How to build a gaming pc with USD$800

It's a commonly held misconception that playing modern PC games is an expensive proposition, full of $500 video cards and $900 dual-core processors. Sure, you can have an amazing gaming experience if you want to blow thousands of dollars putting together our Killer Gaming Rig, but it doesn't have to be that way. You can enjoy the latest PC games with a sub-$1000 PC.

As you'll see, that doesn't mean you have to miss out on all the "good stuff," either. You don't need to turn all the detail levels down, or play at a resolution of 640x480. With the PC we built for around $800, we're able to play even demanding games at HD resolutions (1280x1024) quite well. Granted, that's without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, but it's still a great gaming experience. So if your computer is getting too old to play all the hot games, or if you're looking to build a second computer on the cheap, our suggestions for an $800 gaming PC may be a good place to start.

Recommended Components

Rule #1 for Build It systems is this: The stuff we recommend has to be readily available, in stock, at online vendors we would trust with our own money. We don't just go with the lowest price we can find anywhere in the wild land of online commerce. Prices tend to fluctuate and we're sure that you can find a better deal if you dig around enough—we'd rather err on the side of "you can actually find these prices" than promise a less expensive system you could never build yourself.

It's been our experience that do-it-yourselfers looking to build a computer under $1,000 are recycling monitors and speakers from other machines, so you don't see them on that list. Obviously, you can spend anywhere from $100 to well over $500 on each of those components, depending on just how high-end you want to go.

So without monitor or speakers, our homebuilt rig comes in just over $800, and that includes a Windows XP OEM license, mouse, and keyboard. That's a price your credit card can live with, and as you'll see in the performance section, it doesn't mean you have to make all your games look like mud to get decent performance.

CPU: Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 939)

The Athlon 64 3000+ CPU comes in both socket 939 and socket 754 variants, but you'll probably get better gaming performance out of the socket 939 version, which offers much greater memory bandwidth. This is the same CPU we used in our last $800 Gaming Rig, only this time it's a little less expensive. Truth be told, the extra money it costs to move up to a 3200+ is better spent elsewhere—you'll have a better overall computer spending that money on a graphics card, or better optical drive.

We'd love to get a dual-core CPU in our budget configuration, but prices still have to fall quite a bit before we can make that a reasonable goal.

Motherboard: eVGA nForce4 SLI (133-K8-NF41)

The MSI motherboard in our last $800 gaming PC was a pretty basic nForce 4 model; this time we stepped it up to an SLI board. Sure, you're not going to run two graphics cards in your $800 computer, but we like having the option for future expansion. Besides, grabbing another GeForce 7600 GT in six months might be a really inexpensive way to get a serious boost in graphics performance, if the prices drop even more.

Of course, eVGA's board has all the other stuff you want in a modern motherboard, too. Gigabit Ethernet, SATA-II, rounded cables, etc. Best of all, we found it at Newegg for only $80. Deal of the century!

There's one weird quirk, though. This board has three PCIe graphics slots. Two are for the x8 SLI configuration, but if you are using one card, you plug it into the single x16 PCIe graphics slot that rests between them. This layout uses up the space usually reserved for an additional PCI or PCIe x1 slot.

Memory: Corsair ValueSelect DDR400

Kingston, Corsair, OCZ, Crucial… when you're buying basic DDR400 RAM without concern for extreme low latencies or overclockability, the brand is less important than the price. We found a good deal on a pair of Corsair ValueSelect DDR400 512MB modules. Price fluctuates in the RAM market more than with just about any other component, so shop around and don't be afraid to jump brands (at least, when shopping for budget-conscious, conservative memory). Just make sure you stick with a major name brand. Some of the off-brand stuff can be flaky, and we frequently hear reports of users running into problems with it.

Graphics: eVGA GeForce 7600 GT CO

This particular graphics card model was one of our favorites from our recent big honkin' Graphics Card Roundup. For about $179, it gives you enough graphics horsepower to run all the latest games without sacrificing visual quality. You won't be able to tackle high resolutions with AA and AF enabled, but that's probably beyond the reach of any $800 PC.

Audio: Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value

If you're really on a tight budget, you can skip the sound card entirely and just use your integrated PC audio. We find that's almost always a bad idea, though. The signal to noise ratio is typically poor, 3D audio options are limited, and since all the processing is host-based, games that use lots of audio channels can slow down a bit.

The solution is a good sound card. The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value gets you into the very latest Sound Blaster card—basically the only game in town that offloads audio processing off the host CPU anymore—without spending much money. Note that the Audigy 2 Value is based on the EMU 10K1 chip, the same chip that powered the original Audigy card. But everything else has been updated. Your games will run faster, and you'll get to use EAX in games that support it.

