Actually, I’d like it to be 600 USD or less NOT including a monitor since I know at the end of the day it’ll be closer to 900 once I upgrade my monitor. Thanks for all the replies so far!!!
This might be perfect for you then, and just under your budget:
Personally, if I was buying it, I’d spend a little more and replace the motherboard/CPU with a Intel core i5 and a P55 motherboard. That way I’d have an upgrade path to a very fast core i7-860 if I ever needed it. I’d also get 4GB of memory instead of 2GB.
freep5637 are you a high school or college student or have a college/university based email address?
yes, i do have a college email… and plan on using it for any discount i can get!!!
If you have your own copy of Windows XP that you can install on your PC when you eventually get it, you can use your .edu address to buy windows 7 upgrade for about $45 with the disk, see here. So Tom’s $550 PC or any of the other suggestions here could keep you in budget.
Bumping for questions: I’m thinking of getting a low-end gaming computer, at about the same budget as the OP. Fry’s is offering a desktop with Windows 7 pre-loaded for $500.
-AMD Phenom II x4 810
-AMD 780G Mobo w/integrated graphics
-6GB (of presumably low-end, since it’s 6GB) DDR3 RAM
-1TB HDD
Would this be a good deal for buying and tossing in a 5770? Is the CPU shit or is it good? The integrated graphics chip is a Radeon 3200; would it be worthwhile to find a cheap graphics card that supports hybrid crossfire, or would the performance hit cancel out my savings?
Not sure about the best bang for the buck at that level of cpu/mobo (though ordinarily AMD owns the performance/$ crown in the lower ranges), but I think you’re absolutely on the right track for a budget gaming box getting something like that and throwing in a 5770. The hybrid crossfire is a horrible idea.
I don’t know AMD chipsets that well, but 780g is a crappy budget chipset, right?
There’s no reason for you to go with integrated graphics. The hybrid crossfire thing is cool technology, buy a radeon 3200 is going to contribute so little that it’s not even worth considering the potential overhead it would create. The 5770 would be doing well over 90% of the work I would think.
I guess since it’s a system with an OS available very cheaply, it might be a decent deal if you absolutely must go low budget, but since you have only listed the specific model of one part, it’s hard to give a recommendation. I assume this thing has a PCI-e slot for a video card, right? This feature list of the 780g says it should, but very low budget preassembled systems often come without a video card slot to shave off a few bucks.
It does have a PCI-e x16 slot; beyond that, you know as much as I do.
The alternative is a cheaper Dell with even less information about its specs except that its got an e5400, 4GBs RAM, and half as much hard drive space. I’m already leaning against it, since the monitor its bundled with (the only reason it’d be cheaper) isn’t all that great, but a second opinion would be good, or at least a comparison of the e5400 and Phenom II 810.
Also, how big a deal is the motherboard chipset? Is it a question of speed, or of longterm reliability?
Generally, the Phenom II CPUs are equivalent to Core 2 Duo CPUs, which are all still quite good. Although I did not find that CPU available for sale on Newegg, it got good reviews from customers.
I am guessing the DDR3 RAM is 1066 or maybe even 800, but either way I think the memory doesn’t have an effect on gaming worth considering when you are going budget. Here is an article on the subject but there are a lot of differences between this ACER and a corei7 set-up. The memory differences hardly do anything.
What would stop me from even considering this thing is the PCIe X16 slot. Most newer cards (like the 5770) are PCIe 2.0 or 2.1. The slot that these cards would go into on this 780G motherboard looks to be PCIe 1.0. You would be sticking a fast part into a slow slot. I’m not sure if it would hamstring the performance of the 5770 all that much, but I wouldn’t want to mess around with it at all.
I would call ACER and find out the specific speeds on the memory and whether the slot is 2.0 or 1.0. I would want the memory speed just to know, but I wouldn’t buy it if the slot is PCIe 1.0.
Also, according to one of the Newegg reviews the powersupply that comes with the PC is 300W. According tothis calculator, your proposed system would use most of that up. I don’t know how good these estimates are but I think there is a guy who posts here who feels very comfortable with powersupplies and recommending what you would need.
Anyways, aspects of this thing may make it too budget to enjoy. If you take the time you can certainly build something better yourself.
The Wikipedia article on the 780g says it has “One physical PCIe 2.0 x16 slot” but your link talks about a “32-lane PCI connector (x32)”. Now I confus
Thanks for the catch. The computer is kind of a graduation gift from my dad, and the only experience either of us have with building our own computer is way back in 8th grade when I tried to replace our old Celeron CPU . . . in a carpeted room . . . without an anti-static wristband thingie. :smack: He’s not too stoked on the idea of building from scratch.
I wouldn’t trust a Thermaltake power supply calculator. They’ve kind of got a vested interest in convincing you to buy a power supply 3 sizes too large. Outside of serious rocket-powered gaming boxes with dual video cards or server-grade machines with massive RAIDs, it’s extremely difficult to exceed 300w of DC draw. And the 5770 is very low-draw as graphics cards go. I wouldn’t worry about the psu situation.
I can probably find some graphs and shit to back that up if pressed. Wait, I’ll check. Okay, the 5770 review on techreport.com reports a system power draw under load of 221w in their test system - an i7-965. That’s measuring the AC at the wall, so probably the DC draw (which is what the psu rating is for) of somewhere in the vicinity of 185w.
I can’t really recommend anything without a list of specific parts. There’s nothing there that’s obviously horrible but it’s too vague to really know.
Chipsets control stuff like which processor you can use, what sort of ram, bandwidth to peripherals, what sort of connectors the board supports, etc. I really don’t know anything about the 780g except that chipsets that come with integrated graphics are almost always low end in any way a chipset can be low end. But it may be fine for your purposes.
The last I read about this issue was 2 years ago or so about cards like the gf8800 or radeon 4870, so it may be out of date, but I read that for the most part current cards weren’t maximizing the PCI-e 1 bandwidth that was available and so there was little to no benefit to having everything be PCI-e 2 compliant. But that may have changed with the latest generations of cards, I really don’t know.
This is a good PSU calculator.
People do vastly overestimate their PSU needs. However, I think you’re wrong here. The power from power supplies isn’t fungible - it gets distributed on the several different rails needed to power different components. Cheap power supplies often get up to a certain wattage rating by having a single sufficiently powerful rail but are inadequate for the others. The chances of this happening decrease if you get a well made, reputable power supply which has the proper balance of power across the rails, or if you get more power than you’ll need assuring that you’ll probably have enough head room.
A 300w generic low end power supply is exactly the sort of thing that can make these cheap prebuilt computers problematic. It may work fine, but it may not - and a slightly inadequate power supply introduces all sorts of weird problems that are hard to pin down and test for.
Gorsnak was the person I was thinking of earlier in relation to PSU needs.
I remember the same thing about PCIe2.0 vs. 1.0 as Senorbeef, but could not find anything specific to newer cards though I doubt they are so extremely different at the low end for it to matter much. The point is moot though, here is a link to the computer you are wondering about Nicolas in full detail:
Acer Aspire M3300 Desktop Series Specifications
It has PCIe 2.0 as you might expect with the 780G chipset (as you rightly pointed out from Wikipedia, the chipset supports PCIe2.0). It has ddr3 1066 memory. It’s probably fine for what you are planning.