Putting Everything Together
System Information
Cost – $700 (parts) + $115 (labor) + $25 (shipping) = $840
Rationale
For this build, I was contacted by someone who wanted a build that he could use for gaming, and not much of anything else. He didn’t necessarily want to play games at their highest or best settings, but he wanted a box that could play games pretty well, and he wanted it within a $700-$1000 budget (with a huge leaning towards the $700 side).
The biggest debate I went through was deciding on the CPU. Obviously the i5-2500k is a clear and consistent winner when it comes to price/performance. The ability to overclock it is another huge plus. In the end, however, I settled on the i3 as being the superior choice in a budget build. Overclocking means I would need a better motherboard and an aftermarket cooler for the PC, not to mention the i5 is a bit more expensive than the i3. These were all things that would drastically hurt my overall price point for the build. The only worry for the i3 would be whether or not it would bottleneck our graphics card, but we’ll get to that later on.
For a motherboard, pretty much all I needed was something that I could plug the CPU and the GPU into. The ASRock H77M easily got the job done, there.
RAM these days doesn’t seem to ever be a bottleneck for a system, and even higher RAM speeds seem to have little (if any) impact on gaming performance. I went with 8GB of G.Skill RAM, which honestly might have even been a bit too much, but I didn’t want to risk running into problems with only 4GB.
The 1TB Barracuda from Seagate is an affordable 1TB of storage. 7200 RPM should be fine for what we’re working with here. An SSD or 10kRPM drive isn’t appropriate for the budget I’m working with.
The GPU took a bit of consideration. I was really torn between the 7950 and the 660 Ti. When the 660 Ti was released it was the CLEAR superior against the 7950, and many reviews showed this. AMD’s driver releases, however, allowed the 7950 to close the gap very quickly against Nvidia’s card. To be completely honest, I’m not sure that there’s a “right” answer here, so I went with the 660 Ti to be safe. If you’re looking to imitate any portion of this build, I think you could easily get away with buying a 7950 instead.
The Case I went with was a Rosewill mid tower. No real attachment to it, it was cheap and got the job done. Managing the cables in it was kind of annoying, but I think that had more to do with the purchase of a non-modular power supply than anything else.
The 500W Corsair Builder PSU was plenty enough to get the job done. A lot of people like to go overkill on PSUs for some reason, but this one is perfectly fine for what we’re doing. The only drawback is the non-modular power supply. Again, having a modular power supply is fine, but it’s not appropriate or necessary for our budget constraints.
I threw in a Samsung DVD/CD drive just because the customer asked for one. For me, personally, I use flash drives to get everything done these days (including OS installations). I would have scratched this option if it was up to me.
Difficulties
Assembling the actual PC was a breeze. If you lay everything out in advance and you know what you’re doing, you could easily have this system put together and running in under an hour. The only issue I ran into was that the UEFI required an update before it would recognize the 660 Ti. If you’re looking to copy this build, you WILL need to update the UEFI before it will recognize your graphics card.
Conclusion
All in all, I’m really happy with how it turned out. I ran FRAPS and measured the FPS in three separate games: Crysis 2, Metro 2033 and Skyrim. Across all 3 games the machine was posting FPS’ similar to what I’ve seen in benchmarks. While checking the W7 system info and monitoring Afterburner I was able to see that the GPU was easily hitting 95-99% usage while the CPU was hovering at around 80% usage. For only $700, I think this rig’s quite a winner. I don’t know if anything else I’d cut back in to save some cost, aside from the CD/DVD drive.
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If you’re interested in having me put together a system like this (or something completely different), let me build your next PC!
Good post. Too many people want to post too much, but this was concise, informative and interesting. Hoping to see more posts about builds you do!
Mind sharing the benchmarks or your measured FPS in the games?
They were right in line with typical 660 Ti benchmarks!
Hi Steven,
Nice build video, was a lot of fun to watch. I, like everyone else on the internet (huehuehue), have built a lot of custom rigs (usually for friends so budget (less fun) builds such as the one you did) and was really impressed with the overall knowledge, albeit trolly-as-shit-son knowledge, that you shared with your viewers. I look forward to you building a power rig with all the bells and whistles so I can see you get your hands dirty, I’ve always wanted to watch you get your hands durrrty! nah fag, srsly, I am considering pinging you an email with a little project I’m working on to have you eventually put it together and sign it for my Nephew.
I’m in the progress of working on a Zerg themed Sc2 rig for my nephew. I already have the Case custom painted (purple’ly) with the Zerg logo on one side panel and have yet to decide what design to put on the other side panel.
Potential specs: Using a X58 mobo, Would probs just drop an i5 2500k, cos hey why not, OC’d naturally, don’t wanna waste a 2500k leaving it at 3.6, and throw in a Noctua DH14 (best aircooler EVAR, as you well know) or perhaps a Cosiar H50/60/100 etc depending on how I feel, I really want to colour coordinate however with black on purple colours running throughout the system. I have a spare 560 Ti 448 which would do the job and then some for games, Sc2 in particular. PSU would MAYBE be Corsair AX650/AX750/AX850 (explained why below) and 8GB Memory, again dependant on colour more than anything.
BUT, I kinda want this to be special, so I want to know how competent you are with water cooling (you mentioned you weren’t all that confident so this is something I can, and probably should for transport services, will do after you play Lego with the components) as well as cable management, the plan is, if we go balls deep, would be to do away with the CPU cooler and get a couple of water blocks installed for the CPU/GPU and have a nice purple coolant flowing throw the system. Cables would be braided black and purple, custom made Corsair individually sleeved modular cables, hence the modular power supplies mentioned above. All the BIOS config, CPU, RAM, Voltage, settings can be done by me, but again, this is entirely up to you.
I would pretty much have the basket picked out myself and you would basically be doing the leg work for the simple reason that I could tell him, “Steven Bonnell put this together for you, don’t believe look at this video”.
Oh, one last thing. My personal preference when installing into the case is to, after you’ve performed a POST, just disconnect the PSU/GPU cables and you can simply pick it up by the Graphics Card and line up the mobo with the case and insert.
Good luck in the future!
I can do builds involving closed loop water coolers with no problem, heh. It’s just a matter of finding a spot for the radiator. The Kraken x60 from NZXT is supposed to be BEASTLY, I’d recommend that over anything else on the market atm (even the h100 or the d14). Cable management and all of that are easy enough, especially with a modular power supply.
If it is something you’re interested in, feel free to shoot me an e-mail!