Gaming Under a Budget

Building a gaming PC for under 1200 Dollars.

                                      Recently one of my friends asked whether I know a place to buy a good gaming PC for under 150000 Rupees (Approximately 1200 US Dollars.). I searched everywhere and I couldn't find a place to get a decent one. There are so called gaming PCs here in Sri Lanka that are in this price range which carry GT545 VGAs and 4GB rams. Seriously,  who puts a GT545 in to a gaming PC (It also costs around 1000 US Dollars here.)? Then it hit me. I used to go to the web site of I Buy Power (A company which makes custom gaming PCs) those days and try out different settings just to amuse my self. Sadly they only deliver these custom build rigs to USA and Canada. But yet I wanted to find out what I could build for a budget of 1200 US Dollars.  Finally I wound up building this.

                                                Lets see the specifications of this beauty. The casing is a CoolMaster Storm Enforcer one and the casing is Laser Engravable. It has a Gigabyte B75M-D3H motherboard and the processor is a quad-core 3.4Ghz Intel 3rd gen Core i5 3570 one with 6MB Level 3 cache. The cooling system is a Liquid Cooling one with a standard 120mm fan. I also selected the overclock option which boosts up the speed by 20% for just 20 Dollars. You might be wondering why I choose an i5 processor instead  of an i7 one. Firstly i7 one costs 100 Dollars more. Secondly it doesn't have any affect to your gaming performance. Because what i7 processor does is, it makes a virtual core for every physical core (Hyper Threading), which is not supported by games. So if you are solely buying a PC for gaming giving that extra bucks for an i7 processor is useless. But if you are using softwares like photoshop then an i7 processor would benefit you.If you are thinking of a higher FPS rate the overclocked i5 would do better than i7 one in that category too. 

                                                       I choose a 16GB (4GBx4) DDR3 ram option with a clock speed of 1866Mhz, which is faster than the 1333Mhz ones we see here. When it came to selecting a video card I had to be careful because I was under a budget. So I went with an AMD Radeon HD 7870 single card with a 2GB graphics memory. The other option I had was the Nvidia GTX 660. But Radeon 7870 outperforms the Nvidia one in a reasonable margin in benchmark tests. It is also better than the GTX 660Ti in most areas and 660Ti costs about 100 dollars more than 7870. So the Radeon 7870 seems like the best option for the budget. When it comes to the power option I had to pick a Power Supply over 550 Watts as Radeon 7870 craves for it. So I choose a 850 Watt AZZA Dynamo power supply for all the power needs of my PC. 

                                                             Then it came to the memory option. I so badly wanted to install a SSD but my budget didn't allow me to do so. So I took the next best option. I choose a SSD cache drive which caches your most used applications as they were installed in a primary SSD. So that means even though your data is in a normal magnetic hard drive the SSD caches the data you use frequently and make them work faster as if they are stored in a SSD drive. We are able to do this thanks to the Intel's Smart Response Technology. So I choose a 60GB Kingston V+200 as my SSD cache and a 2TB 7200rpm ,6 Gb/s, single hard drive as my primary storage. I choose a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card as I am kind of an audiophile. I also selected an Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network Card and an Asus 300Mb wireless USB adapter for connectivities. I used a 24x LG DVD R/RW as my optical drive and a 12-in-1 card reader to plug in the memory cards. I also choose an iBuyPower gaming keyboard and a mouse as it was the only option I could choose without exceeding the budget. But if you want some real gaming gear go for Razer or Logitech. There are also giving Nexuiz and Sleeping Dogs for free because I choose the Radeon HD 7870 and also a 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive for the systems over 1000 Dollars. 

                                            The price of the whole setup was 1199 Dollars(about 150000 Rupees). It is not the best gaming rig out there. But it is a pretty decent setup (Which would enable you to play Battlefield 3 in the Ultra mode without any lagging) ,specially under a budget . If you are searching for a gaming desktop for a budget this would be an option that you could consider.