Saturday, March 26, 2011

<$800 Casual gaming rig (without monitor/mouse/keyboard)

Case:
COOLER MASTER HAF 922 RC-922M-KKN1-GP Black Steel + Plastic and Mesh Bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Cooler Master HAF's are great cases. This one has awesome air flow.
Harddrive:
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Western Digital is a good Manufacturer and 1TB is really all you need. Its has extra cache for an extra boost in performance.
MotherBoard:
ASUS M4A78LT-M AM3 AMD 760G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
This  Mobo has the Sockets we want and 4 slots for RAM and the one PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot we only need. Having more than one is just wasteful. With the RAM we got, you'll have 2 slot open for the future, if you need more.
Video Card:
EVGA 01G-P3-1561-AR GeForce GTX 560 Ti FPB (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
Remember we are going to be Casual gaming not Maxing out everything, but this GPU can for almost every game out. But also remember we want this rig to be casual for aleast 2 years. EVGA is a great manufacturer too.
Power Supply:
Antec EarthWatts EA-500D Green 500W ATX12V v2.3 / EPS12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply
Antec makes PSU's very well. We wouldn't every need anything above 500 Watts for what we got. Only stupid people think more watts more performance. There are Power Supply Calculators out there on the web.
Memory/RAM:
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory Model KHX1333C7D3K2/4GX 
Kingston is God Tier with RAM. 240-Pin is compatible with our Mobo and so is DDR3 1333. If you wanted to get faster RAM you can find a 4GB (2x 2GB) 240Pin with DDR3 1600 since the Mobo can handle it. But you have to know how to set up the clocks and voltages in the bios which is easy if you read some tutorials online.
CPU:
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ965FBGMBOX
Now since we aren't doing anything crazy with this computer we don't need an Intel i7 9** or their Sandy Bridge.

I'll take requests for types of builds or price ranges if you guys want. Just leave some comments.

11 comments:

  1. Awesome. Been thinking about upgrading my rig for a while.

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  2. i'll make another build with 1155 next time

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  3. Agreed, 1155 is more bang per buck.

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  4. When you have a certain budget you will not go higher, only lower
    That's why people choose for the AM3

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  5. That looks pretty solid.. what type of games do you usually play?

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  6. How about a rig that can handle audio producing and some gaming for 1100 or less?

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  7. excelent setup mine is a hunk of junk atm

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