Can you get a good gaming rig for 1000€ ?

[Yeeek]

Roughly 1213$ or 687£

My current gaming comp, about 3 years old.
asus A7N8X
Athlon XP 2500+
radeon 9600
512 ddr ram

So yes its not a bad comp but i can't run all the recents game at full details and its ugly for some. :/

I'm saving up for a while now and i can buy a new comp (not counting the screen) for that amount, what would you suggest for cpu/mobo/gc. I could wait a month or two to save up to 2000$ aswell.

I take it now 1k of ram is a must?

 

[Abaddon]

Yeah you can do it on that using bits you already have.

As long as you sont get the ultimate graphics card (£300?) and instead the second best (usual about £150 but virtually as good)

u should be laughing.

If u know how to put the bits together yourself, buying off ebay etc is even cheaper.

Look for the spoilt brats already selling stuff thats perfectly fine, but not the ultimate that they demand

 

[dragokatzov]

you soure could! what games are you playing? if your not playing anything thats cpu intensive, you might be able to get away with just upgrading your current computer

 

[Gainy]

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ - £150
Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3200PT - £150
Sapphire ATI Radeon X1800 XL - £250
Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra - £75

£625

I've rounded all of those prices up, so it's actually about £600. You can reuse your old HD, monitor, soundcard (if not, there's onboard on the mobo), case, etc.

That would be a pretty ownage pc.

And yes, i'd definately go for 2gb of RAM.

 

[Yeeek]

Thanks for all the advice, i appreciate it.

At the moment i'm aiming at AMD 3500 for the cpu wich seems ok for running games such as HL2, Battlefield 2, FEAR and the like.

For the mother board, i agree with you Gainy, the AN8-E is alright and not expensive from what i could see on different website. However i have one question, i keep reading about SLI.. If i understand correctly, its only needed if you plan to use two graphic cards? So, i don't really need it and could save money buying a mother board without SLI.

Now, about the graphic card. I like Radeon, never had a problem with it, so i'm an happy customer The one you suggest sound nice, but what about the x800 GTO²?

I'm shocked at how much cost memory sticks I consider myself as a novice in the matter but i don't understand why they cost so much. I'm tempted to buy no name ram even though i've read people having lots of problem with such ram but i never had any with my 2x256 ddr no name for 3 years of heavy gaming. I have money to spare though, so perhaps for the first time i could afford buying Corsair, even 2x1Go! But wich one? With all the funny numbers and names i'm lost, XMS, ect.

 

[dragokatzov]

Thanks for all the advice, i appreciate it.

At the moment i'm aiming at AMD 3500 for the cpu wich seems ok for running games such as HL2, Battlefield 2, FEAR and the like.

For the mother board, i agree with you Gainy, the AN8-E is alright and not expensive from what i could see on different website. However i have one question, i keep reading about SLI.. If i understand correctly, its only needed if you plan to use two graphic cards? So, i don't really need it and could save money buying a mother board without SLI.

Now, about the graphic card. I like Radeon, never had a problem with it, so i'm an happy customer The one you suggest sound nice, but what about the x800 GTO²?

I'm shocked at how much cost memory sticks I consider myself as a novice in the matter but i don't understand why they cost so much. I'm tempted to buy no name ram even though i've read people having lots of problem with such ram but i never had any with my 2x256 ddr no name for 3 years of heavy gaming. I have money to spare though, so perhaps for the first time i could afford buying Corsair, even 2x1Go! But wich one? With all the funny numbers and names i'm lost, XMS, ect.

You may want to condifer a 3700+. very overclockable. not the 3500+ isn't, just it has more L2 cache and you can over clock it to FX-55 or 57 speeds i hear. i know one guy who has one clocked at 2.75Ghz, just a little shy of fx-57, but still very impressive

SLI is an nVidia/3dfx concept. Biscally runing 2 graphic cards in parallel, both working at the graphic end of things. In general, its more power than your ever need, and currently a waste of money. however, if you want a future proof computer, get a SLI motherboard but just use one nVidia card. then get the another card the exact same, and you can enable SLI. Although not all nVidia cards are SLI. i think the Geforce 6600GT is the slowest card that has SLI. The ATI equivelent is called Crossfire, and is set up a little diffrently.

