Requesting advice for building a budget gaming PC

What's the most important thing when it comes to gaming?

  • Graphics Card

    Votes: 18 100.0%

  • Ram

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Monitor

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Sound card

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    18
SirDigby

SirDigby

Posts: 1,008   +912
TechSpot Elite
As far as my knowledge can take me, I'm still a noob compared to the collective knowledge of my fellow tech spot members, who, after a year of membership and advice, I call my friends.

Te help I request is as you may have guessed, I am look thinking of building a gaming PC, with a low budget.

My budget is :
Currently : £160 - £160
(-£40 for holiday) - £120
+£40 August pocket money - £160
+ (£250-300) Results Day - £410-460
+£40 September pocket money - £450-500
+£40 October £490-540
+£40 November £530-580
+£40 December £570-620
(-£120 for GF Christmas+Birthday) £450-500
(+£100-150) Christmas £550-650

Sorry, had to do the math and thought I'd share it with you!

So I could potentially have anywhere between £550 and £650

Now for my minimal specs :
Any Graphics Card above 1000 (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html)
At least a quad core
Water cooled
Sound card not too important
6GB RAM

If anyone finds a setup that fits this then thank you so much for your time and effort!
 
I vote for the graphics adapter as being the single most important factor in a gaming PC.

Out of your choices the monitor would be the second most important. However without adequate power to the graphics card it would be rendered useless, so I believe the Power Supply would be the second most important factor in gaming.

With CPU gaining in performance and becoming less of a factor in gaming, I would give the CPU the third most important position.

If you had included the Power Supply and CPU in your pole above, I would have made the monitor fourth most important factor. After all what good is being able to view a good picture if you can't produce the picture with better quality parts listed in the top three I mentioned above.

In my opinion RAM and Sound Cards would have very little importance as RAM is not all that expensive to purchase and on-board sound is usually sufficient.

Edit:
I noticed you are looking for a gaming card and referenced to the Passmark benchmarks of 1000 as a recommended score. You might should consider looking at cards that will score at least 2000.
 
So are you building everything from scratch, or is there a case/hard drive/PSU that you're going to re-use?

You can forget about water cooling, that will eat up at least half of your budget. Cliff is correct in saying that the GPU is the most important part of a gaming PC, and you should be looking for a GTX 560 or 6850 (2700+ passmarks) for decent gaming performance. It should be possible with your budget.
 
I'm currently using an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5470 which is decent enough, on the same website as the benchmarks posted, it's top of the midrange at benchmark of about 400 but this is on my laptop.

I'd rather buy a smaller case, but I do have a spare one.

Water cooling is just a preference, because my laptop overheats like a ***** and I hate it, it makes playing isummer almost unbearable but I suppose that a fan is ok. My budget has just shrunk by £80 but my dad will probably help pay so it shouldn't affect it too much,
 
ETF Soldier said:
Water cooling is just a preference, because my laptop overheats like a ***** and I hate it
Click to expand...
You can't base water cooling preferences from a laptop overheating experience. Laptop coolers are cut down so that they fit into space allowed by the case. Laptops in general run hotter than desktops because of their compact design, which limits air flow as well as cooler performance.
 
I'd recommend against water cooling, with a proper (and cheaper/simpler) air cooling setup, you'll have no problems with heat.
 
New budget:
Currently: £95

  • Money left over from holiday (Max £100) = (X)
  • Results day. 9 x (A/A* = £30, B = £25. C = £20) = (y) Max - £270 Min £180
+£40 September - £135
+£40 October - £175
+£40 November - £205
+£40 December - £ 245
(-£60 GF's present)
  • Christmas (Max - £200)
Maximum by Christmas : £765 | Minimum by Christmas : £375
+ My Dad would probably help pay for some things, but that doesn't add anything to the total as it would only counter balance me going out at several points.
 
This is a build I put together for a friend a few weeks ago. Perfect price/performance.


uggl9.png
 
That looks pretty decent but I'm sure you can do away with 8GBs of memory, 4 would be plenty.
Also getting overclocked versions will probably be more expensive, and also wouldn't give a whole lot more performance.
I'd simply advise against using a WD Caviar blue.
There are plenty of cases that are cheaper than that that will also suffice.
 
hellokitty[hk] said:
That looks pretty decent but I'm sure you can do away with 8GBs of memory, 4 would be plenty.
Also getting overclocked versions will probably be more expensive, and also wouldn't give a whole lot more performance.
I'd simply advise against using a WD Caviar blue.
There are plenty of cases that are cheaper than that that will also suffice.
Click to expand...

