So you want to play the latest games, but your budget is limited. Still, you want a system your friends won't laugh at. You want to be able to play the current crop of games on reasonably high settings and hope to run this system for the next year or two without having to back off the graphics settings to "minimum." This section's for you.
As mentioned in the introduction, all prices are from Newegg unless explicitly specified otherwise. No special prices (e.g., after mail-in-rebate prices or combo prices) are used if that can be avoided. You should be able to load these items in your cart and get them at or near the prices quoted. I had hoped the new Core i3s and i5s would be introduced at prices low enough to get them on the budget build list. Now that I've seen them, the Core i5 750 would still be my Intel budget CPU of choice. The good news this time: CPU prices have come down and my case of choice went down by $10. The bad news: The Nvidia GTX 260 - my staple card for budget gaming - seems to be in short supply and prices have risen .. a lot - like $40-50. Memory and disk drive prices also rose slightly, which didn't help my goal. Motherboard prices seem to be holding steady at least. My self-established goal is $900 if possible, with an absolute maximum of $1000. This month, that's going to be a hard goal to reach.
I guess the computer component industry is hailing the end of the recession/depression. The price on nearly every component has increased. Memory went up substantially. The reason is usually contributed to fewer DRAM makers, reduced production and increased demand, but maybe it's time to revisit that price-fixing incident of 2005/6. Video card prices increased as well. This one's pretty easy to guess. Nvidia has effectively exited the gaming video card market until their Fermi line starts up near mid-year. The prices of the few cards they do have available are rising because of shortages. ATI has raised their prices because of the lack of competition. (Although if their memory costs have gone up as well, maybe it's not just price gouging.) The motherboard prices are going up, too. I'm going to self-inflict a bigger increase than necessary because the board I've chosen for the last three builds has been discontinued. It's been replaced with an upgraded version with some future-proofing built in, but the price is higher as well. Enough complaining. Let's see how bad all this hurts.
CPU - I've found no reason to change this from last month's CPU, the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition. Unlike most of the components, the price has dropped a couple more dollars to $160. The version chosen for this build has the new C3 stepping, which reportedly has better power consumption and higher overclocking headroom. When the original AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition was introduced in April 2009, its cost was around $245. With this build, I've stayed with the stock cooler for the CPU. This processor is a 125W TDP model, so this is an area we may want to revisit later. (We will not be overclocking in this build, but add a good 3rd party CPU heatsink/fan, and it's certainly doable. The C3 stepping has been letting a lot of people hit over 4GHz and have a stable system.) Motherboards of good quality that can be paired with the AMD go for a bit less than those of the Intel counterpart, so it makes even more sense for a budget build. There are plenty of reviews for the 955 BE because in many benchmarks, it gives the $300 Core i7 920 a run for its money. A few are found at TechSpot, Overclocker's Club and HEXUS. These are reviews of the original 955 BE from April 2009, and it's only gotten better with this new version.
Motherboard - My motherboard recommendation of the last three builds, the Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P, has finally reached it's end. Not because I found a better board at a better value, but because it's been discontinued. At $80, it was unmatched. Now, it's unavailable as well. It's replacement is the Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3 at $95. I'd like to be more upset about the price increase, but this board has both two USB 3.0 and two SATA 3 (6.0 Gb/s) ports. That adds two SATA ports bringing the total to eight (with six being SATA 2 [3 Gb/s] ports). The USB count remains the same (12) with 8 rear panel USBs (2 of those being the USB 3.0 ports) and motherboard headers for 4 more (for front panel USB ports mostly). The SATA 3 ports really are just there for sex appeal in this build. SATA 3 (6.0 Gb/s) drives barely push the SATA 2 (3.0 Gb/s) specs in the benchmarks I've seen, so there's no reason to pay the extra cost for those drives in this build. The future, however, is solid-state disks (SSDs). The prices are coming down, and before this build reaches the end of its life, an SSD will probably be a reasonable upgrade. Those can bury SATA 2 and give SATA 3 a respectable workout. I'd say the same thing about USB 3.0, but USB 3.0 devices are beginning to appear en masse. USB 3.0 external hard drives are just a bit expensive right now as they are new, but their speeds are very impressive. External backup to a external USB 3.0 drive (as opposed to an external ESATA drive) is quite believable. You know it's mainstream when it's available at Wal-Mart.
