It happens all too often – you set aside a budget for a PC upgrade, only to spend far more than you planned because you scored on a few good deals. Either you can scrap the budget and spend the money (*points at James*) or you have to cut corners and make do. If you’re planning on the latter, read on.
For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll take a look at building a fairly high-spec gaming PC based on the Sandy bridge platform. The budget for the upgrade is R9,500.00 and we’ve run into a problem – the cost of our planned system upgrade is R9,850. As it stands, the system is made up of the following:
- Intel Core i7 2700K – R3,200.00
- 2 x 2GB Kingston HyperX Grey 2133MHz CL 9-11-9 – R1,100.00
- Asus P8Z68 Deluxe – R3,050.00
- Sapphire HD 6870 Vapor-X 1GB – R2,500.00
Prices were taken from a range of local online e-tailers and were rounded off to the nearest R50. Each component category was sourced from the same e-tailer.
CPU
In our original machine, we decided to go with an Intel core i7 2700K. Being the top-end processor in the Sandy bridge family, you pay a premium for the best performance (and bragging rights).
That said, the core i7 2500k performs very close to the 2700k at stock when it comes to gaming. The reason I’ve downgraded to the 2500K and not the vanilla 2500 is that the price difference between the two hardly justifies the extra saving in this case, though if you were pushed the extra R100.00 saving would help.
- Core i7 2700K price: R3,200.00
- Core i7 2500K price: R2,100.00
- Saving: R1,100.00
Intel Core i7 2700K
Memory
High-end RAM shows very little performance increase in games when it comes to the Sandy bridge platform. The guys over at Anandtech did a RAM kit comparison for Sandy bridge and found little-to-none performance benefit between the low- and high-end RAM kits.
While I don’t advise getting the cheapest 2GB 1333 9-9-9-24 modules, getting fairly cheap RAM from a respectable manufacturer will serve gamers just as well as top-end kits costing at least twice as much. In this case we substituted a set of 2 x 2GB Kingston HyperX Grey 2133MHz CL 9-11-9 modules, with a set of 2 x 2GB Corsair Vengence DDR3 1600MHz CL 9-9-9-24 modules.
- Kingston HyperX Grey 2133MHz CL 9-11-9: R1,100.00
- Vengence DDR3 1600MHz CL 9-9-9-24: R350.00
- Saving: R750.00
Kingston Hyper X Grey
Motherboard
The motherboard is probably the most important component during the upgrade. It allows future upgrades to continue smoothly, and hopefully provides you with all the features you need. I would suggest spending a bit more on a board to make sure you’re future proof.
Our original board had all the bells and whistles without spending obscene amounts of money. The Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z is underrated as a motherboard, but does feature everything one could want from a fairly high-end board without the fluff, such as dual gigabit Ethernet ports.
- Asus P8Z68 Deluxe: R3,050.00
- Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z: R2,200.00
- Saving: R850.00
Asus Maximus IV Gene
Graphics card
Important for gaming, be careful when skimping on the graphics card. This component has the largest effect on gaming framerates, and as such even though this article is about saving money during an upgrade, we’re actually going to spend some of our savings on a better graphics card.
As I’ve previously mentioned, premium edition graphics cards are a waste of money. In this case, we’re going to replace a “premium” Sapphire HD 6870 Flex 1GB with an MSI HD 6950 TWIN FROZR III. The HD6950 in this case outperforms the premium 6870 by almost 20 percent for only R700 extra.
- Sapphire HD 6870 Flex 1GB: R2,500.00
- MSI HD6950 TWIN FROZR III 6950 2GB: R3,200.00
- Saving: There is none, we’re actually out of pocket by: -R700.00
MSI HD6950 Twin Frozr III
You will have noticed I’ve stuck with older HD6xxx series graphics cards here rather than the recently released HD7xxx series. This is due to a low amount of choice on current HD77xx and HD79xx graphics cards in the country, and the large initial price gap between the two series of cards.
Before we started budgeting, our upgraded system would have set us back R9,850.00 – well over our initial budget of R9,500.00. However, with a bit of cost-cutting (and adding a more powerful graphics card into the mix) we managed to get that down to R7,850.00. This frees up an extra R1,650.00 that can be better spent on one or more of the following:
- Another 4GB of RAM;
- A 60/120GB SSD;
- A graphics card upgrade to two HD7770 graphics cards;
- A CPU upgrade to the i7 2700K we previously cut;
- 3TB of storage;
- A 23 inch LED full HD screen;
- A good night out.
While the above is just one case of cost-cutting, there are a few pointers below on how to keep costs down:
- Avoid top-end components: components that are at the forefront of technology usually command a price premium that doesn’t justify their cost. This is clear in the case of the RAM and CPU, where diminishing returns are the only thing your hard-earned money will buy after a point.
- Stay away from premium-edition graphics cards: I wrote a whole feature article on this topic. Premium edition graphics cards charge a hefty premium for marginally more performance, and a cooler that might be a bit more effective and quieter.
- Avoid the fluff: stay away from fluff features, particularly those found on motherboards. Dual gigabit Ethernet ports, external LCD displays, three PCIe express lanes for those who won’t actually crossfire/SLI – all are features that will probably never be used by the majority of gamers.
