Mohtalim

Hey, I have a very different kind of computer build thread. I'm hoping to build something for a total of about $700-800, not including mouse/keyboard/monitor. I have no idea what passes for acceptable nowadays because I've been using a MacBook for pretty much the past 8 years. I want a computer that's going to basically be able to play games smoothly on medium graphics settings. Maggie will only really use it for word processing and powerpoints. I'm completely out of the loop about even the most basic things like what kind of CPUs are out there now and how much RAM I'll need. And what graphics cards are acceptable.

So yeah, uh basically everything. Anyone have suggestions?

Why a desktop? Why are you moving away from the MacBooks?

Because MacBooks are expensive and I don't want to spend that much money on a new one when I mainly want a new computer to play games on. My current MacBook works fine what everything else I'm using it for.

And Maggie wants a desktop for some reason. I think she doesn't like writing on a laptop as much as on a desktop. I figure that's a good enough reason for me if it means I get something I can play games on.

Not that I am against selling more processors, but have you considered buying a keyboard, mouse, and monitor and calling it a day? You presumably do not have a late-model MacBook, or you could go for the Thunderbolt external gfx card as an upgrade to your existing machine(s).

Assuming you have a Core 2 Duo MacBook and really do want to get a desktop minitower, here's what I think.

My crystal ball says says you should get at least a $160 worth of gfx card in order to play the next-gen console ports without upgrading your machine later. Like a Radeon HD 7770 or a Radeon HD 7850. Right now Nvidia has a hole in their lineup at this price point and doesn't really offer anything competitive. I think you'll find just under $200 ATI is doing better. Nvidia is winning at price points that break your budget.

If you intend to do digital darkroom on this machine, you've got a hard choice. Buy an SSD big enough for all your photos, or give up on SSD for photos. I'm barely keeping it together with 80GB, but I can definitely say that the SSD is a huge improvement to browsing my RAW collection, to say nothing of loading & editing. Look at what Vinny selected and maybe go down in capacity to fit your budget. The load times for game levels is also noticeably improved on an SSD, as is boot time. If you care about none of these, get a 1.5TB 7200 RPM disk.

A quiet & usable case like my Antec Solo costs $80. You can get a cheaper one that you will cut yourself on for maybe $40. For this much machine you need 250-300W of power. If you're going to want to add disks or move up in gfx to the next tier ($270+) later, go for around ~400W of PSU.

My crystal ball also says you require 4GB of DDR3 (2 matched DIMMs of 2GB apiece). You are well future-proof with 8GB (2x4GB). Buy the 1600 if you can afford it, but the 1333 will be fine for discrete gfx gaming.

Games like Starcraft are CPU-limited. Look for the i5 that is just barely cheaper than Vinny's (i5-3550) and see if it fits your budget.

AMD "recommends" 500W PSUs for those cards I listed. They've certified plenty of 400W & 430W units, though.

This is all assuming you want to buy a machine "now" (i.e. before back to school).

You didn't mention whether you are going to buy OEM or not. HP at least did not have anything matching the spec I laid out. The closest equivalent was a $1200 machine with an AMD CPU.

Next year, an integrated gfx CPU will likely meet your criterion of "play games smoothly on medium graphics settings" if that means you are willing to downgrade resolution to lower than that of your panel. It won't be fast enough for that next-gen console experience out of the box. You'd probably decide to upgrade at some point, which would entail some kind of fairly anemic upgrade to a discrete $100 card (because your box won't have the PSU/cooling for a beefier card) or ditching the box.

I'll be doing a system upgrade next year whenever they decide to hand out Haswells. Most likely, I will ditch my current mobo, RAM, and CPU and keep all the rest of my components.
http://jonathan.pearce.name/mohtalim/vi ... 683#p18683
I did upgrade to a GeForce 560 of some kind eventually (last year?), but otherwise what I've posted there is what I've got.

Edit: Oh, yeah, I also upgrade to Nehalem when I got an i7-whatever.

My plan it to wait a year of two and buy sinolar to what vinnys thread has as my 2009 mid range is getting pretty old. D3 plays fine I guess. I just had to vacuum out all the dust in my case with a straw it was awesome.

If you don't care about noise, you can save a lot of money over what I ordered.

For a $700-$800 gaming rig it'll be close. You'll most likely be spending mostly on video card and processor (<$400). 4 GB of RAM is <50$, case + PSU <$100, motherboard <$100, operating system <$150 which is <$800. Anything left can be spent on a hard drive. I don't see an SSD fitting into that budget.

For specifics, I'd use newegg per category, use power search to set a max price and filter out what you want to buy (e.g. ivy bridge for CPU and z77 for motherboard), then sort by best rating.

SSDs start at $50. If you use it for OS & docs (no photos) it is perfectly reasonable.

Unfortunately, games are often large For example, Team Fortress 2 is over 10 gigabytes by itself. I also can't see a $50 SSD being more than 50 gigabytes today at most. My C:\Windows directory alone is 26.4 gigabytes.

VLSmooth wrote:Unfortunately, games are often large For example, Team Fortress 2 is over 10 gigabytes by itself. I also can't see a $50 SSD being more than 50 gigabytes today at most. My C:\Windows directory alone is 26.4 gigabytes.

You can get 80GB SSD's for $60 or slightly less if you find a really good deal. All of my SSD's were under $1/GB. Best deals I've seen are about $.50 or $.60 per GB

OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-240G 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) for $174.99 - $25 MIR = $149.99 = $.625/GB

Good case deal; $42.98 for an Antec 1100 last I checked. That's a huge discount.
http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/77552/n ... puter-case

Thanks everyone. If I wait until later in the fall will that make much of a difference in the SSD prices?

NAND is a cyclic business, just like DRAM. Prices generally decline over time due to Moore's Law, but the spot price at a given process node goes up and down as a function of how much capacity is online. If things are deeply discounted now, I wouldn't expect large reductions in 2Q.

Jonathan wrote:NAND is a cyclic business, just like DRAM. Prices generally decline over time due to Moore's Law, but the spot price at a given process node goes up and down as a function of how much capacity is online. If things are deeply discounted now, I wouldn't expect large reductions in 2Q.

I recall hearing that we're going to be potentially nearing the end of a nand glut.

Toshiba cutting production to firm up prices in the third quarter.

Plot of nand prices over time

Looks like non-sale prices for SSDs are hovering right around $1/GB.

Jonathan wrote:Looks like non-sale prices for SSDs are hovering right around $1/GB.

Yes, it's been that way for a while except for the larger (>256GB) drives.