Other than the sexy new ports, this board is nearly the same as the one it replaces. It has only a single PCI-Express X16 slot, so no Crossfire here, but then budget builds don't usually include multiple graphics cards. Also, it's reported that the AMD770 doesn't support multi-GPU configurations at all, so the 4870X2 and 4850X2 are not candidates either. Gigabyte's Ultra-Durable line (with "UD" in the model number) are 2 oz copper PCBs are still my favorites. They have run solid in my last three builds and overclock like nobody's business. They're just problem-free boards. In general, I'll always stick with the big four: Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and ECS, but right now, Gigabyte and I are dating. This motherboard has a nice layout and is somewhat improved over the - avoiding having anything directly under/behind the PCI-E X16 slot. The one design decision I can't quite figure out is the replacement of two PCI-Express x1 slots with older PCI slots. I'd find the X1 slots more useful in the future, but in all fairness, the only slot we're likely to use is the X16 slot for the graphics card. This board does support several types of RAID and DDR3 1866 memory when overclocked. (We will be using its stock DDR3 1333 speed.) It's still a budget rig, but that doesn't mean it has to be slow. More information on this motherboard can be found at Gigabyte's web site.
Memory - This Gigabyte motherboard uses up to DDR3 1866 memory. Going with DDR3 gives a little performance boost here and creates the possibility of taking this memory forward in the future. Unfortunately, growing memory prices across the board made it impossible to keep the price around $80, which was the price the last build. Though we have to pay more, it's a faster-timed part this time. I'm going back to the OCZ camp - always a favorite of mine - with 4GB of OCZ Platinum DDR3 1333 OCZ3P1333LV4GK (as a two by 2GB kit). This starts the system off with 4GB in two of the four memory slots. I was miffed in the last couple builds that I had to go with slow CAS timings, so I'm happy to be returing to a CAS 7 DDR3 1333 part. If you look around, you can likely find a rebate that drops it in the $90 range. If you find it, take it.
Graphics Card - I'm really grumbling here. Just plain grumbling. There's still a shortage of Nvidia GPUs across the board, and it's only likely to get worse. The shortage of ATI GPUs seems to have abated, but in light of little competition, their prices have risen. My previous hypothesis about the dwindling Nvidia parts was that Nvidia expected to have switched their demand to their new Fermi boards in early January and was caught flatfooted when they missed that date. Nvidia says that they always planned to release Fermi-based GPUs in March 2010, which begs the question as to why they aren't pumping out GTX 260s and 285s in the meantime. I've found some articles that suggest that Nvidia wasn't making enough profit on the G200 GPUs to get into a price war with ATI's 5000 series cards, which are delivering better frame rates in real-world gaming. That makes more sense to me that simple stupidity on Nvidia's part. They couldn't compete at a lower price level, so they decieded to stick with the chipsets that are making them money for now - ION and Tegra netbook CPU/GPUs. That said, given that the prices of the GTX 260s are pushing $300, they might want to think about pushing a few more G200 GPUs to the manufacturers.
I find a good match of graphics card to CPU is to get a graphics card that costs roughly from the same cost as the CPU to about 10-15% more than the CPU. This is likely to change at some point, but it's been holding for a while now. In the case of the budget build, I generally try to keep the CPU right around $150, which would mean a graphics card price from $150 to 172.50. So, even though I've splurged with a $160 CPU, I still want to keep the graphics cost around the level. Ideally, I would like to stay right at or less than the $165 price of the GTX 260 I used in the last build. Since the GTX 260 moved way outside of this range (the cheapest one in stock being $190), I could fall back to the ATI 4870. Two problems with that: 1) It's already been end-of-lifed (EOLed) by ATI (as it's a year old GPU), and 2) the cheapest one available that I would buy is $170. Instead, I've chosen to go with the SAPPHIRE 100283-2L Radeon HD 5770 1GB right at $160. This irks me because it's both slower than the 4870 and the GTX 260 in most benchmarks. It does, however, have DirectX 11 support and Eyefinity support. It's not a bad card at all, just not what $160 bought a few months back. <Grumble>
Sound - For this build, we're going with the integrated sound provided by the motherboard. While I still prefer discrete sound cards, the difference isn't worth the cost in a budget gaming rig. Save that money and put it into decent surround sound speakers.
