Gaming PC - Build or buy off the shelf?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I know there was a similar thread for advice on building a gaming PC but the other thread had a higher budget and was interested in building their own.

Anyways, I’m looking to get a new gaming PC, and I’d like to spend somewhere between $1000 - $1500. I have not kept up with technology so I’m starting from scratch. First thing I did was google “gaming PC for $1500” and PC Mag has a parts list that you can get for a little under $1500:

Updated Component List
CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K ($332)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H ($114.99)
Video Card: EVGA 02G-P4-2680-KR ($499.99)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB ($64.99)
SSD (Primary Storage): OCZ Vertex 3 (120GB) ($124.99 after mail-in rebate)
Hard Drive (Secondary Storage): 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARX ($129.99)
Optical Drive: Asus Black Blu-ray combo drive ($74.99 after mail-in rebate)
Power Supply: Thermaltake TR2 TRX-650M ($64.99 after mail-in rebate)
Case: NZXT H2 ($79.99 after mail-in rebate)
Total: $1,486.92

I hopped on Tiger Direct and put all that stuff in my shopping cart (except for the case) and it indeed came out pretty close to $1500. I also looked some pre-built systems that look similar quantitatively (though quality wise I’d expect them to be inferior). For instance:

Acer Predator AG3620-UR21P Gaming PC -
3rd generation Intel Core i7-3770 3.40GHz,
16GB DDR3,
2TB HDD,
128GB SSD,
2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630,
DVDRW,
Keyboard/Mouse,
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
$1,199.99

CyberPowerPC Gamer Zeus GZ6100TGaming PC -
Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz,
16GB DDR3,
2TB HDD,
Blu-ray ROM/DVDRW,
AMD Radeon HD 7770,
Liquid Cooling,
NZXT 810 Switch Tower,
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
$1,399.99

The first does not have blu ray, the second one does not have an SSD. Both come with Windows. What am I gaining/losing by buying the parts and building my own? If I buy either of the 2 systems above (or another one) could I easily upgrade them in the future? Is there a better place I should be looking at for getting a prebuilt system?

2

A couple of things -
Does your Tiger Direct, build your own pricing include an operation system/Windows? You need to add that to the price, if you haven’t included it.

The big thing I noticed was the video card. The Tiger Direct EVGA is a much higher end card than the other 2. Depending on what kind of gaming you do, that may or may not be an issue.
For example - the EVGA card is a $500 card. The other two have $100 cards. I’d guess that that is where most of the cost difference is coming from.

So, what do you want to do with this machine?

3

I built my own last winter. I think it was my 6th or 7th over the years.

In that time, the price difference has narrowed to a point that building your own does’t save a significant amount of money; the only reason to do it is the fun of piecing it together and the pride in having done so.

Next time, I will order one. I haven’t been able to keep up on the technology so it was hard for me to study up enough to make good decisions. Plus, with a manufacturers machine you get a warranty and tech support.

4

No, the build your won does not include an OS. I’d have to look to see if I can get Windows cheap through my company (last year I got Offce 2010 for like $10).

I’m mainly a console gamer, so I probably will not be playing a lot of FPS on this, though I recently got hooked on DayZ so I will be playing some. I would mainly be playing strategy games (Civ, Total War and the like).
Another thing I’m hoping to do is set up remote desktop so that my wife can remote in from her current laptop and do web surfing/view videos (I hear RDP 7 does htis better than previous versions, need to test it out). This would almost be a must have because the main thrust behind buying a new computer is that both our laptops are outdated.

5

Building a computer is so much more satisfying than an off the shelf, and you will end up with more reusable, more upgradeable components than the designed to save a buck ones you’ll get from somebody else.
Were I building a $1500 PC with your basic picks today, I would build it with these parts:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/dwuR

Basically, spend a little less on a GTX 670, and upgrade to a Xonar sound card and M-Audio AV40 speakers for better sound.

Note that there are several ways to save money on this build beyond what you see on pcpartpicker. First, you can pick any of the parts off newegg, add to cart, and scroll through the “combo deals” section on the page that shows up to save money sometimes. You can watch the newegg shell shocker deal page (Promo Codes, Daily Deals, Coupons, Discounts | Newegg.com), and buy your PC one component at a time off of there. If you can wait 2-3 weeks to buy your parts piecemeal you probably can get an equivalent system to the one on PC part picker via newegg shell shockers and following slickdeals.net for at least $150 less - but you have to go with the cheapest 120GB SSD, cheapest reasonable Z77 motherboard offered, cheapest decent 80 plus power supply, be flexible on GTX 670 vs 7950 or 7970 for graphics card, etc.

Edit to add, speaker link not showing up on PCPartPicker (http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0051WAM64/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used).

