System Builder Marathon, Sept. '09: $650 Gaming PC

Page 4 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Status
Not open for further replies.
[citation][nom]pauldh[/nom]The official announcement will spell out the rules, but the first SBM contest was limited to the USA and Canada. Canadians took home two of the three systems.[/citation]

I believe Americans won 2 of the three. One system went to Canada.
 
I like that you did not include a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and OS in your build. I price new pcs assuming I already have that stuff.

Kudos.

Pricing a $650 machine, I've added a beefier cpu and only one vid card, but your Crossfire setup is intriguing. I wonder how a single video card & stronger cpu would compare to crossfire and a weaker cpu.
 
[citation][nom]pauldh[/nom]If I'm not mistaken, you're missing the HDD, right?Core i5 wasn't available for this round, but I think it would be better suited for the mid-priced enthusiast PC. Unless we drop the traditional "Gaming" name from the lowest budget system, I don't think i5 will allow enough GPU anytime soon. It's something to aim for anyway.[/citation]
yeah forgot the hard drive. i could fit in under the $705 there by chopping some other things and being aggressive with rebates and bing cashback. i take your point though. for a from scratch build it'd be hard to do it and keep the system balanced with an i5.
 
[citation][nom]tapher[/nom]Nice diplomatic handling of the AMD fans. Unfortunately I don't think they're going to quiet down in the future, tho. They're like the republican tea party folks; given this "success" brought on by complaining, they may just complain louder and more virulently in the future. At least no Intel salespersons have been hung up in cemeteries yet.[/citation]

You mean, like the G20 protesters?
 
[citation][nom]ofirhadad[/nom]For that price you could put AMD Phenom 9650 instead. Is much stronger.[/citation]
stop drinking so much koolaid.
 
[citation][nom]pauldh[/nom]@ All: As always, thanks for the comments and discussion. I'll try to catch up on some responses.I'd also like to ping some feedback from the community on what your first upgrade to this system would have been if your budget was slightly increased. I sure have my running list for each SBM, but am curious to hear yours. Would it have been on a Phenom II X3 720BE, a PII X4, after market cooler, 1GB HD 4850's, bigger/faster HDD, nicer enclosure, or something else? Thanks[/citation]
I would either go with a Phenom II X3 720 BE or with a Phenom II X4 955 BE CPU if the budget was a little more.Yeah I'd vote for a more powerful CPU.I've heard that there is supposed to be a Phenom II X3 740 BE coming out soon though but that's currently not available.
 
[citation][nom]pauldh[/nom]@ All: As always, thanks for the comments and discussion. I'll try to catch up on some responses.I'd also like to ping some feedback from the community on what your first upgrade to this system would have been if your budget was slightly increased. I sure have my running list for each SBM, but am curious to hear yours. Would it have been on a Phenom II X3 720BE, a PII X4, after market cooler, 1GB HD 4850's, bigger/faster HDD, nicer enclosure, or something else? Thanks[/citation]
a pair of 1GB 4850s probably are about $220 no rebates, a pair of 1GB 4870s are about $240 after rebates. I'd get the 720BE, i dont think anything else is really as good a value at that price point. with the 4850s and the 720BE that'd be about $60 extra.
 
If you're looking at building this system, spend an extra $15 and get the Phenom II X3 720 BE. A lot of the benchmarks here on Toms show games benefit from 3 cores, but not as much from 4 cores. I think the X3 is the best bang for the buck you can get with a CPU. You should be able to overclock it to 3.5Ghz without a problem.

Personally, if I was going to drop $650 on a new machine, you might as well put another $100 in and get a pair of 4870s instead of the 4850s along with the X3 CPU. This system would be darn close to the $1250 system in the next article here at Toms. That part is definitely debatable, but it's silly not to pony up for the X3. Otherwise, the components in this system are all great choices.
 
Heck if we're going over budget, why not spend 115.00 instead of 103.00 for the PII 720 BE? We can OC easily and have three cores with a unlock for the fourth one available.
 
My main point was just to spend $15 to get the 720 BE, seems foolish not to do that. If you don't mind spending roughly $100 extra you can get a pair of 4870s which should be very comparable to the $1250 system for much less money. If you're really on a budget, get the 720 BE and a single 4870 card and overclock both and you still have a really nice gaming system and don't have to worry about profiles and drivers to make Crossfire work.
 
How much are the power costs of this machine over its lifetime? Do they add up to a notable fraction of the total purchase price?

4hours/day * 200W/hour / 1000W/kW * 0.10cents/kWh = $29.20 per year. Is that right? I suppose that's still a small fraction of the cost.
 
