Every 3 months I’ll gather an impressive collection of hardware for building a quality gaming PC with a reasonable pricetag. A PC that both performs well in the latest games and doesn’t cost excessive amounts of money.
These components can be found at virtually every retailer and will provide you the most worth for your money at that specific moment in time. It’s intended to be a good indication of what parts to get that you can either copy for your own system, or add more high-end hardware to if your budget allows it.
Many quality games have only recently been released – some of them (Empire: Total War) – quite demanding. You’ll want to play them all at high settings, so you’ll need a quality PC. This time we’ll be assembling just such a PC by looking at the hardware of spring 2009.
The quarterly budget gaming PC is not intended to be the be-all, end-all gaming system. It will allow you to play all recent games with comfortably high settings. But in all likelihood there will be games that you can’t quite play maxed out without some performance loss.
You will be able to find better performing hardware as well as less expensive systems. This is intended to be a quarterly indication of what makes for the best price/performance gaming rig.
Note: all of the following prices are based on a single webshop. It’s quite likely that you’ll be able to find better prices when browsing various webshops. Assembly will generally cost about 40 euro extra. For help with home assembly, see this article.
Overview
ASUS P5Q SE 78,- EUR Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 145,- EUR ASUS EAH4850 512 MB 130,- EUR 4 GB Kingston PC2-6400 32,- EUR Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 640 GB 55,- EUR ASUS DRW 20B1LT 23,- EUR Antec TruePower New 550W 87,- EUR Chieftec Dragon 50,- EUR Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 102,- EUR Total: 702,- euro
Motherboard
ASUS P5Q SE
It’s not expensive and comes packed with plenty of SATA connectors for extra hard disks and DVD drives. It’s also more environmentally (and energy bill) friendly thanks to ASUS’s EPU energy saving mechanism. This ensures the CPU only gets as much power as it needs to perform the tasks you ask of it.
Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
A powerful dual core processor with 6 MB cache. A particularly good choice, because quad-cores have yet to become useful for gaming and it’s clocked in at a whopping 3 GHz, while the pricetag is relatively mild.
If you really want a quad core system for improved performance in applications such as PhotoShop and 3D Max, or potentially future games that do support quad cores properly. Then you can get the Q8200 at a similar pricepoint, but it’s lower clocked and features less cache (4 MB), which means it will definitely perform worse in modern games.
Graphics card
ASUS EAH4850 512MB
In terms of price/performance ratio there is hardly a better card to be had. It outshines the similarly priced Geforce 9800GTX+ and even rivals the more expensive Geforce GTX260 GPU.
Don’t bother with the 1 GB version! This is not a card intended for high resolution gaming and in anything lower than 1920×1200 you’re not going to notice a performance difference at all.
Memory
4 GB (2×2) PC2-6400 Kingston
It’s important to have sufficient memory (at least 3 GB) if you want to play modern games in high detail. But the speed is not particularly important.
You want to get PC2-6400 (800 MHz) at least, but anything higher is not something you’ll notice in-game. Overclocked modules will not result in any notable performance boost in-game, so don’t bother with them.
Hard disk drive
Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 640GB
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 series is known for it’s good performance and low noise output. You can also go with another hard disk drive, but this is generally a good perfomer for gamers who also like some measure of storage.
If you want genuine top-speed hard disks then you’ll want to go with Western Digital Raptor drives, but these are significantly more expensive. They’re also tiny at 300 GB or less.
DVD Drive
ASUS DRW 20B1LT
Inexpensive and solid DVD burner.
Power Supply
Antec TruePower New 550W
A high quality power supply unit, which is also marked on SLI Zone as a SLI-certified product. This means it’s a high grade PSU featuring optimal (more than 80%) efficiency.
A solid choice for this system, but more demanding systems – particularly SLI / Crossfire ones – will require more than 550W.
Computer case
Chieftec Dragon
A fairly inexpensive mid-tower with lots of space for any hardware you may wish to install. It’s also a surprisingly attractive case considering it’s pricetag. A bit on the heavy side, so it’s less than ideal for LAN Parties.
Operating System
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista has become standard in most stores and it can be hard to get your hands on XP. Vista Home Premium will generally cover all your needs, without limiting you too much.
You can also opt for Windows XP Professional at 30 euro extra. Windows Vista Ultimate costs over 70 euro more than Home Premium. You decide whether it’s worth it.
Loading ...
Hello there!
I just went though the article and your choices are really good.
While it might seem offtopic, I am planning to buy a rather budget pc than a gaming PC.
Already have the Monitor, Case, Keyboard, Speakers, Sound card (PCI) and DVD drives from the older PC.
I was doing well this oold athlon XP (2600+ ) with AOpen MK77MII motherboard based pc is failing in general (frequent I/O errors) and i cannot get a replacement :(. so basically my IDE (Pata) 320 GB harddrive, Nvidia FX5200 256 MB GPU, and 2 Gigs of DDR Ram are useless as no board supports them now.
I require a new motherboard + CPU combo (within Euro 100 or less ) THe board should just be stable and not have reliability issues. I have no plans for overclocking the processor. a 2.2 Dual core from AMD would do just fine.
+ 2Gigs of Ram (no need for 4 as ill be using XP SP2 only and with a Linux Fedora/ Ubuntu)
+ a 500/320 gig harddrive
+ a 256MB PCI-e graphics card (don’t like onboard graphics)
+a decent powersupply IF possible.
Total budget for this cannot cross more than 250 Euros :( I dont have any gaming needs and its mostly used for programming, photoshop, and listening to songs and videos.
Reliability is the top priority. I dont have much need for processing really. I occasionally work in Photoshop which requires a decent amount of RAM. But I do heavy downloading for which the pc remains on for many hours in a day.
Ill be asking my cousin in germany to buy the stuff and get them over to India. I can’t find any good boards and stuff here is mostly outdated for my kind of budget :(
How about an AMD Athlon II X2 240 (2.8GHz) dual-core processor with a budget AMD board? Something like an ASUS M3A76-CM sAM2 motherboard?
That would be slightly over the $100 budget, but I wasn’t able to find a less powerful AMD dual-core processor.
I had Euro 100 as budget for processor and motherboard. (which is a lot more than USD 100) so I am perfectly fine with this combination. THe board seems quite good and I could upgrade it if I wanted to migrate to windows 7 later on with more RAM. Six Sata ports is just pleasing to see, will probably buy sata connector based optical drives.
Also another concern.. Since I do plan to upgrade the system later on with additional harddrives (possibly 2 more) and RAM (2×1 GB )and possibly a better graphics card, would opting for a 500W PSU (From Antec or Corsair) be enough ?
Thank you very much !
Oh i forgot to ask this: Windows XP Professional SP2 will run fine on this system right ? I do not want to move to Vista as I dont have the $ to spend on an OS.
Windows XP will run fine.
As for power requirements. I’m not sure 500 Watt will be enough, that depends on the videocard you’re going to use and the amount of internal (harddrives, disk drives) and external connectors (USB, Firewire) you generally have in use.
A 500 Watt PSU would do fine for say, a HD4850, 4GB RAM, 3 HDD system. But if you’re going to go more high-end than that (e.g.: GTX275), or attach a lot of external stuff, then you’ll want a more juicy PSU.
[...] is the same motherboard as in the spring budget system and for the same price. The reason for this is simple: we haven’t seen any great advances in [...]
Amazing! Exactly what I was looking for!