Best Gaming PC's for a given budget

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pjbliverpool

B3D Scallywag
Legend
I was wondering how much a truly kick ass (not bleeding edge, but high end) PC would cost in todays very competitive markets. Here's what I put together as representing the best mix of high end performance / capability with value....

All prices from www.scan.co.uk

Intel Core i7 920 Retail: £239
Gigabyte X58 Mobo: £155
Radeon HD 4890 1GB 850/3900: £196
6GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333Mhz: £69
Maxtor DiamondMax 22 1TB HDD: £72
OCZ APEX 60GB SDD: £171
Pioneer Blu-Ray Reader / DVD Re-Writer: £65
Iiyama 24" 1080p LCD Monitor, 5ms: £195
Decent Case: £30
650w EZCool Silent PSU: £34
Keyboard / Mouse / 360 Controller: £75

Total cost = £1300

So £1300 for what I would consider a pretty cutting edge high end gaming PC. Not bad!

Anyone disagee with any of the above? How about looking to some cheaper price points, £1000, £700, £500 etc...?

How much value do PC's offer these days?
 
Don't know about that PSU and the HDD, but the other stuff looks dope.
 
The PSU is frightening. Use this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139001

Higher quality in every way. Yes, the wattage is lower, but trust me, you don't need 650 to power that machine.

Also, the i7-920 isn't THAT good... see http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/intel-core-i7_12.html#sect0 and http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15818/6 (Read page seven as well)

A Core 2 Duo E8600 would be as good or nearly as good and slightly cheaper(not counting the savings on the motherboard and ram. this is also according to the sie you linked), or Core i7-940 would be better period.
 
I was going more for price and features on the HDD and PSU rather than a known name / model. The HDD was the cheapest 7200rpm 1TB drive with 32MB cache and a sub 8.9ms access time that I could find.

The PSU was just the cheapest decent looking 650w (which I figured would be about optimal for this system).

The SDDwas the only component that I wasn;t too sure about. Its certainly not necessary and adds a lot onto the cost but its sure nice to have as an OS / Programmes / Documents drive which leaves the HDD free for games and media.
 
You can easily overclock the i7 920 to 965 levels if you go for good aftermarket HSF combo.
 
pjbliverpool said:
I was going more for price and features on the HDD and PSU rather than a known name / model. The HDD was the cheapest 7200rpm 1TB drive with 32MB cache and a sub 8.9ms access time that I could find.

The PSU was just the cheapest decent looking 650w (which I figured would be about optimal for this system).

The SDDwas the only component that I wasn;t too sure about. Its certainly not necessary and adds a lot onto the cost but its sure nice to have as an OS / Programmes / Documents drive which leaves the HDD free for games and media.
Click to expand...

Bear in mind SDDs get real slow real fast... Check http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=44476 to see what I mean.
 
Go with a Vertex instead of the Apex SSD. Apex uses the JMicron (fail) controller...
 
I would skip the SSD all together. You'll be hard pressed to ever notice any difference, except when you hit one of those SSD performance walls and everything grinds to a halt. Put that money towards a faster CPU and/or bigger HDD.
 
Brad Grenz said:
I would skip the SSD all together. You'll be hard pressed to ever notice any difference, except when you hit one of those SSD performance walls and everything grinds to a halt. Put that money towards a faster CPU and/or bigger HDD.
Click to expand...

I think more important than a top of the line CPU would be getting a very fast hdd setup. CPUs are very fast nowadays and i bet they spend most of their time waiting for data to be fed to them. Therefore up the hdd speed and watch your system zip through stuff. Of course that does not mean go buy an Athlon 64 ;)
 
I.S.T. said:
Also, the i7-920 isn't THAT good... see http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/intel-core-i7_12.html#sect0 and http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15818/6 (Read page seven as well)

A Core 2 Duo E8600 would be as good or nearly as good and slightly cheaper(not counting the savings on the motherboard and ram. this is also according to the sie you linked), or Core i7-940 would be better period.
Click to expand...

This i7 benchmarks don't tally up very well with most of the others i've seen.

For example, just look at how the i7 completely slaughters an E8400 in Crysis Warhead once all GPU bottlenecks are removed and with the settings at maximum:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/core-i7-multigpu-sli-crossfire-game-performance-review/15

Dual cores may be as fast, or even faster than an i7 in some older games or even in newer games when no real pressure is being put on the CPU (situations that are primarily GPU limited) but as soon as you start putting some serious strain on the CPU, the i7 just leaves everything else in the dust.

