3 720BE
MSI 790x motherboard (ddr2 one)
G.SKill DDR2 8000
EVGA GTX 260 Sp 216
I think I used the same OCZ Psu
WD black

That build with a good aftermarket heatsink would do awesome in gaming. Q6600 is a great CPU if your going to be doing lots of multi tasking and video encoding but a good dualy beats it in gaming.

[Ronin]

Which is better on stock q6600 or e8400 ?

[cadaveca]

Depends on teh game, IMHO. I'm on E8400 right now, but I had many q6600, and even QX9650 for pretty much a year (Nademon has it now), and I tell ya, I long for a quad...but I'll go AM3.

[kazyn]

In my opinion this is the best price/performance for under 1000 bucks (If he decides to upgrade buy him a different case, and power supply, also maybe buy him the am3 versions). Quads not useful now for most games, but in the future it is. You can also pricematch some of these items, also maybe replacing some items with the ones that are on sale. Like maybe a bigger HD. You can easily overclock this to 3.4 - 3.6 on air with stock cooler. And the phenom 2 is just as good as a q9550.

ASUS M3A78-EM AMD 780G mATX AM2+ PCI-E16 PCI-E1 2PCI SATA HDMI Video Sound GBLAN 1394 Motherboard 111.86

AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition Quad Core Processor AM2+ 3.0GHZ 8MB Cache 125W 45NM Retail Box 254.99 <--229.99 at another retailer (n**egg.ca)

Kingston HyperX T1 4GB 2X2GB PC2-8500 DDR2-1066 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN DIMM Dual Channel Memory 78.17

Antec Sonata III Black ATX 16IN Mid Tower Quiet Case 3X5.25 2X3.5 4X3.5IN 500W 120MM Fan 155.28

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA2 3.5IN 8.5MS 7200RPM 16MB Hard Drive OEM *3YR MFR Warranty* 64.99

EVGA E-GEFORCE GTX 260 Core 216 55NM 576MHZ 896MB 1.998GHZ GDDR3 PCI-E 2XDVI-I HDTV Out Video Card 206.99

872.22 is the total before taxes and shipping (you'll probably get free shipping).

[matsta31]

I like the amd build for budget. Kazyn, build is nice. But, in the goal of saving money, I would explore theses choices to :

I would go for a 4850 instead of a GTX260. this one is 150 $ :

NCIX.com - Buy XFX Radeon HD 4850 512MB XXX DDR3 PCI-E Dual DVI-I HDCP HDTV Out Video Card - HD485XYDDC In Canada.

You could drop the 8500 ram for some little cheaper, to ddrII 800 if you dont plan on OC.


I would go tri core instead of a quad. the 720 is a good choice. Another 50$ saved for not much performance loss, and you get a chance of an unloackable 4th core

AMD Phenom II X3 720 - Comparer les prix au Québec et Canada - Meilleurs prix et Aubaines

if you want to Oc a bit, get a aftermarket Heatsink. The Ocz vendetta is a good choice.


I prefer the WD black 640 vs the seagate, but both are sound choices.

Also, Kazyn, we are not affiliated with any retailer here, so there is absolotuly no problem in sayeing newegg.ca !

[rapmaster]

Originally Posted by Realityshift

Drop the quad for a dually, or go AMD x3, quad is a huge waste for a gaming rig.... For a 22" id go with a minimum GTX 260, but for 19" the GTS 250 would work just fine. Drop the ram for G.SKill you should save some money and get better quality ram IMHO. Should take a look at the new CM Storm Scout case, its a nice mid ground between the CM 690 and the 902. For HDD make sure you grab a WD 640 black.

I just put together a build for my brother, without an OS it came to just under $1000 after tax and shipping...

P2 x3 720BE
MSI 790x motherboard (ddr2 one)
G.SKill DDR2 8000
EVGA GTX 260 Sp 216
I think I used the same OCZ Psu
WD black

That build with a good aftermarket heatsink would do awesome in gaming. Q6600 is a great CPU if your going to be doing lots of multi tasking and video encoding but a good dualy beats it in gaming.

+1 except don`t get the MSI 790x, it has a SB600 instead of SB750

and get a Corsair PSU if you can, the quality is much better than ModXStream

[Realityshift]

I would have sudjested the Corsair but the word budget was thrown out there =( The build for my bro wasnt going to be a very overclocked rig so I went with the cheapest MB I could find, otherwise it woulda been gigabytes.

Masta why would anyone cheap out on a GPU for a gaming PC? the GTX 260 is a MUCH better GPU for $50 more...

Either of the AMD BE processors are not going to need overclocked ram to get them to max clocks so any DDR2 ram would work, but the DDR2 8000 G.Skills are the same price as the DDR2 6400s and are binned a bit higher.



Having run dualys and quads I can honestly say I saw no difference, then again I do not run a sloppy PC... the only thing I saw a difference in was encoding speeds and winrar unzipping times, a stock Q6600 will bottleneck most of the higher end GPUs... 9800GTX/GTS 250+ unless overclocked where as the E8400 wont right out of the gates. The only reason I long for a quad right now is for the raw processing power for converting avi to dvds, other then that I would see no other benefit, an E8400 @ 4ghz will be good enough for me.

[cadaveca]

Originally Posted by Realityshift

an E8400 @ 4ghz will be good enough for me.

GTA4 and FarCry2 both suffer under dualcores. As more titles come out this year for the pc platform, you'll find this trend continues.

Last year, you would have been 100% corerct in saying a dual is better, but having gone back to E8400, @ 4ghz, isn't enough, and I only use my pc for gaming or surfing the web.

E8400 is NOT future-proof in this regard, so it might be time to re-assess your recommendations....even GTX260, @ 1680x1050, isn't that much more powerful than ATI 4870...at least not enough to justify the 20% cost increase...for 5% of performance.

[Realityshift]

The GTX 260 is much more then 5% faster then a 4850 and the 4870s are almost the same price as the GTXs atleast the 1gb models that can compete with them anyhow..

I cant say farcry suffers under a dually, I got 45fps with my 2 9800GTXs and an E7400 @ 3.6ghz where as my buddy gets 40 fps with a single GTX 260 and a Q6600 @3.2ghz, both PCs running max graphics and screen rez of 16:9. I dont play GTA games I think their horible so neither of us know what our PCs run in those games but I really doubt it would show much of an increase, no matter what its still going to be GPU based at higher resolutions.

EVGA GTX 260 Core 216 55nm Superclocked Edition Video Card Review

Considering the 4850 hovers around the 9800GTX in terms of performance this review gives a good look at how well the GTX 260 sp 216 performs. Depending on the resolution of the 22" monitor a 512mb 4850 will fail harder at 19:10 resolutions and higher so the extra frame buffer of the GTX 260 or the 4870 is what your looking for, but at near the same price why not buy the faster card? Atleast with EVGA you get a very good lifetime warranty as well as awesome support forum and great customer service, you get that with xfx as well but an xfx 4870 is going to cost alot more then $206.