Corsair is an excellent brand. especally the XMS ram by them. great proformance. Lots of people say 1 gig is pleanty. many have reported a noticible diffrnece when they upgrade to 2 gigs.

the Radeon x800 GTO² is a special Redeon put out by Saphire only. from what i gather, its GPU is unlocked, to allow ofr overclocking. read this article for more information http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/127

 

[Speedo]

You may want to condifer a 3700+. very overclockable. not the 3500+ isn't, just it has more L2 cache and you can over clock it to FX-55 or 57 speeds i hear. i know one guy who has one clocked at 2.75Ghz, just a little shy of fx-57, but still very impressive

If you want overclocking the best choice is a S939 Opteron. Overclocking, though, is not something I recommend to most people.

Corsair is an excellent brand. especally the XMS ram by them. great proformance. Lots of people say 1 gig is pleanty. many have reported a noticible diffrnece when they upgrade to 2 gigs.

Most testing places the performance increase of 2GB vs 1GB at <5%. 1GB is fine for now, but if you're planning on keeping this setup for a while an you're not on an extremely tight budget, you should go ahead and get 2GB. By this time next year 2GB will probably make a significant difference in newer games.

I'm shocked at how much cost memory sticks I consider myself as a novice in the matter but i don't understand why they cost so much. I'm tempted to buy no name ram even though i've read people having lots of problem with such ram but i never had any with my 2x256 ddr no name for 3 years of heavy gaming. I have money to spare though, so perhaps for the first time i could afford buying Corsair, even 2x1Go! But wich one? With all the funny numbers and names i'm lost, XMS, ect.

Memory is dirt cheap right now... you can get 1GB of name brand (Corsair, Kingston, Crucial, etc) for under $90 US.

XMS is Corsair's high-performance line of memory. You will probably be fine with the considerably cheaper "value" lines of RAM by Corsair and etc.

You usually see a string of 4 numbers associated with memory, ie X-X-X-X. This is the memory's timing.
The first number is the CAS Latency of the RAM.
2nd number is the RAS to CAS Delay
3rd number is the RAS Precharge
4th number is the Cycle Time/Tras
If you want to know what each of those actually does (it's not something I have memorized) I can point you to a few articles, but all you really need to know is that smaller is better.

For 2GB total memory you'll want 2x 1GB, and the absolute best timings you find there for DDR is 2-3-2-6, which will be from Corsair's XMS line, about $300 US for a matched pair.

 

[Gainy]

If you're only wanting to run current games at highest, then you wouldn't need as much as I specified. Could go for a x800 or x850 series gfx card, maybe only 1gb of (higher performance) RAM. However I would stick with the 3700+ processor. It is good value for money, and as others said, easily overclockable. You may not want to dabble with that at the moment, but in the future it leaves you with options.

I recently got,
AMD 64 4000+
Sapphire x1800xl
2gb corsair XMS 3500LL
Soundblaster Audigy 4
Asus A8N-E

This runs games like counterstrike source at over 200 fps, with everything at the highest setting. You could get a much less expensive system to run the games at about 50fps, and you probably wouldn't notice the difference. However if you're wanting to play future games like that (and not upgrade for a while), then you will need to spend a bit more.

 

[FriendlyFire]

I got a similar setup

AMDXP 2400+ @ 2.21
1Gig DDR ram dual channel
120gig Seagate HDD
19" LCD syncmaster
430W PSU coolmaster
MX440

Iam planning on upgrading my Videocard to a 6600GT and the entire PC upgrading it later date.
If you dont really need a new PC shell out for another 512Ram and a 6600GT agp card.

 

[Jafendel]

After having problems with Asus mobo /Via chipset and Radeon 9600 XT I'd make sure that mobo/graphics card combination isn't videly known as 'buggy'

Geforce 6600 GT sounds a very promising AGP card if replacing a few yeards old one. Newer cards and mobos tend to be PCI-express anyhow.

Don't buy a PC for future games, they say...

 

[Yeeek]

Thanks again for you advice. I remember when i bought my current computer few years ago, AGP mother cards were the thing to buy. What changed? Now everything is PCI again?


