What's the cheapest gaming rig you can build?

What’s the cheapest gaming rig you can build?

I'd be curious... what does our local master of pc builds (Joker) say about this.
 
I'm not sure I agree with this build. Would a quad core give you any noticeable advantage above a dual core when no discrete card is present? Even with a dual core, your bottle neck in this build will never be the CPU. Not sure the faster memory will give you any real world advantage either.
I would get cheaper memory, a cheaper CPU and a discrete GPU.
 
^^

I do like the article, only thing I can fault on is using a pic of a modified Cosmos II.

Intel Pentium G2020 R610
MSI B75MA-E33 R616
Corsair 4Gb ddr3-1333 R348
MSI R7770 R1349
Zalman T1 Mini-Tower R265
Corsair VS350 R368
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB R627
Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Controller R515

R4698

AMD's APU setup does make sense, It is really amazing (My SO has a 5800K machine)
The above mentioned Intel machine will be faster for gaming, purely because of the 7770 Dedicated GPU.
You will be able to play on higher setting in more demanding games.
 
Joker and I seem to agree, I just used the Cosmos picture because it was there :-p

Mister 44 said:
Would a quad core give you any noticeable advantage above a dual core when no discrete card is present? Even with a dual core, your bottle neck in this build will never be the CPU. Not sure the faster memory will give you any real world advantage either.
Click to expand...

Actually you'd be surprised. Many games today suffer tremendously on a dual-core processor that doesn't have Hyper-threading. Crysis 3 on Low settings and 1080p is bottlenecked by the dual-core chips (yes, even Core 2 Duo suffers) and a Core i3 or a quad-core makes a lot of sense. And that's just Crysis 3 - some games, like Skyrim, run well enough even on the Celeron G1610 with discrete graphics. Others, like Far Cry 3, run just on the edge of playability with a dual-core and even Hitman Absolution requires a Core i3 or a quad-core chip to break the 30fps minimum barrier.

In an intensive battle in Starcraft II, you'll need a quad at the very least for good overall performance.

I just don't think a dual-core chip is a good choice for all-round gaming. Either you pick an i3 or a quad-core from AMD for a new build.

As for the memory, the built-in GPU is very memory-sensitive. The HD7660D in the A10-5800K, for example, requires DDR3-1866 RAM to deliver performance equal to the Radeon HD6670. Higher-performance memory really does give the chip better frame rates and AMD's always been a better performer with lower-latency and higher-frequency RAM.
 
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nice rig both of them for cheap. Now what i would like the see is a build that could be used for a file server that supports RAID 5.
 
Wesley said:
And that's just Crysis 3 - some games, like Skyrim, run well enough even on the Celeron G1610 with discrete graphics. Others, like Far Cry 3, run just on the edge of playability with a dual-core and even Hitman Absolution requires a Core i3 or a quad-core chip to break the 30fps minimum barrier.

In an intensive battle in Starcraft II, you'll need a quad at the very least for good overall performance.
Click to expand...

So the days of games not utilizing multiple cores are finally behind us? How do game performance scale with 6 or 8 core CPUs? (In general).
 
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Wesley, have to give it to you, you do sound like you know your hardware! Looking forward to more of these kinds of reviews...
 
Nice article!

Saves me the time of telling people the same stuff in the weekly 'what cheap gaming pc should I buy' discussions.
 
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