Case - This is a component that often gets the short straw in a budget build because this is a place where some money can be saved. However, one can go too cheap and make building the new PC a miserable experience. There's nothing worse than having to tear everything apart just to be able to move one disk drive or add a new one. For this build, I've again selected the Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case, which has had a $10 price increase to $70. The Illusion is a step up from the regular Antec Three Hundred because it includes the two front Antec TriCool fans, which are worth well over the $10 price difference. I looked at a number of cheaper cases in order to try to keep the price down. Most of them just don't have enough fans included to convince me they have the cooling needed. (They all have the cut-outs for the fans, but they just don't have the fans.) By the time I add a fan or two, I found myself back up the cost of the Illusion. I've done a build with the Antec Three Hundred (not the Illusion version), and I find a lot of things to like about it (many of which were the same or similar to the Cooler Master case).
You can find out more about it here and the (English) manual is here. I expect this case to be in my budget build for a long, long time.
Power Supply - Since this is ostensibly a single graphics card build, we don't need to put a 1000W power supply unit (PSU) in this build. On the other hand, it is not a good area to scrimp on the PSU either. A poorly designed, overloaded/underpowered power supply can manifest itself in a new build as all sorts of problems. If it drops power on one of the 12V rails, the graphics card can malfunction or a disk drive could get corrupted. A bad PSU can make it appear as if you have faulty memory or a faulty motherboard as well. We don't need to go top end, but we do need a name we can trust. My short list of PSU suppliers in my personal order of preference includes PC Power & Cooling, FSP Group (Fortron), OCZ Technology (who now own PC Power & Cooling), Enermax, Corsair, BFG and Antec. I also hear good things about Cooler Master, Mushkin, Thermaltake, XClio, Zalman and some of the new Rosewill PSUs, but I've never used them personally.
Let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate of power consumption for this build. The two main power using components are the graphics card and CPU (in that order). What we're interested in is the worst case power requirements. The AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition uses up to 182W according to this Guru of 3D article. That's the total power consumption of the system though, not just the processor, so the graphics card uses a little. We're interested in worst case though since that's what the PSU has to be able to supply. The ATI HD 5770 (1GB) uses up to 108W according to this Tom's Hardware article. (Read the text under the graph.) Those two components alone total up to 290W. Finding the exact power requirements of the rest of the components - the motherboard, disk drives, DVD-RW drive, memory and fans is somewhat trickier as the values aren't always published. Based on several articles such as [1], [2] and [3], I'm going to use 50W for the motherboard, 15W per disk drive, 20W per DVD-RW drive and 15W per RAM DIMM. This comes to 50+(2x15)+20+(2x15) or 130W. Combined with what we had before that's a total of 420W. Assuming we want no more than a 70% load on the PSU (50% is a good target, too), we need at least a 600W power supply.
Given that all of the calculations are worst case, a 650W PSU should be plenty. Interestingly, the best PSU still seems to be the same OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W PSU picked for the last build. This is the same PSU as in the last build list, but with the price reduced back to $80. I have the OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI 700W power supply in my gaming machine, and I like it very much. As of this writing, there is a $30 mail in rebate card that makes it effectively $50.
Hard Drive - At least this cost didn't go up any further (as it has in the last couple builds. If you don't wish to try to use RAID 0 for speed, my single drive pick is still the Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA drive, which has 1TB of space for $100. The motherboard supports RAID 0 (as well as 1 and 0+1) and RAID 0 striped drives truly make a system run faster, so my suggestion for the last build was to go with a pair of Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive drives. We need a pair for RAID 0, so that's a total of $180 for 1.5TB of (fast) disk space.
DVD-RW - DVD/RW drives are truly commodity items. Still need one for loading Windows though. For this build, I chose the Lite-On iHAS-324-98 24X DVD Writer, retail version. Why retail this time? Because we need the SATA cable. (The motherboard only includes two and the disk drives will be using those.) The software doesn't hurt either.
