News Can you beat the budget gaming rig?

My friend has an HP Pavilon notebook with that same graphics card. Gaming rig? Hardly. And overclocked 4.0? Why not just get something cheaper thats far more stable.

Most people have already covered all the flaws, so I'll just back them up.

Gaming rig?

 

why raid 0 aswell. ist that a bit of a waste of money. buying 2 hard drives
a small hard drive would be fine for a gaming rig

 

Raid Zero is good for gaming rig....but the watercooling needs to go........By the way, tom's hardware proves it stable at four. The Top-Flight version needs some editing to be cost efficient as well. Otherwise good work.

Oh, and you guys chill out on the anti-card comments.....I am one who got BF2 (the biggest graphics and ram hog...EVER) to run on intergrated graphics....
SiS intergrated graphics at that.

 

Yeah but when i consider a "Gaming card", i mean something that doesn't run BF2 to look like CS 1.6

 

Budget gaming rig heaven if you enjoy solitare

Ditch the Koolance and get a 7600GT and Thermalright CPU cooler.

Nice try though!

 

I just spent $1850 NZD (~1000USD?) and got...
Gigabyte Motherboard 945 chipset
P4D 805
Watercooling
2gb DDR2-667 Corsair ValueSelect
XFX 7900GT Extreme Edition
WD Raptor 74gb
Cranks around 5000 3dmark06 with a wee overclock and im going for more but having some issues... perfectly stable at 3.33ghz

 

ATI 1300 is def not a gamers card TOMS even say the 1600 aint really worth it.

 

Actually....it ran quite fine with PRETTY GOOD LOOKING settings. Shadows on low, everything on low. I could probably get everything to run on high if BF2 wasn't such a resource-hog (2GB NECESSARY....not even certain better looking games need that much) Oh, and this compy here maxes BF2, and it still looks pretty bad IMO. I think CS:S and Fear/Doom3 all look better. The grass in it is all cartoony, I'd rather have no grass than that junk. Anyway, maxes CSS at 1280x1024 at 20 FPS.
X1300 is a gaming card. It isn't a very good gaming card, but it'll do the work.

 

its not a gamers card, source games are pretty low resource hog, most card can run max, except when it comes to HDR
20FPS on a FPS game is not acceptable, x1300 is definitely not a gamers card, the x1600 could be classed as one, a cheap one at that though

BF2 does not need 2gb ram, 1gb is enough for it, i ran BF2 for a long time on 1gb and its very playable

 

TBH the x1300 is not a bad buy. I recently slipped an AIW version of it into a new budget (£600) rig for a friend. No w/c tho . It still runs CoD2 quite well at 1280*1024.

-ed out

 

it can run games or it can crawl games what do you prefer?

and 20 FPS? i dont consider that good.

 

We've already proved that the bottleneck for games is the GPU and not the CPU, so if I was designing a gaming rig for as little as possible, the GPU would be the LAST place I'd save money. I'd save money on the mobo, CPU and get a better graphics card. This is just an exercise to spend only 600 and say "Wow.. it's 4GHz" when we all know that a cheap, used Venice core on a cheap 939 board, with cheap RAM will still outperfom it in games with a better GPU. The 1300 is not a brilliant gaming card.... if it's a gaming card at all.

 

Wasn't there a thread on building a cheap rig not long ago? Anywho, for 550 quid you can build a pretty nice machine.
3200 A64 = 70GBP
Asrock Dual Sata = ~50
2GB ram = ~110
400w PSU (not some cheap crap) ~ 50
250GB HDD = 60
X850XT = 110
Add a case, mouse, kb, opticals with the 100 quid left... Sorted. Stick a new cooler on the CPU and you should see 2.5ghz.

Overclocking IS the "in" thing in the computing community at the moment (and even for new/novice users just getting into computers), EVERYONE'S doing it, buying bit's for overclocking etc. Hell 2 of my housemates are running (or are soon to) overclocked machines 24/7 now!
Suppose they're just going where the market is! Next thing will be DIY phase change guide, as this seems to be where the markets heading at the moment...

 

No offense but what were you using before, a Pentium 2?

My 820@3.2GHz seems to not enjoy processor intensive operations. Converting 300 flac files into mp3 takes an hour on both cores

 

I just configured the stupidest gaming rig that I could.. Didn't turn out all that bad.

XCLIO 6020BK Case
ECS NFORCE4-A754 Socket 754 Motherboard
MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE Geforce 7950GX2 Video Card (=D)
Linkworld LPG2-43-P4-IO ATX12V 630W PSU
AMD Sempron 64 3000+ Palermo 1600MHz HT Socket 754 Processor
CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 Memory
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3120827AS 120GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 HDD
SONY Black IDE DVD-ROM Drive
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS.

It all comes to around $1015 or £552.

Heh. It beats the X1300.

It would be a lot better if I put in an Asus motherboard, with a more conservative video card, an X2, and If I remove the sound card, but this'll do fine.

 

Some kinda overkill the GX2 ain't it? Screw it, get a X2 and a 7900GT.


1150€... seems to be allright.

 

RAM = Mushkin HP2-5300 DDR2 1GB Kit $100
CPU: $117 (inc dvd-RW) (P4 805)
mobo: Asus P5LD2: $120
Sapphire X1600pro $100
Thermaltake 500w: $80
Hitachi 80gb HDD: 45
XClio 6030b case: $41

all off newegg

Add $50ish and you get PQI turbo 2gb RAM

Add another $50ish and you get a nice Thermaltake BT or a little bit more and get a Corsair Nautilous.