Right now, the only game that really challenges any modern CPU is GTA 4 but thats the one game were you should avoid a dual core completely regardless of how fast it is. i7's on the other hand rip it up. And I would expect more games to lean on 4 cores in the future so I think a quad is definatly the better bet.
 
I here what you guys are saying about the PSU but on the other hand, i've been rocking along on a cheap no name 430w PSU for the last 6 years without any issues and in terms of total power draw, I don't expect that system to be much beyond mine. Hence, while I don't expect to get anything near 650w out of that cheap supply, I think that it would still deliver more than enough juice to keep that system running happily. I could accept paying £10-15 more for a better make / lower wattage but definatly not double as I just can't see the benefit.
 
Brad Grenz said:
I would skip the SSD all together. You'll be hard pressed to ever notice any difference, except when you hit one of those SSD performance walls and everything grinds to a halt. Put that money towards a faster CPU and/or bigger HDD.
Click to expand...

It already has a TB of HDD ;)

Perhaps adding a second TB drive and going with a RAID 0 / 5 array might be the better bet though. It would work out cheaper and give a lot more space.

What I like about the SDD though is the lack of need for the HDD to churn during 'normal' operations. i.e. I would be using it to store the OS, all programmes and all none media type documents. Hence except for playing games or media (music/pictures/video), the HDD wouldn't have to be used much at all, so the whole system is quieter and should feel a lot snappier.
 
Well, on the PSU an extra £35 is double, but it's also only an extra £35 and if you get a decent PSU it'll last years. Scan used to stock some half-decent brands in the 400W range for <£50 but they seem to have decided that the credit crunch is an excuse to raise prices. Go figure.

To my mind I'd still lean towards an HDD like a Velociraptor rather than an SSD for a system drive (having tried both!). In 12 months things may well be different, but right now IMO SSDs aren't quite where they need to be in terms of price and the little surprises they like to spring.

Every time I price up an Intel system I'm gob-smacked by how bloody expensive the motherboards are :/
 
pjbliverpool said:
I here what you guys are saying about the PSU but on the other hand, i've been rocking along on a cheap no name 430w PSU for the last 6 years without any issues and in terms of total power draw, I don't expect that system to be much beyond mine. Hence, while I don't expect to get anything near 650w out of that cheap supply, I think that it would still deliver more than enough juice to keep that system running happily. I could accept paying £10-15 more for a better make / lower wattage but definatly not double as I just can't see the benefit.
Click to expand...
650 is not needed for this system unless you plan to run more than one GPU.
 
pjbliverpool said:
It already has a TB of HDD ;)

Perhaps adding a second TB drive and going with a RAID 0 / 5 array might be the better bet though. It would work out cheaper and give a lot more space.

What I like about the SDD though is the lack of need for the HDD to churn during 'normal' operations. i.e. I would be using it to store the OS, all programmes and all none media type documents. Hence except for playing games or media (music/pictures/video), the HDD wouldn't have to be used much at all, so the whole system is quieter and should feel a lot snappier.
Click to expand...

I'd avoid raid-0 like the plague. You get double the chances of a catastrophic HD failure that leads to data loss with a very very negligible increase in performance. In fact, so low that other than file transfers you won't notice any speed increase for a normal home computer doing normal home computery things.

As noted before the only SSD's really worth considering at this moment in time are either SLC based or Intel MLC or the OCZ Indilinx based Vertex MLC drives. With SLC being the most expensive down to the Vertex being the cheapest.

If money wasn't an object, the Intel SLC based SSD is the best performing with the least performance hit when the SSD becomes greatly fragmented.

A quality PSU will also save you a lot of headache. Especially if your location doesn't have stellar power line voltage quality. Although if things are particularly bad, then like me, you'd also need a quality UPS for a consistently crash free experience.

Likewise, I don't see anything in your setup that would require more than a quality 400 watt PSU. Heck I'm willing to bet even a quality 350 watt PSU would run that rig just peachy. But to be safe and if you plan to upgrade in the future it may not hurt to get a quality PSU somewhere in the 450-600 watt range. And that's usually pretty afordable even with a very high quality PSU.

Regards,
SB
 
A low quality 650 W cannot possibly be compared to a high quality 450 W. There's more to a PSU than wattage. You have amperage, voltage regulation quality, ripple, efficiency, noise, heat, general quality of the components, temperature rating of the capacitors and how it functions at 100% load and how it functions at a load that is above the rated wattage. A very low quality PSU will most likely die even at lower than 100% load. A quality one can pump out more than it is rated for.

A PSU that goes ka-blooie can take out other components like the motherboard and GPU and that will be expensive.

You may get lucky with a cheap and cheerful PSU, but I don't think it's worth it.
 
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