Gamming PC for R10 000

[The Joker]

I suggest you have a look at the Pentium G3258. It's a dual core CPU (no Hyper Threading) with a stock clock at 3.2 GHz. However, it is overclockable. You can hit 4.4 GHz with stock cooling, and higher than that if you invest in an aftermarket cooler. The CPU also only costs R850. (wootware)

The overclocked pentium vs the stock clocked i5 are not too far apart performance wise, and you will be saving R2000, which is money you can put into a better GPU, which will give you much more performance gains than the CPU will. If you spend R500 on a nice aftermarket CPU cooler, you still have R1500 left to spend on a GPU. You can get a GTX770 for R4000 from wootware for example, which is a lot faster than the 270X

Tom's did a review on the pentium and it really looks like a brilliant CPU once you overclock it, especially if you're working on a budget.

So my suggestion would be to look at that as a viable alternative.

If you are going to overclock, maybe rather go with something like the CoolerMaster G500, which is 80+ bronze certified for the same price. The lower wattage should not be a problem.

As for the RAM, RAM prices are a bit high at the moment unfortunately, so there isn't really getting around that. The only option would be to maybe only buy 4GB now and then 4GB more later on, since you rarely use more than 4GB anyways. I have yet to utilize my 8GB of RAM fully.

Although I somewhat agree with what you are saying, I will not recommend that pentium for a gaming rig, especially since we are finally seeing games that utilize more cores, a 4.4Ghz Pentium will still be miles behind an i5 in pretty much everything not just gaming. Then on top of that you suggest that he should grab a GTX770...That pentium will bottleneck that card so incredibly hard.

The pentium is a good chip for light budget gaming rigs def not a good idea for using with something like a GTX770/R9 280x ect.
Don't just read reviews and listen to what reviewers say, they get paid by intel/amd/nvidia so yeah.

@OP I will work on something for you.

To save money I suggest looking at an i5 4460

http://www.rebeltech.co.za/290-intel...0ghz-lga1.html

Grab a H97 board to go with it

http://www.rebeltech.co.za/2104-asro...00-6x-sat.html

That's a good foundation for the rig right there.

[FarligOpptreden]

Listen to this Joker man... He knows what he's talking about. He fixed me up with a brilliant rig not too long ago and I'm still ecstatic about it. Had some overheating issues (due to the monster components in the dwarfish chassis), but he guided me through the MSI Afterburner setup to sort it out.

Let him build you a rig, you'll end up with something much better than you could've built otherwise...

[Blazzok]

Although I somewhat agree with what you are saying, I will not recommend that pentium for a gaming rig, especially since we are finally seeing games that utilize more cores, a 4.4Ghz Pentium will still be miles behind an i5 in pretty much everything not just gaming. Then on top of that you suggest that he should grab a GTX770...That pentium will bottleneck that card so incredibly hard.

The pentium is a good chip for light budget gaming rigs def not a good idea for using with something like a GTX770/R9 280x ect.
Don't just read reviews and listen to what reviewers say, they get paid by intel/amd/nvidia so yeah.

@OP I will work on something for you.

To save money I suggest looking at an i5 4460

http://www.rebeltech.co.za/290-intel...0ghz-lga1.html

Grab a H97 board to go with it

http://www.rebeltech.co.za/2104-asro...00-6x-sat.html

That's a good foundation for the rig right there.

Hmmm yeah sorry, that is a good point. Was typing this from work, so was doing it in a hurry and not really considering everything.

However I still think he should try and put some more money towards the GPU and not stick with the 270X. For R1000 more he can get the 280X from wootware for R3500, which is a great price for the GPU.

[The Joker]

Hmmm yeah sorry, that is a good point. Was typing this from work, so was doing it in a hurry and not really considering everything.

However I still think he should try and put some more money towards the GPU and not stick with the 270X. For R1000 more he can get the 280X from wootware for R3500, which is a great price for the GPU.

Wouldn't touch that powercolor.
Yes I don't like powercolor, they are inferior to something like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus and Sapphire.
They use thinner pcb's, they have poor cooler designs and generally have issues.

There is a reason why they are less expensive than the other top brands, and its not because they are imported.

The only powercolor worth looking at is the reference R9 290 and 290X cards because the cards and coolers are manufactured by AMD themselves, so there is no difference between the brands.

