[citation][nom]littleleo[/nom]I understand the point you were trying to make in this build but doesn't that defeat the purpose of what these build were suppose to represent in the 1st place. I thought these builds were supposed to show ways to build the best gaming rig for the budget you had specified. Not see how good a gaming rig you could build using a parts you would never use in a gaming rig in the 1st place like this Celeron. That would have been best for another article exploring the gaming potential of low-end Sandybridge CPUs and other non gaming parts. All 3 builds seem to lack the fire and excitement of previous builds. It was like you were just going through the motions. I didn't feel any real desire to do best you could with the different budgets. Maybe I'm wrong but that was the vibe I got. Still it was interesting article, but not what I was looking for. I think you could done much better, just didn't feel the same as in past builds.[/citation]
Just saw this after posting. Guess I have time for one mroe response.
I'll speak for myself only, as the one who has "The Budget Gaming PC". This quarter, at the request of readers, we dropped back down to a $500 budget. As it turns out, the last $650 rig went huge on graphics to tackle 1920x1080. So I had to decide which $500 config I wanted to build first... which one do I MOST want to compare to the last build?
So rather than 1) dump most of the money into the CPU and easily win the overall performance per $ score (at the expense of some unplayable game settings) or 2) build the rig I would most recommend A GAMER on this budget, I decided to aim for the same 1920x1080 resolution again, by focusing on Graphics goodness.
While we very often target the most overall bang for the budget, sometimes it's more fun to tackle a specific goal. And as the "Gaming PC" name implies, sometime I like the budget build to ignore "winning an SBM" to focus purely on it's intended purpose. The past two machines have done just that, at $650 and now $500. Otherwise, there would be far too similar rigs being built, time after time.