Cheapest gaming quality modern PC?

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Originally Posted by chilled

Dude, that's 7 yr old cpu that is power hungry (and has no integrated graphics). Same for the vga. If I were him I'd get new parts of recent hardware. This has no room for any expansion, the ram is slow (16gb is overkill, heck, even 8gb is way too much imho) and the pc will get old way sooner. Plus small disk drive. The cpu is slower in single core than modern i5s like the one I choose. Emulation and most programs still use only one core.

But oh well if it's just for console emulation, maybe it'll do the trick and your advice is the simplest option. I am proud of my pcpartpicker build, though :)

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I'd go with chilled's build, myself. Room for future expansion!

On the 8GB RAM point, though, I tend to use my own PC's for more than gaming. Artwork, video processing, and coding (what bare minimum I do work on) quite need that RAM! Even with 16GB, I can sometimes feel restrained. Of course, not every person does those three things. :)

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Originally Posted by chilled

Dude, that's 7 yr old cpu that is power hungry (and has no integrated graphics). Same for the vga. If I were him I'd get new parts of recent hardware. This has no room for any expansion, the ram is slow (16gb is overkill, heck, even 8gb is way too much imho) and the pc will get old way sooner. Plus small disk drive. The cpu is slower in single core than modern i5s like the one I choose. Emulation and most programs still use only one core.

But oh well if it's just for console emulation, maybe it'll do the trick and your advice is the simplest option. I am proud of my pcpartpicker build, though :)

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Your build is nice, but I don't like the case; my last 2 video cards are bigger than that case is. He'd have to learn how to build his own PC and get a cheap Windows key Code, or pay $100 for an operating system.

The days of programs using a single core (Dolphin uses multi-core) are long gone. Even the latest Skyrim takes advantage of hyperthreading and extra cores. And the GTX 260 will probably have 2 DVI ports, like my old GTS 250. It'll do until he can drop another $100 for a more modern graphics card.


Those i7's (a lot better than anything AMD currently has) still kick ass. The i7-950 came out a little over a year before Sandy Bridge, and the 950 boost clocks to 3.33 Ghz without any kind of overclocking.

Just look at this old i7-920 keeping up with and beating a 4460. My good old 4790k is crushing both of them though, with a lesser GPU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSD40aoNRIc

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Here you go!

It's only $450.

It has an i7-950 @ 3.07 Ghz
A 256 GB SSD for fast boot
Windows 7 Professional
GTX 260
16 GB of memory

You could easily upgrade the GPU later on, if you want to play more graphics intense games with this. The power Supply should be good enough for any single card, considering that this thing is using a power hungry GTX 260.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Studio-...3edbe#viTabs_0

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It's funny that I saw a similar setup to this in the pawnshop today. It had the i7-920 and some AMD r6 graphics card. It also had a nice Corsair TX750m power supply and a 256 GB SSD. The whole setup was only $379.

Those 1366 motherboards are in high demand now, with prices reaching the mid $200 range. You can pair them with a 6 core/12thread Xeon for less than $75.