Operating System - Here we go with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM version for $105. This particular version is for system builders, which means you get to do your own product support. I'm not sure how that's any different than the retail version when it comes right down to it. I always end up tracking down my software issues myself. There's just so much info available on the web I've never found the need to use the Microsoft telephone support system.
| Component | Description | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition | $162 |
| CPU Cooler | Stock | $0 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3 AM3 | $95 |
| Memory | OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 Model OCZ3P1333LV4GK | $111 |
| Graphics Card | SAPPHIRE 100283-2L Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 | $160 |
| Sound | Integrated sound on motherboard | $0 |
| Case | Antec Three Hundred Illusion black mid-tower | $70 |
| Power Supply | OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W Power Supply | $80 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive (Times 2 for RAID 0) | $160 |
| DVD/RW Drive | LITE-ON Black iHAS-324-98 SATA 24X DVD Writer | $30 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $105 |
| Total | The final damage less shipping | $973 |
I exceeded my self-imposed limit of $900 that's usually my bar for a "budget" system, but given all the prices that have gone up as they have in the last several builds, I'm happy to still be under $1000 for a system with this much power. We've bumped up the CPU considerably. I would like to have a bit beefier graphics card in there. Make no mistake, the ATI HD 5770 is a very good card, but I'd like to have been able to stay with the Nvidia GTX 260 or 275 I had in past build, but the cost is too prohibitive. I'm hoping the release of the Fermi boards might cause some trickle down price drops in the next few months. As always, this build is not intended to be the rock bottom build that can play average games. With DDR3 memory, RAID 0 hard drives, a fast CPU and a decent graphics card, this system should run any game out there fairly well. If you build this system (or one based off of it), I love to hear from you with any problems, praises or jeers you have by emailing me.
Bonus Build! - What I was really hoping for when the new Core i5s came out was to be able to use one of those models and a P55-chipset (LGA 1156) motherboard in the budget build. I hoped the same thing again when the Core i3s came out. Intel hasn't been competing in the under $1000 build nearly as well as they could. I'm still waiting. The closest thing to the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition used above is the new Intel Core i3-540. It costs $145 or $15 less than the AMD 955. However, most tests/benchmarks I've seen to date show it lagging significantly behind both the AMD 955 and the Intel Core i5-750. With the price drop of the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition to $160, there's much less of a clear reason to go with the Core i5 750.
CPU - The substitution here is the new Intel Core i5 750. Theres a very good review at Guru of 3D that shows that the Intel Core i5 750 sometimes beats and sometimes loses to the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition. Given that it's $40 more and that the P55 motherboards tend to cost more than AM3 motherboards, the reason to go this route is not as easy to justify as it was in the last build. Still, it's the Intel processor to choose for a budget gamer.
Motherboard - The substitution here is a motherboard compatible with the Intel Core i5 750. This motherboard lacks the USB 3.0 and SATA 3 (6 GB/s) ports that the AMD board has. It appears to have a second PCI-Express x16 slot, but in fact, it's only a x4 slot, so no SLI or Crossfire on this board either. To get the Intel Core i7/i5/i3 equivalent to the Gigabyte motherboard chosen for the AMD 955 above, you would need to go with the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 LGA 1156 Intel P55 motherboard for $135. That's $40 more than the AMD counterpart, and would blow the $1,000 absolute limit. That said, I'd pay the extra $30 just for the cool new ports.
| Component | Description | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5 750 | $200 |
| CPU Cooler | Stock | $0 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 LGA 1156 Intel P55 | $105 |
| Memory | Corsair XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 Model TW3X4G1333C9A | $80 |
| Graphics Card | SAPPHIRE 100283-2L Radeon HD 5770 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 | $160 |
| Sound | Integrated sound on motherboard | $0 |
| Case | Antec Three Hundred Illusion black mid-tower | $70 |
| Power Supply | OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W Power Supply | $80 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive (Times 2 for RAID 0) | $160 |
| DVD/RW Drive | LITE-ON Black iHAS-324-98 SATA 24X DVD Writer | $30 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $105 |
| Total | The final damage less shipping | $990 |
This build definitely exceeds my self-imposed limit of $900 at $990. This bonus build was introduced in a few builds ago for those just have to have Intel CPUs. The price difference this time is only $17, but I got there by cheating with a motherboard that's not the equivalent of the AMD version. To get the equivalent one mentioned above, the price difference is $57. The increase in performance for that $57 isn't that clear. In fact, there may be no increase in performance. Still, it you're a true blue Intel fan, this is probably the way to go for a budget build.
If you do build this system (or one based off of it), I love to hear from you with any problems, praises or jeers you have by emailing me.
January 2010
October 2009
August 2009