Low Cost Gaming Rig

[Drop07]

Hi everyone, I want to build a cheap gaming PC. Please advise me.

If you don't give a s*** about my life, skip the below paragraph.
I live in a dirty ****-hole in Paris and have decided to play myself to death. Therefore I want to spend half of my miserable trainee paycheck to build a LOW COST GAMING RIG aside from my mac.
I am going to play mostly to TrackMania Nation and Guild Wars 2. The former game can be played with a small PC configuration, but I want of course to have the best rig considering my budget.
Just for information here is the minimal configuration to run GW2 (CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo 2,0GHz, Core i3, AMD Athlon 64 X2 or better / Flash memory : 2Go / Graphics : NVIDIA GeForce 7800, ATI Radeon X1800, Intel HD3000 or better / 25 Go of free space on the HD)


TARGET BUDGET : 400 euros. (1.00 EUR = 1.324 USD)

Here are the components I have already spotted. I am not a specialist so some of the stuff below may not be appropriate, so if you have some better propositions (around the same price), please share and tell me the best combinations.

CPU : INTEL Core i3 2100 3,1 GHz (86 euros) / i3-2120 3,33GHz (113euros)
MB : Asus P8H61/USB3 B3 (31euros) / Gigabyte GA Z68A-D3H-B3 (110euros) / Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H (97euros)
Graphic card : NVIDIA GeForce GS 560 1Go GDDR5 (103euros) / NVIDIA GTX 550 TI 1Go (115euros)
Flash memory : 4 Go DDR3 1333MHz(20euros) / 2 x 4 Go (40euros)
Hard Drive : SEAGATE 160Go serial ata III 7200turns/min 8Mo cache(25 euros) / MAXTOR 500Go SATA II 7200turns/min 16Mo cache (68euros)
Power supply : 480W (17euros) / 750W (38euros)

My suppliers would be :
http://www.rue-montgallet.com/ the website of an entire street in Paris dedicated to IT and Geek's stuff. I like it because prices are not that high, and I can directly go to the shop and touch the product.
http://www.grosbill.com/ is a massive IT distributor. Cheap and serious. There are also some nice discounts from time to time, by the way the NVIDIA GeForce GS 560 1Go GDDR5 (103euros) is one of their promotion.
http://www.ldlc.com/

On top of that I'll have to buy a 20euros DVD reader and a 20 euros Box/Tower, I don't know the name in english.

I start from scratch, no screen, no keyboard and not even an old rusty mouse to get started.


Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

[grumpydaddy]

Give us a link to your local/preferred supplier please so we can compare French prices some more

[Drdeath]

I would go with AMD Llano platform. Much better graphics.



Look at the A6-3650 and GIGABYTE GA-A75M-S2V. You do not need a graphics card as the APU has an on die GPU (Fusion technology). If you want to add another, a radeon 6670 can be crossfired with the on die 6550D for real good gaming.

[killjoyjim]

Welcome to pure my friend.

[SamCR3]

Welcome. Drdeath is right about an APU build. There are some APU and related motherboard reviews here you can look at. You can do a decent system for about $600 USD, which is just a little over your present budget. That doesn't count gettting a monitor, so if you need one you will have to increase your budget by about $150.

[Drdeath]

Welcome. Drdeath is right about an APU build. There are some APU and related motherboard reviews here you can look at. You can do a decent system for about $600 USD, which is just a little over your present budget. That doesn't count gettting a monitor, so if you need one you will have to increase your budget by about $150.

Heck, he can do it for $400 with a A55 motherboard and a A8-3650.

[SamCR3]

Assuming he needs everything, this is what I came up with:

[Drop07]

Thanks for your welcome and first answers guys.
I updated the first post so anyone jumping into the conversation will be directly aware.

I indeed build this computer from scratch which means no screen, no wire, no mouse, no keyboard. I don't know if wires are expensive though, but concerning the out-video I first thought to plug it on my big samsung tv.

I did not know that APU have included graphic cards nowadays. Why not corssfiring it with a graphic card, if it matches the budget.
And what is the difference between an APU and a CPU?

Thanks.
Drop07

[Doctor_Death]

If this is going to be a gaming build, then you do not want to use the on chip graphics, you need to buy a decent video card, something like a GTX560 TI or a AMD HD6950