Now that i remember.. Wasn't SLI something used by 3dfx back in the day? I remember that thing from the 3D Voodoo extrem cards and such.. thats old

 

[dragokatzov]

SLI was orginally a 3dfx thing. nVidia baught them out and recently brought SLI back to life. the 3dfx verson stands for Scan-Line Interleave. the nVidia verson stands for Scaible Link Interface. its still the same basic thing though

 

[logical_psycho]

If you're only wanting to run current games at highest, then you wouldn't need as much as I specified. Could go for a x800 or x850 series gfx card, maybe only 1gb of (higher performance) RAM. However I would stick with the 3700+ processor. It is good value for money, and as others said, easily overclockable. You may not want to dabble with that at the moment, but in the future it leaves you with options.

I recently got,
AMD 64 4000+
Sapphire x1800xl
2gb corsair XMS 3500LL
Soundblaster Audigy 4
Asus A8N-E

This runs games like counterstrike source at over 200 fps, with everything at the highest setting. You could get a much less expensive system to run the games at about 50fps, and you probably wouldn't notice the difference. However if you're wanting to play future games like that (and not upgrade for a while), then you will need to spend a bit more.

Buying current hardware to play games that aren't out yet is a waste of money. You'd do better off playing the games that run fine on your system now and upgrade once it is necessary, than buying components that won't be fully used until 2 years from now.


You might have to upgrade a little more often this way, but at least you will pay half the amount of money for each system this way. Unless you value bragging rights and have more than enough money to spend on a system, this is probably the best way to go...



By the way, some advice, go with PC3200 400Mhz DDR-Ram, DDR2 isn't supported by 939 motherboards like the A8N.

 

[Speedo]

You'd do better off playing the games that run fine on your system now and upgrade once it is necessary, than buying components that won't be fully used until 2 years from now.

That's debateable. Current high end games like FEAR push current top-of-the-line hardware just about to its limits. If you want to run FEAR at 1600x1200 without turning down a lot of the eye candy, you'll need at least a 7800GTX or x1800XL, and even then you'll just average performance in the 40 fps range.

By the way, some advice, go with PC3200 400Mhz DDR-Ram, DDR2 isn't supported by 939 motherboards like the A8N.

XMS3500LL is Corsair's top-end, low latency 1GB DIMM product, with 2-3-2-6 timings. It is also meant in part for the Rev E AMD64 processors that "unofficially" support DDR433, hence their calling it PC3500.

 

[Yeeek]

Well, finally i went with :

AMD 64 3700+
ASUS A8N-E
Sapphire X800 GTO² (partly because of this article http://www.techpowerup.com/articles//overclocking/vidcard/127/1)
Two stick of Corsair Value 512 Mo DDR-SDRAM PC3200

Should get delived this next week, also this will be my first try at building a comp by myself

For roughly 850 $USD, i still have to buy a new HD, new DVD and probably next month LCD Screen, most likely a belinea 17"

 

[Speedo]

For roughly 850 $USD, i still have to buy a new HD, new DVD and probably next month LCD Screen, most likely a belinea 17"

If you have that much, I would go for a quality 19 or 20" LCD, or a 21" CRT. You will probably keep your monitor longer than any other part of your comp... its definetly something worth dropping a few $$ on.

 

[FriendlyFire]

20" is way to much atm
hang onto your CRT and save up for a 19" as its well worth it

 

[Speedo]

20" is way to much atm
hang onto your CRT and save up for a 19" as its well worth it

20" is worth the money. Much better than being limited to a paltry 1280x1024 with a 19". Besides he already has the money... in fact enough to buy a good 20" LCD, HDD and DVD-R with plenty to spare.

 

[Yeeek]

Built the comp this week with a friend, i'm happy so far! Its like day & night compared to my other computer i had..

I did a 3Dmark 2005 test, score is 6321 with the graphic card o/c to 520mhz core and 540mhz memory inteast of 400/490 "out of the box" with the 16 pipes activated. I believe thats pretty good. But not as good as my friend who is a PC nerdie and beat 8000!

Thanks everyone for your advices. Next stop, the new screen next month.