SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ars Technica has published a new "Bargain Box Guide" for April 2014. As I'm looking through this I poked my nose over at Tom's hardware System Builder, Q1 2014: The $750 Gaming PC. Am I completely off my rocker? How do either of these qualify as a "budget build?"
I can consistently build systems (without monitors or OS) for far less that these systems and get a quality build that will work for several years of service. Am I just cheap or have I just been broke for too long and can't fathom the expense?
Do you still build systems or have you only purchased factory built units? How would you approach your design differently?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
You have had a long-term stimulation relative to business.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Monday April 07 2014, @01:43PM
I have been looking at the AMD APU builds and frankly as long as you pair it with decently fast, say DDR3 1600 RAM? Frankly they can play a hell of a lot of the mainstream titles and you can easily put one of these together for sub $500 including Win 7 HP.
As a nice bonus if you decide to get a discrete GPU down the line and stick with AMD you can use zero tech to a hell of a power advantage. For those that haven't heard of it zero tech is a new tech AMD added starting with the 7 series GPUs that allows the cores to "park" when not in use, turning off a large portion of the GPU to save power and heat. It is a pretty big drop, for an example my HD7750 goes from 110w to as low as 15w when zero tech is activated. With the APUs its even more dramatic as the GPU can shut down completely and allow the APU to do the job when it comes to multimedia so your GPU doesn't have to unpark just because you want to watch HD video, instead it can stay parked until you game which equals a pretty decent power savings.
So I'd argue it really isn't hard to build a sub $550 system that will play most games fluently and more importantly still have enough headroom that it won't be obsolete in 6 months.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.