Help Me Buy A Gaming PC For $500 Or Less!

The Game Room
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OK. I have a little extra cash and am considering buying a newer Windows gaming/media-oriented PC. I found one on ebay that’s pretty reasonable here: http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Workstation-PC-AMD-Athlon-II-X4-No-Reserve-/120619564121?pt=Desktop_PCs&hash=item1c157c7c59 and I am wondering if the computer gods at the SDMB can get me into a better machine for the same or a lower price. Obviously I already have monitor, keyboard, speakers, etc so I’m only interested in a tower.

I want:
8GB of RAM
A quad core processor
a good video card
Windows 7 included
a good power supply
decent cooling capability
no headaches
at least 500GB hard drive space
a fast hard drive

Can anyone beat this deal? It seems pretty good…the video card on it is an entry-level card, but research shows its pretty good (and has to be better than the Nvidia 9600GT card I have in my newest machine right now).

Hard drive space is kinda smallish, but this PC seems pretty damn cheap to me. Any help on this?

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The Tom’s hardware $400 build might interest you: System Builder Marathon, Sept. 2010: $400 Gaming PC | Tom's Hardware

The ebay deal is good, specially if it includes the OS. The only thing I don’t like about it is the low powered video card. For gaming you really want a 5670 or a mid range end GPU of the previous gen as the minimum. I’d take the Tom’s build and replace the 5670 with a 5770 if ym budget allowed it. Can you not carry over your hard drives, optical drives to your new build? Might make up for a beefier video card.

8 Gigs of RAM is overkill IMHO. 2 is ok, 4 is best, I’ve got 6, but only because I’ve got a tri-channel chip.

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Is 8GB of RAM really overkill, or is it future-proofing?

Thanks by the way. I’ll check out your link.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

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Kinthalis, that PC you’ve linked to only has 2GB RAM.

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From FoisGras’ spec: AMD Athlon II X4 635 Propus 2.9GHz Quad Core

This is an ok CPU, but not as good as the AMD Phenom 2 line.

8gb is not overkill, in my opinion, but I’d rather buy 4gb + a Phenom 2.

The big risk is, do you trust a guy on ebay who’s account is only two months old and who only has 50 feedbacks? Personally, I wouldn’t.

If I were you, I’d get this Dell here - link

And choose the upgrade options so it looks like this:

AMD Athlon™ II X4 630 + ATI Radeon HD 5450 1GB
Win7 64 bit
4gb RAM
500gb Hard drive 7200rpm

Price: $589.90

It’s roughly the same but it’s got Dell’s 1 year warranty and Dell’s a reputable company (even though their stupid website doesn’t let me link a specific build.)

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Thanks Merneith. I can’t really go over budget though. $500 is it. The computer I linked to seems like a lot of computer for very little money, but as you say, there’s certainly an element of risk associated with buying from that person.

Anyone else?

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Do you already have a good bit of parts and are you willing to build it yourself? If you already have a case, hard drive, and DVD drive you could knock about $150 off the cost.

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I don’t see that that machine comes with a license for Windows 7. It comes with a DVD, but I see no mention of a license.

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That 5570 is actually worse than your 9600GT, take a look at the benchmarks here.

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Yeah but the 9600gt is only Dx10. The 5570 is Dx 11. It won’t burn the barn down, but it’s not bad.

I’d double check on the Win7 license, like Quartz says.