At the end of December, my wife’s PC finally died and mine was barely limping along. They were both over 4 years old. I have become disenchanted with pre-builts so I decided I’d build them myself. I hadn’t done so for 15+ years so i was a little nervous about it. But they turned out GREAT (knock on wood). Top Notch Gaming PC for under $1000 If you do all the rebates, you can actually put it together for about $870. Check it out and let me know what you think!

A $1,000 is a lot of money. If you have that kind of money to spend on a new PC though, I think you can build a great gaming PC for under $1000 nowadays with all of the online retailers. Because of that, I don't see anything special about that build myself in particular. Of course, I've built my own PC for the past number of years and have kept up with hardware so not much of it seems magic to me anymore.

The real challenge is doing it for way less, let's say around $500. TigerDirect offers really cheap barebones systems nowadays that you can just upgrade and save a lot of money on. Take for example this one. For $400, you can have a really good gaming system that does not break the bank. If you were so inclined, you could just bump up the video card and have quite a nice gaming machine for under $600.

I guess what I'm really getting at is, putting together a great gaming system with $1000 is not a challenge today like it might have been in the past if you know your parts. You could even shave off a lot of that cost to bring it down a bit as well. I'm definitely not trying to knock on that article, especially if it is yours, but I did want to at least point that out [smile]

PS - I'm a die hard NewEgg fan myself, so I'd never buy from anywhere else when it comes to building a new PC, good choice there [grin]

I built my gaming rig for 650 and it is good enough to play all the latest games at high settings without trouble. You just have to buy the things on sale that are good. Shop around online, tigerdirect and ncix and newegg between the three of them you should find something good. If you can get all the parts from one or the other you can avoid too much shipping too.

Quote: Original post by Drew_Benton
I guess what I'm really getting at is, putting together a great gaming system with $1000 is not a challenge today like it might have been in the past if you know your parts.

Agreed that's why you are even starting to see alot more $500 gaming pc guides everywhere!
I just built a new rig around a 9550 not long ago and it's sad to see that it's only considered mid-range now:(
System Builder Marathon: $1,250 Mid-Range PC

Also there still isn't a singlecard GPU out yet that can run Crysis at over 30fps with all settings at high at all resolutions so I will wait a bit longer to upgrade my vidcard since I really don't want the extra noise that comes with SLI or crossfire.
So you can't really can't call it a top notch pc IMO since there are still games like Crysis and FSX it won't be able to run at a playable rate.
You need dual vidcards for that!
"While the test appeared to run smoothly on the GTX 285 at our lowest-tested Crysis settings, occasional stutters would get the player fragged in a real game. The only good option for a single-GPU card would be to reduce detail levels, although the dual-GPU GeForce
GTX 295 could make 1920x1200 pixel game play possible for buyers with more discretionary income."
And I run 1920x1200 as my main resolution now since that's the native resolution of my 24" LCD.


[Edited by - daviangel on February 19, 2009 3:51:23 AM]

That's a good point. I wonder how low you can go to have an actual decent gaming PC.

$650?

Is %500 doable?

Or at that point are you massively sacrificing performance?

Quote: Original post by Cambios
Or at that point are you massively sacrificing performance?

Check out this build your own from TigerDirect:

Quote:
Asus M3N78 PRO Barebone Kit -
GeForce 8300
AMD Phenom X4 9500
8GB DDR2-800 Corsair
500GB SATA2
ATX Mid-Tower
750W PSU

You would have a pretty decent gaming rig with that and you would only have to add a optical drive to it. Of course, gaming would be sub-par, so if you added a $100 video card to it, then you would have a very competitive gaming system. Plenty of ram, the CPU isn't dated or slow, and you have enough hard drive space.

So, it is definitely possible to get a close to great but over good gaming system for around 500-600, depending on how much extra you'd want to spend on the video card. If you just threw in the top end nvidia, you would still be under 700 yet still have a system pretty comparable to your original $1000.

There are other cheaper alternatives that you can customize, but that's just the one they sent me in their daily e-mail spam [lol]

I built my friends gaming pc with parts from tigerdirect that was almost a year ago for about $648 and it was good enough to play Crysis on Max smoothly. I built mine first and I spent around $1200 but it was all the top of the line parts then. That was about a year ago too, and there isn't a game today I can't still play on max graphics with a high fps.

I will never buy a prebuilt computer again unless it is a laptop of course or something little, but for myself I like gaming and I refuse to pay 3500+ for a Alienware when I can build one way cheaper.

I just built my new system with parts from newegg and tigerdirect after rebates it only cost $380 (not including hard drive, case and dvd burner). Its not the top of the top but I am able to play crysis at max settings with no problems. The only thing I didn't get yet is a second gfx card so I can check out all the talk about sli.

Quote: Original post by Feralrath
I just built my new system with parts from newegg and tigerdirect after rebates it only cost $380 (not including hard drive, case and dvd burner). Its not the top of the top but I am able to play crysis at max settings with no problems. The only thing I didn't get yet is a second gfx card so I can check out all the talk about sli.

That is a good idea I read somewhere that a lot of games don't have sli support so you won't be using the power of both the cards. Things might have changed by now, I think AoC was like that when it came out. I stopped playing that so I am not sure if they ever added that support.

You can buy a Dual GPU card as a single card set-up for now. They're about the same price as a conventional Sli/Crossfire setup but only take up one slot.