It's just a guideline, really. Those are the specs my friend needed.

The CPU isn't an OC version. It's the cheapest Ivy Bridge CPU out there.

And yeah, you could get away with 4GB RAM.

WD Caviar blue is fine. It may not be SSD-fast, but it's a hell of a lot better than the 250GB Maxtor I have as a boot drive. What with the crazy HDD prices, you just have to get the best performance and capacity you can afford.

I would have advised the Samsung F3, as it's possibly the fastest mechanical hard drive around, but it's also £70 at the moment.

True, there are such cases, but the Fractal 3000 is pretty.
 
The CPU isn't an OC version. It's the cheapest Ivy Bridge CPU out there.
Click to expand...
I was talking about the Asus direct CU II... I don't really think there are "OC" CPUs.
You can also snag a 1GB version if you'll be using lower resolutions.

It's true that there isn't a big difference between green/blue/black but faster is faster :), that's really up to you.
I would personally only buy a small SSD for the time being.

True, there are such cases, but the Fractal 3000 is pretty.
Click to expand...
That's... also up to the buyer I suppose. If the topic starter had included "case" as one of the choices, it would surely surely be at the bottom
 
hellokitty[hk] said:
I was talking about the Asus direct CU II... I don't really think there are "OC" CPUs.
You can also snag a 1GB version if you'll be using lower resolutions.

It's true that there isn't a big difference between green/blue/black but faster is faster :), that's really up to you.
I would personally only buy a small SSD for the time being.


That's... also up to the buyer I suppose. If the topic starter had included "case" as one of the choices, it would surely surely be at the bottom
Click to expand...

ASUS GPU's are among the top, if not the top, which you can buy. £187 is amazing for a 7850. The majority are £200-£220.
 
Why delete my post? It's the truth. The FX-xxxx line of processors are rubbish.

Bunch of delusional fanboys.
 
^ I'd tend to agree. Which is why I suggested the Phenom II.

I didn't suggest an Intel setup since it would be cutting it close to the upper-end of the budget, but it would obviously be the better buy.
@OP, if you can afford it, get the i5 3450 and this motherboard instead of the ones I recommended.

Good luck, and do post pictures of the build once you're finished!
 
I've been doing quite a bit of digging around, and referring to Passmark and have settled with a pretty decent build, as far as I can tell. We don't need to get a new monitor as the one we have at the moment is 22" with only a 0.02 milisecond delay (or 0.2 can't remember). I think we were gonna keep the PSU that we have now.

The build is here. Do you know if this would be compatible with the case? If all goes well, I could have this well before Xmas! I currently have £70, and results day is nearing! To save you the trouble of calculating, the build is £350 without the case, with a case about £400, either way, still £200 cheaper than the specs you've all ptiched, BUT DON'T YOU DARE THINK THAT THEY'VE GONE TO WASTE! Using your pitches, and references to my friend's current specs (which I benchmarked) I've managed to get a good medium of price, better than most of theirs as far as I'm aware, whilst not costing me too much!
 
cliffordcooley said:
Edit:
I noticed you are looking for a gaming card and referenced to the Passmark benchmarks of 1000 as a recommended score. You might should consider looking at cards that will score at least 2000.
Click to expand...

I'm currently gaming on my laptop, which seemingly does the job while fairly well, and scores only a 312. so trebling that would be more than satisfactory, but in my recent post, the graphics card scores 2700, and I have a backup for £30 less that scores 2000. (is that worth it?)
 
ETF Soldier said:
I'm currently gaming on my laptop, which seemingly does the job while fairly well, and scores only a 312. so trebling that would be more than satisfactory, but in my recent post, the graphics card scores 2700, and I have a backup for £30 less that scores 2000. (is that worth it?)
Click to expand...
That all depends on which settings you are willing to compromise for your gaming graphics.

I'm happy with my GTS 450 that returns a score of 1400 at passmark. There has been a few times, I've noticed little effects ingame that could have been corrected with a higher scoring card. I'm currently looking at benchmarks and reviews for the GTX 660 Ti (passmark score ~ 3500), I've been waiting quite a while for this card to release.
 
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