6

Wanted to add one link. To follow Newegg Deals & Shell Shockers without having to get spammed by them (and you can see what the prior deals were like).
Use mailboxr
http://www.mailboxr.com/emails/tech/newegg/
To see price history to see where components “should” sell for:
For newegg:

For amazon:

7

The BYO has the top-of-the-line Geforce 680 GTX and decent quality components, but you may need to add a CPU cooler - something like a Corsair H80 - unless you like noise. The other two have vastly less powerful video cards.

You don’t need a SSD; that will cover the cost of a Windows license.

16 GB RAM won’t give you any benefit over 8 GB. Corsair Vengeance RAM is probably overkill: you could save a bit and go with ordinary RAM ($51.99 for 2x 4GB from Crucial).

The GA-Z77M-D3H is probably not the best choice of motherboard: it’s a mATX motherboard, the x1 slot will get blocked by the graphics card, and the second PCI 3.0 x16 slot only runs at x4. As you’re going for a full ATX case, you should go for a full ATX motherboard like the GA-77X-UD5H.

Putting together a PC is very easy these days. Everything plugs together very easily. The biggest problems you’ll have are making sure you’ve got enough SATA cables, and getting the power button and reset button plugged in right.

I’m sure drachillix can give you chapter & verse.

8

Thanks for all your help!

I’ve been playing around with this and this is what I’ve come up with so far: PCPartPicker. Am I making any glaring errors? I may cut back on the RAM, or take out the SDD. Comes out a bit north of 1500 with Windows.

9

You need a CPU cooler, like a Corsair H80. You don’t need a SSD. The GTX 570 is a bad pick at that price point. It’s the previous generation of cards and the GTX 660 Ti is out in a week or so anyway and should stomp all over it.

Do you really need a BD writer?

10

K, updated the build based on your recommendations.

Do I need the BD Writer? Probably not, that was the inner kid in me going for the shinier toy. Replaced it with a DVD writer.

11

I think the guy above who says you don’t want an SSD is out of his mind - it probably is the biggest upgrade you can make on your PC if you don’t do hard core gaming. Yes, it doesn’t help all the time, but it helps when it is the most noticable, ie when you are likely to be sitting there waiting - when loading programs, pulling web data from cache, and booting the computer.
If you hurry up you can get a decent SSD for $100 and the same power supply you have picked out at amazon today for $50 : Amazon.com: fd_redirect

For the power supply make sure you click on the page to get to the details, there is a “clip and save” coupon you have to click to get the price down to $50 after rebate.

12

For your graphics card I usually refer to the Toms hardware “best graphics card for the money” for the $ I want to spend, and find the one of that graphics card that costs the least after rebate.

13

Thanks for the tip!

Is SSD vs no SSD sort of like nVidia vs ATI(now AMD) or Windows vs Mac vs Linux or Firefox vs Chrome or any of a hundred other debates people love getting really passionate about?

14

Ahem. It’s a trade-off. The money is better spent elsewhere. And consumer SSDs still don’t last long enough. You’ve basically got to have a normal drive on which to place your page file, profiles, caches, and temporary files. Unless you want to replace your SSD in 3 years.

15

No. An SSD is a clear, straight performance boost. There is no downside other than cost. An SSD’s random seek time is so much faster than a HDD that it isn’t even funny. The only question is if it’s the best place to dump extra money. For a gaming computer, if all you care about is the framerate in your photorealistic FPS, then almost always the best place to dump extra money is the video card. But if you’re budgeting $400 or more for your video card you’re already onto a pretty steep portion of the diminishing returns curve and the extra snappiness you get from an SSD in routine computer use is going to be far more obvious in ordinary use than going to whatever the most expensive card on the market is.

No, no, no. The SSD is absolutely where you want your page file, temp files, and caches. That’s where you’ll get the biggest performance boost. And you won’t have to replace it in 3 years. More like 10, and 10-year-old drives are hopelessly obsolete in terms of capacity anyways. Anand has written about this repeatedly, and has put it to the test to boot. NAND’s limited lifespan simply isn’t an issue in any realistic desktop scenario.

16

SSD is back in (and on the way) so the only thing left to pick is the graphics card, and that will come down to if the GTX 660 Ti is at the right price point. Over bugdet, but I hope to not need to put any mpnry into it for a while.

17

Did you order the cooler yet ? The H80 is fine liquid cooler if you want to go liquid, but if you are worried about money a Cooler Master Hyper 212+ or Hyper 212 evo will get you almost as high of an overclock, for way less money.
Edit to add, I assume you are overclocking, else liquid cooling should really not be in the picture. And also make sure to buy whatever extra 120mm fans the case needs to fill all the fan slots - usually you need to buy a couple more than the case comes with.

18

I also recommend an SSD drive. I just installed one recently and have Windows and my programs on it. Everything from booting to launching programs is MUCH faster.

19

No, I have not ordered anything but the SSD and the power supply. I have not decided on overclocking yet, if I decide to not do it I’m not getting liquid cooling.

20

Thought about it, I’m not overclocking, so liquid cooling is out. Do I need to replace it with something other than fans?