Here is last week’s “Weekly Build” – sorry for the delay!

Recently, the enthusiast oriented builds we have put together have been relatively expensive, usually around the $1,000 mark. After seeing my article on the $500 PC for grandma, Jared became curious as to how cheaply you could build a machine but still be able to use it for gaming. I set out to see what kind of gaming performance you could squeeze out of $600. As it turns out, quite a bit.

AMD Athlon II X4 620 2.6GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor
[$89.00 - Newegg]

Seeing as we are trying to be budget-conscious, this was one of the best processors for the price. Just under $90, this is probably one of the cheapest quad-core processors you will get your hands on. It lacks the L3 cache of its more expensive siblings, but it should be able to at least keep pace with Intel’s Q6600 before overclocking. Rumor has it this processor can hit a 40% overclock on average, which is not too bad.

MSI 770-G45 ATX AMD Motherboard
[$59.99 after $20 mail-in rebate - Newegg]

This motherboard was one of the cheapest I found from a reputable manufacturer that both accepted DDR3 memory and had two PCI-e x16 slots. The second slot drops to x4 when running in CrossFire mode, but it should be more than sufficient to handle the video cards I selected. Other than that, the board is pretty standard by all other accounts.

Patriot G Series ‘Sector 5′ Edition 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory
[$69.99 after $20 mail-in rebate - Newegg]

What we have here is 4GB of DDR3 1333 memory on two DIMMS. This allows for the addition of more memory in the future if required, and is supposedly pretty easy to overclock to DDR3 1600 speeds. It doesn’t get much better than 4 gigs of Patriot memory for only $70.

Two XFX Radeon HD 5670 HD-567X-ZNF3 Video Cards
[$219.98 ($109.99 each) after $10 mail-in rebate - Newegg]

Since this machine is meant for gaming, visuals are a priority. These boards use the Radeon 5670 processors which are not necessarily the newest of the new, but then again these cards only run $110 apiece! Paired together in CrossFire mode, they should work quite well for most games. A head’s up though – unless you have a CrossFire ribbon cable laying around, you will need to pick one up, as other users report that these cards do not come with one. As a bonus, you get two coupon codes for a free copy of Blacklight: Tango Down. Sell one to a friend to save a couple of bucks on your build!

OCZ ModXStream Pro OCZ700MXSP 700W Power Supply
[$59.99 after $25 mail-in rebate - Newegg]

Since we may be overclocking, and because we have two graphics cards, I decided to add a relatively beefy power supply. 700 watts should suffice for this build, and the price isn’t bad either. This PSU is modular, which is a feature I look for in any power supply I purchase. I really don’t see the need to have extraneous plugs you will never use cluttering up your system.

Thermaltake V3 Black Edition VL80001W2Z Black Computer Case With Side Panel Window
[$32.99 after $12 mail-in rebate - Newegg]

I was surprised at how attractive this case was, seeing as it was only $33. There are many more expensive cases that look terrible compared to this one, so I think this was a lucky find. It’s not huge, so there is only a bit of room for expansion, but it should do the job nicely.

Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 32MB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive
[$61.13 plus free shipping - Amazon]

There are cheaper or similarly priced drives that double the 500 GB capacity of this one, but how much space do you really need for playing games? Odds are you will play one to five games concurrently, so this 500 GB drive is more than large enough for the task. My main focus here was speed, and the WD Black drives deliver. They are pretty reliable, but also come with a 5 year warranty, so you are covered on all bases.

LITE-ON DVD Writer – Black SATA Model iHAS224-06 with LightScribe Support
[$19.99 - Newegg]

As always, I will end the post with a basic DVD-RW drive to round out the system. Nothing exciting to see here, though it does come with Lightscribe support.

With all things considered, this is a pretty decent “budget” gaming system at a very nice price. The total price came to just about $630 shipped, which is not too shabby considering what $500 bought us when we were putting an email machine together for Grandma. It might not run Crysis on 4 monitors at the highest resolution with anti-aliasing cranked to 11, but it should do pretty well for most games you will want to play.

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