Keyboard and Mouse: Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 and Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical 1.1

There are probably tons of keyboards and mice at your local mega-computer-shop, but don't expect to save a lot of money that way—they tend to charge retail price. We found Microsoft's nice Curve 2000 keyboard online for under $25, and an IntelliMouse Optical for under $15. Yeah, it's not G15 Gaming Keyboard and G5 Mouse, but we're not about to blow $150 of our $800 PC on input devices. Continued...

Hard Drive: Seagate 7200.7 160GB

The seventh-generation Seagate drives aren't quite as nice as the newer eighth-gen drives, and we just heard of a ninth-gen series with perpendicular storage. But you can still find these all over the place online, and they're a good deal. In our case, we get acceptable performance in a SATA drive and a nice 160GB of space for an extremely reasonable $70 price.

Optical Drive: Pioneer DVR-111DBK

The Pioneer DVR-111DBK is a fantastic optical drive deal. It's a full DVD-RW burner, with support for –R and +R formats, and burn speeds up to 40x for CDs, 16x for DVDs, and 8x for DVD-RWs. The drive casing is a little on the long side—not a problem for our system here today, but it might be a tight squeeze in a small form factor computer. These beauties are easy to find for around $45 online, and models are available with either beige or black bezels.

Case and Power Supply: Antec Sonata II

Yes, you can find cheaper cases out there. But we just couldn't pass this one up. For $89, you get a very attractive piano-black finished case with a 450W power supply, and it does a pretty good job of keeping some of the fan noise trapped inside, especially with the new air-duct CPU cooling system.

Operating System: Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2

What can we say? If you want to play the latest and greatest games, it behooves you to use the latest iteration of Microsoft's flagship operating system. We're watching every dollar we spend on this system, so we opted for the Home edition, which foregoes a couple of networking capabilities that the vast majority of users will never need anyway. In any case, make sure you get the version with Service Pack 2 integrated into the setup, or install SP2 right after installation.

Performance

Unfortunately, in the intervening time since we last built an $800 Gaming Rig nearly a year ago, virtually all relevant benchmarks have changed. If we were to compare our new system to that one, we'd be testing "old and busted" games and apps. You don't want to know how it runs the old and busted stuff, you want to know how it runs the new hotness.

An overall PCMark05 score of 3401 is perfectly respectable, though far from the blazing speeds those $1,000 CPUs deliver. That 5146 score for the hard drive test is pretty good, especially considering the $80 cost of the drive!

Our system is about half as fast at media encoding as the super-quick high-end systems we test new motherboards and graphics cards with. Then again, it also costs less than half as much. Overall, we feel really good about these scores, though this is a system that isn't optimized for this kind of work.

So close, and yet so far! We ran 3DMark06 four times, hoping that the slight variance from one run to the next would get us over 3000 points. It didn't, but we're right on the edge. Even the slightest overclock would probably push us over.

Here's where the rubber really meets the road. We ran all our game benchmarks at 1280x1024, stepping up from last year's $800 system where we only ran at 1024x768. Fact of the matter is, 17" LCD monitors with native resolutions of 1280x1024 have gotten very inexpensive, and we think that would most likely be paired up with a box like this one.

And wouldn't you know it, each game was able to deliver an average frame rate higher than the LCD's referesh of 60Hz, save one. Call of Duty 2 tends to push graphics cards really hard, and it's tough for even the best to drive over 60fps.

Note that we didn't pull any punches, here. We ran every game with the same maximum detail settings we use to test new graphics cards. Texture resolutions are maxed out, lighting detail is cranked up, reflections are boosted, and so on. If you want to make Call of Duty 2 run and look great on this system, you can just turn the texture resolution down from "extra" to "high."

Thanks to the magic of ever-decreasing hardware prices, our new box kicks the tar out of our old one. It maintains great frame rates at a higher resolution, with more demanding games. It's got a nice DVD burner, not simply a DVD-ROM drive as before. The hard drive space is doubled, and performance increased. The motherboard supports SLI for future dual-graphics expansion. And last but not least, it's all stuffed inside a more attractive, quieter case. Not bad for around $800, right?

To be fair, once you look at shipping costs and the inevitable "the place with the good price doesn't have it in stock anymore" syndrome, you may end up spending more than $800 to build this exact system. Still, we think it's a fantastic value, and testament to the advantages of building a PC yourself. The only thing cooler than seeing how much computer you can build for $800 is thinking about how pitiful this machine will seem next to the awesome power of the $800 Gaming PC we build a year from now.

Special thanks to Extreme Tech for the compilation of this how to.