[B1nary]

@Joker

How Would you rate a H97 board against Z97 if you wont be taking the overclocking route, I suppose that also means your ram wont have to be more expensive as it wont ever run faster than clock speeds.

just as a side note have you seen any issues when putting ram with higher speeds on boards that don't run them, generally I know they will just run at 1333mhz but i'm wondering about system stability

[The Joker]

@Joker

How Would you rate a H97 board against Z97 if you wont be taking the overclocking route, I suppose that also means your ram wont have to be more expensive as it wont ever run faster than clock speeds.

just as a side note have you seen any issues when putting ram with higher speeds on boards that don't run them, generally I know they will just run at 1333mhz but i'm wondering about system stability

Well Z97 is only really worth it if you're looking at running sli or crossfire and if you plan on overclocking your i5 cpu, some other bells and whistles here and there but that's about it, not worth the cost in this case though.

Almost all boards are rated DDRIII 1333 as the default. so don't pay to much attention to that.
I'll put something together for you, I am just really busy at the moment.

[ave]

Well Z97 is only really worth it if you're looking at running sli or crossfire and if you plan on overclocking your i5 cpu, some other bells and whistles here and there but that's about it, not worth the cost in this case though.

Almost all boards are rated DDRIII 1333 as the default. so don't pay to much attention to that.
I'll put something together for you, I am just really busy at the moment.

The H97 that you linked to earlier seems to indicate that you can use that for crossfire:

2x PCI, 1x PCI-Express 2.0 (x16 @ x4), 1x PCI-Express 3.0 (x16), 6x USB2.0, 6x USB3.0, 1x PS/2, supports Optional Serial and Parallel Add-On Cable, supports AMD CrossFire

yet there is only one PCI-Express 2.0 and one PCI-Express 3.0. Does that mean you would have to pair an older card with a newer one? Don't know much about it. They also seem quite close together, are you going to be able to fit two GPUs in there?
Is crossfire or SLI worth considering when you are buying a new pc, so when the prices come down you can get a second gpu for a little bit of extra power?

[ave]

Is crossfire or SLI worth considering when you are buying a new pc, so when the prices come down you can get a second gpu for a little bit of extra power?

Just to answer my last question, I found a cool article on this. Though I would still like to hear others opinions

[Blazzok]

The H97 that you linked to earlier seems to indicate that you can use that for crossfire:



yet there is only one PCI-Express 2.0 and one PCI-Express 3.0. Does that mean you would have to pair an older card with a newer one? Don't know much about it. They also seem quite close together, are you going to be able to fit two GPUs in there?
Is crossfire or SLI worth considering when you are buying a new pc, so when the prices come down you can get a second gpu for a little bit of extra power?

You can put any new GPU into a PCIe 2.0 slot and it won't matter, current GPU's aren't hitting the bandwidth limit of PCIe 2.0 yet, so there won't be a performance drop.

On a personal note regarding SLI/XFire, I bought my last PC with the thought of getting a 2nd GPU later on when they are cheaper, but the prices never really dropped all that much for me to consider a 2nd GPU. In fact, since buying my components, prices have gone up. So now I'm just gonna wait it out for the 800 series from Nvidia and see how that compares to the current R9 series from AMD and upgrade to a new, single GPU.

However once again, more of a personal taste than anything else. SLI/XFire has evolved to the state where you can almost get double the performance when running a 2nd card, apart from some games sometimes having trouble with such a setup (mostly older games). Also to take into consideration will be the extra power required for a 2nd GPU as well as the extra heat that will be generated by the 2nd card, so you will need a well ventilated case.

[ave]

You can put any new GPU into a PCIe 2.0 slot and it won't matter, current GPU's aren't hitting the bandwidth limit of PCIe 2.0 yet, so there won't be a performance drop.

On a personal note regarding SLI/XFire, I bought my last PC with the thought of getting a 2nd GPU later on when they are cheaper, but the prices never really dropped all that much for me to consider a 2nd GPU. In fact, since buying my components, prices have gone up. So now I'm just gonna wait it out for the 800 series from Nvidia and see how that compares to the current R9 series from AMD and upgrade to a new, single GPU.

However once again, more of a personal taste than anything else. SLI/XFire has evolved to the state where you can almost get double the performance when running a 2nd card, apart from some games sometimes having trouble with such a setup (mostly older games). Also to take into consideration will be the extra power required for a 2nd GPU as well as the extra heat that will be generated by the 2nd card, so you will need a well ventilated case.

interesting. I suppose the cost of the better case, extra power, better mother board also needs to be taken into account. You could throw that extra R1000 into a better card up front.
I'm still running an ATI 4850 and have often toyed with the idea of hooking another X8XX up to it, just for an extra bit of juice, but a quick scan tells me there isn't really anything available anymore unless I go second hand, which I'm reluctant to do, I must say.