Real Budget Gaming Rig

Stildawn

Stildawn

New Member
Hi all...

My mates getting married soon.. And since most wedding presents are lame crap for females/house etc... I thought Id be cool and upgrade his computer....

Basically.... I can use some of his old parts etc but will need quite a bit, but of course I dont want to spend millions...

So with a budget of say US$350 ish (can go abit more if you convince me lol)

I need:

Motherboard
CPU
Ram
Video Card

He has a DVD Writers and a 160gb HDD, however they are both IDE, and I think all modern Motherboards only come with one IDE now a days, so Im thinking of using his HDD (as they are more expensive that ROMs) and getting a sata DVD Drive... But what would you recommend?

Heres my little list I came up with...

AMD Athlon II x2 240
ECSS MCP61M-M3 AM3
ATi 4770 512mb
Crucial DDR3 1066 2x2gb

That would be around US$328 here in NZ....

But Im sure you guys can come up with better...

He has a Tower and a 400w PSU (nothing flash but with those cards shouldnt really matter)

Now I know I cant get the best... But just after the best for the budget.

Cheers
 
That would be a nice build and can handle games on medium settings... but an IDE HDD is going to bottleneck. Does that board have any SATA plugs? SATA is the standard nowadays, and it's a big improvement from IDE. Also, storage space is so cheap these days it will cost next to nothing for a larger sata drive, like 250gb or more. look on ebay and you'll see.
 
Yeah im tryin to save money on stuff... So was hoping to use his HDD, a DVD writer is only fourty bucks, but a HDD is more like 90 ish.
 
I hope this helps, i dug around newegg to see what i could find for you. I uped the cpu to the triple core because it was cheap with a well rated MoBo as it's combo. The Graphics card was priced low, specced high, and got great ratings, people were using it to play Crysis, and if you don't know its the perfect game to test your system with to see how it handles.

CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103649

MoBo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128398

Ram: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220436

GPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161287

The Cpu/MoBo combo comes out slightely under $200 which is cool.
 
I won't recommend ECS mobo. To play in save, get Asus/ Gigabyte/ MSI

PSU - Make sure he has good quality psu.
 
Im in NZ dude... I would love to buy from Newegg but I cant lol.

ECS is the cheapest option... Im sure it cant be that bad, as long as it runs the components will be fine.
 
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