Hardware Building a £400 Gaming PC

El. cheapo. El. Not fair.

On top of that fuel is dirt cheap over there, fill up a car for £60 (£30) yet it costs about £50 to fill up here ($100). You guys have it lucky, you even have higher wage rates too!


£400 for a gaming rig may seem cheap for enthusiasts but unfortunatly in my experience, people with no knowledge of hardware who want a gaming rig seem to think that expensive = better when it's not always the case.

 

I'm starting to want to move to America.

Now if only there weren't so many americans there...



Jokes!!

 

Maybe I'm spoiled. And I've only ever lived in the USA and never been outside but gas here where i live is $3.89 a gallon.
(Well it was last night, who knows today, it moves about +/- 10 cents three times a week anymore.
In my 3.2L car (11 gallon tank) it costs me over $40 to fill it.
Most people it costs $60+ and if you have a big truck or H3-- $100+

Considering our public transportation is ****, taxis are expensive and drive like crack-addicts--
and considering the layout of our metropolises and cities in general--
its hard to walk anywhere consistently in all but the most rural areas.

Cause i guarantee if you're close enough to walk to work,
you aren't close enough to do anything social/shop/groceries etc.
And vice versa.

So as I said-- maybe I'm spoiled or sheltered but near $4 a gallon is just plain stupid.
And our min-wage is only $7.50. Working under 40 hours a week that gets me ~$350 a check.

$700 a month minus $475 rent and $100 phone bill doesn't leave alot left for other stuff.

Huh, this turned into a blog post. >.> sorry.

 

Problem is, a PC7 would have been about double the price of the case they bought. IMO, the case they used is fine and the extra money that would have been spent on a PC7 would have been better spent on an 8800GT

 

We're nearing £6 per gallon here. Yeah, $12 per gallon.

Think yourself lucky!

 

In that case I will shut the hell up.

(More on topic-- is there a way to know if the BIOS is going to let you over clock before hand? Is it the chipset that lets you know this or just googling about the given board or just a bit of dumb luck?)

 

Most BIOSes today allow you to overclock to a reasonable degree, even on the cheapest mobo. Gigabyte (as per the one in the article) tend to have a fairly unfriendly one which takes some getting used to. For example they have this annoying "feature" where some of the more sophisticated areas such as memory timings are unlocked when you press ctrl F1 on the main screen. When you figure that out, learned the jargon and worked out where everything is, you can do quite a bit.

 

Though I think part of the problem is that performance freaks are, generally, enthusiasts but not too many enthusiasts are performance freaks with deep pockets (or lack of other priorities).

I built my system with an e4400 & P5N32E SLI Plus for the same reason.

If enough of us avoid them maybe they'll stop doing that.

 

This Guide ROCKS... This is awesome rig.. my rig can't get that FPS in those games... and it's more expansive by 10 time.... Now you make me want to change.. But I think I will wait for the new chip with that 1366 pins or some thing. TY BT for this useful information

 

For US from newegg:

E2180 $70
Gigabyte P31 DS3L $75
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB 4-4-4-12 $31 AMIR $25
XFX 8800GT $130 AMIR $30 with improved cooler or Asus 8800GT $130 AMIR $30 with improved cooler.
OCZ 500W StealthxStream $40 AMIR $25
WD 250GB $58
Optiarc DVDR $26
Vista Premium X64 $95
Cooler Master 340 $40

CPU slightly better, memory CAS4, better 8800GT comes out cheaper then 9600gt, PSU very simmilar OCZ is much cheaper here though, case 340 version.

Total after rebates: $559 USD + roughly $20-30 shipping.

I suspect Canadian pricing may be even lower, will do tonight when NCIX releases their new prices.

 

I'm a budget gamer and I have to make due with what I have because I can't afford to go out and purchase a xtreme video card whenever a new game comes out that I want to make explode. I found out that PC gaming is only as expensive as you make it. I recently upgraded my 6 year old PC with just a mere 70 bucks and I manage to run Doom 3 on High Quality with fantastic fps and Half-Life 2 with around 70fps and as I posted earlier I ran The Lost Coast with 10-45 frame rate which is very playable in my book.

The PC gaming industry is becoming too dependent on eye candy. I'm all for PC gaming and my eyes have been opened recently because of my upgrade and the experience I've had with the new games that became available to me. However, I think that developers need to start focusing on making more original games with great gameplay. I mean, for a new comer such as myself trying to get into PC gaming and seeing literally hundreds of different video cards it's overwhelming if you don't know what you're doing. Why release a new video card every 6-8 months? That's saturating the market and sucking up consumers cash.

 

This is what im talking about, you don;t need to spend silly money to play games at silly rez's. Just shows what £400 can do. Its very similar to my own rig.

 

nice guide for cheap pc gaming, its unfortunate that you couldnt shop around though, there really are better deals out there.

im thinking of getting a better system than that though yes it does cost more (about £500) but its worth it.

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 £123 (which i will attempt to overclock to 3.6Ghz)
2Gb Kingston Ram PC6400 £30
XFX 680I LT £65
Inno3D 8800GT 512MB £109
OCZ Stealth XStream 600W PSU £49
several case fans £15
Freezer 7 Pro cpu cooler £15
galaxy 3 case £20
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit £68

total of £494

but im thinking if changing the mobo to a p35 as im not too sure if i really need sli,
advice from a professional would be greatly apreciated

 

> Did this actually come as a surprise to anyone? I have *never* bought anything that was top-of-the-line. Ever.

Me either. I tend to splurge on big processors, but graphics cards have - until extremely recently - been completely useless for video edit and other imaging work. All you ever needed was a 2D display.

I am very excited about the possibility of using pixel shaders for colour grading work, as the Color program (part of the Final Cut suite) does on the Apple Mac. Even the most expensive gaming graphics card is vastly cheaper than the sort of hardware you previously had to buy to accelerate this sort of thing.

But as regards games, well. Last thing I played on this was Oni, which is an extreme example, but my first experience of Far Cry was about a year ago on a rig which ran it with the settings maxed. I'm not sure how many people had their first experience of the game crippled by trying to run it on something that wouldn't do that, but I'm content to play stuff that's a couple of years old and get the absolute best out of it. I'm looking at FEAR next.

Bwaha.

P

 

Any students out there can probably end up affording that 8800GT if they wanted too, considering they wouldn't have to pay for an OS (most colleges here in the US I know of offer free or cheap (IE 3 bucks)copies of any Windows desktop OS (my college offers the higest vista you can buy, and also XP pro, both under 5 bucks)

then you have the people that will find "some other way to get windows OS running on their machine" (wink wink)

 

nice guide. I built my current rig for around $400~ not top of the line but it's still quite powerful.

 

Awesome article, I really related to it, because the system I'm building at the moment is very close to this one (Just kicked up a step in a few areas - E2220, 8800GT, GA-P35-DS3L) so I loved reading this. Awesome work!

 

Great article, even better if you have an existing case and psu that can be used.

Well done for putting it together and of course there is flexibility on all prices with specials offered on many different websites with free/cheap delivery.

Made a computer similar to this one for a friend, worked out great. Shows it can be done, and done well for most gamers who just want to play.

 

Now i wanna see it against a 400$ amd machine!!

 

Just so you know, CoD just upgraded to patch 1.6