Wow, I might be building a very similar gaming PC to the one TH built here.
The biggest drawback I've found now is the skyrocketing price of RAM, both DDR2 and DDR3. To date, the cheapest DDR2 kit is around $85-90CAD, while the cheapest DDR3 kit is still over $100. It usually ends up being the same price of the motherboard (Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P DDR3) and/or the power supply (Corsair TX650 or Antec EarthWatts 650W) which I find completely ridiculous. While I somewhat understand DRAM fabs pushing for DDR3 adoption, all DRAM is up in price. I don't think I'll be able to afford my build until after xmas season. Anyways, I just hope DRAM prices get under control. We're all paying through the nose for kits that cost 20-50% less even 3 months ago. And most of the last generation Radeons and Geforce's have spiked in price as well...I can't find a Radeon 4850 for less than $120CAD when it was under $100 last month! With the release of Lynnfield and the Radeon 5000 series cards, the high end has seen awesome prices for a top-of-the-line system, while the mainstream/entry-level components have all spiked in price because of external forces. *shrug* I'm waiting until at least the New Year to build my budget system.
 
[citation][nom]pauldh[/nom]@ All: As always, thanks for the comments and discussion. I'll try to catch up on some responses.I'd also like to ping some feedback from the community on what your first upgrade to this system would have been if your budget was slightly increased. I sure have my running list for each SBM, but am curious to hear yours. Would it have been on a Phenom II X3 720BE, a PII X4, after market cooler, 1GB HD 4850's, bigger/faster HDD, nicer enclosure, or something else? Thanks[/citation]

I've just recently started looking into building my own PC and I'm not incredibly PC savvy and this article has got my mental cheerleaders goin' and I think I'm going to make it one of my winter projects.

In response to the quote above from Paul, I would definitely go with Phenom II X3 and the graphics card upgrade, though I'm not too sure about which one(s). Going off of paul's own suggestion I would definitely look into 2 1GB 256-bit 4850's. But I was wondering can you run dual GPU's with NVidia's comprable model? Is that what SLI capable means? I've only seen this spoken about with ATI's so I have no idea.

I think then I'd look at a nicer CPU fan and then a better case. I priced it out with all of these upgrades and the crappy RAM price increase and it came out to be a little over $900 which by everyone's estimates on here would be competing for playing time against the $1250 Entusiast's build.

Like I said I'm still new (1 week of researching) to this, so any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I'm really into RTS games and my current hand-me-down PC barely handles C&C generals so the game that I was really looking at was World in Conflict. But with a new PC I'd be a lot more likely to venture elsewhere!

This article was beautifully presented! Keep up the QUALITY work.
 
Zinimus; you look like a consumer who'd be down for overclocking, and this factor may alter your CPU choice!

Post specific build prospects in your own thread in the forums, and you'll get some feedback updated to the day's best prices, often!

 
[citation][nom]jj463rd[/nom]That's a bitchin budget gamer system especially looking at the gaming benchmarks.Just this month I was thinking about building a similar type of system with the Phenom II X2 550BE.I was going to go with gigabytes 785G type board (just one graphics card slot) though however I may reconsider that especially with what you presented here although I was shooting for a much cheaper budget build (about $180 less than what you have),Newegg did have a gigabyte 785G board with the Phenom II X2 and $20 off in a combo deal until the end of this month.I think that your choices were better than mine (more powerful).[/citation]
And that is what I like about these articles! They don't just throw out a system, they (THG) break it down to each part. They also use real world retail prices, and only use off-the-shelf parts.
And as can always be said, something newer and better is just around the corner. But if we are Ever going to see something done, you just gotta do it, and do it now. (Remember, magazines are written 3 MONTHS in advance. I think even the daily newspaper is written 1 - 3 days in advance.)
Once again, THG has produced something that occasionally is Better than what we would have done. Thanks Tom's crew!
 
[citation][nom]Saifudeen[/nom]Heck if we're going over budget, why not spend 115.00 instead of 103.00 for the PII 720 BE? We can OC easily and have three cores with a unlock for the fourth one available.[/citation]
Yes, with a few more dollars, we can always get a better system. Sometimes though, the person has a "bottem line" dollar amount that they have to stick to.
Also, this system was to give great performance w/o overcloaking. Don't get me wrong, if we can spend just a few extra dollars on a part KNOWN for giving a noticeable improvement after easily/reliably being overcloaked, then that should not go overlooked.
 
[citation][nom]trying2[/nom]Yes, with a few more dollars, we can always get a better system. Sometimes though, the person has a "bottem line" dollar amount that they have to stick to. Also, this system was to give great performance w/o overcloaking. Don't get me wrong, if we can spend just a few extra dollars on a part KNOWN for giving a noticeable improvement after easily/reliably being overcloaked, then that should not go overlooked.[/citation]
-- OOPS, I might have quoted the wrong comment. Moving up $12 for improvement is a good investment. FYI though, by the time using an extra core is needed, the processors would have advanced into better territory. I have always bought with upgrade space, like SLI support. But every time my graphics needs updating (finally), the cost of an "old board" for SLI isn't worth it compared to spending a few more dollars and getting a faster board, with more Ram, and current DirX standards.
 
[citation][nom]bpdski[/nom]My main point was just to spend $15 to get the 720 BE, seems foolish not to do that. If you don't mind spending roughly $100 extra you can get a pair of 4870s which should be very comparable to the $1250 system for much less money. If you're really on a budget, get the 720 BE and a single 4870 card and overclock both and you still have a really nice gaming system and don't have to worry about profiles and drivers to make Crossfire work.[/citation]

All good points. Thanks for sharing.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.