Quote: Original post by Drew_BentonQuote:
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.
You'd need a graphics card and an optical drive, which adds $200-300, not $100. If you add the same ones as the build in my article, that's +300 for a total of $760.
That system also doesn't have a sound card or cooling (optional I guess, but I wouldn't recommend stock cooling). If you remove those from the build in my article as well, my system is $755.
So before you misjudge the system I wrote about, note that it is $5 cheaper with twice as much HD space, and a superior CPU.
