Upgrading to PC gaming.

[Cubethulhu]

I recently crunched some numbers and found out that if I sold all my PS3 games to a local trade in place. (E-star land) I would make around 450 dollar. I could sell my backwards compatible 60 GB PS3 for about 200 - 250. My accessories for 80. I have about a hundred I can spend on a frivolous purchase. And my birthday is coming up so I'll probably get about 200 bucks worth of games I don't plan on keeping. So I'll have around a thousand dollars. I know that this is like the starting point for how much you pay for a PC. But if I buy the individual parts or buy a pre-owned one I could get a machine that's way better then my current PC and be thoroughly entertained by a large back catalogue of games I've always wanted to play. So I was wondering what might be the best option for buying a gaming PC on a fixed budget? Take into consideration I would like for it to be able to play recent stuff on at least the medium settings. (I.E. Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim.) If anyone could help me I would be most appreciative. Also if you would like to buy any of the stuff I'm selling I would gladly sell it to you if you beat E-star lands price. Thanks and have a nice day.

[SecondTalon]

I'd say a thousand is starting if you're starting from zero.

Sounds like you already have a keyboard, monitor, mouse, case, power supply, CD-ROM drives, Sound Card, maybe even a salvageable hard drive and, of course, assorted cables. So you're really just looking at a new Motherboard, CPU, Memory, and video card. And.. maybe a hard drive and if your power supply isn't up to it a new one of those.

Point being, you should end up with a few hundred left over.


All that being said, Imma gonna talk to phlip about moving this over to Hardware, where they can probably spec you out something on NewEgg faster than the Gaming community can. Even though they're often the same people. Shut up, logic.

[Derek]

While I certainly would consider moving to PC gaming an upgrade ( ), I wouldn't trade in any games/systems that you might regret selling someday. If you really never play your PS3 games anymore then it's fine, but I still play N64, Gamecube, and GBA games sometimes, if I had traded them in I would certainly regret it now.

And like Talon says, if you already have some parts, you might not even need to spend a thousand.

[WarDaft]

You definitely won't spend a thousand. 1500 bought me a laptop that plays every game I have at peak or near peak settings, including ME3 and Skyrim. Desktops are always a lot more power for substantially less money.

As ST says, you can reuse things, but you might actually need a new power supply. Cards can be big power hogs and generally need their own rail, if your PC doesn't have the right kind of supply, it might not have the extra lines a card will want. Be sure to check that.

Do note also that if you don't have the games already on PC, you'll need to buy them, and you'll probably never be able to sell them for anything much. You should probably take that into account since you're selling your console game library in addition to your console.

[PhoenixEnigma]

Ohai, you mentioned Newegg links?

Assuming your last PC was a 386 and you need new everything (as mentioned, probably not a good assumption, but better to play it safe):

Spoiler:

CPU: Intel i3-2120 - $128. With Ivy Bridge CPUs launching in a matter of days now, it's hard to recommend anything but "wait a bit", but it's plenty fast enough and cheap enough, too. Unless you plan to play BF3, it's probably all you need (and it won't fair too badly at that, either).

Mobo: Asrock Z68 Pro/Gen 3 - $104. Solid board with all the fixings and room to expand. Should last you though a mid-life update in a couple years.

GPU: GTX 560Ti - $220. The video card market is a little odd at the moment, with some of AMD's new cards not actually available yet and nVidia expected to launch new cards soon, too. Waiting a month or so for it to shake out makes the most sense, but the 560Ti will make things awfully pretty if you need your fix now.

RAM: 2x4GB DDR3-1333 - $38. It's cheap, it's RAM, and it's 8GB.

HDD: 500GB WD CAviar Blue - $85. Hard drive prices are still kind of nuts, though you can generally score pretty decent deals with sales if you're willing to look. If there's room in the budget, I'd stick a small SSD in as a cache drive as well.

Optical Drive: Samsung DVD-RW - $16. Probably want one to install Windows, at least. No real differentiating factors here.

PSU: 520W Seasonic - $70. Top notch power supply that will deliver enough power for most reasonable systems. Power supplies are a bad place to cut corners, and this is anything but.

Case: CM HAF 912 - $60. Well regarded, though there's a lot of options, particularly around that price. The Antec 300 would be a more subdued alternative, for one.

Monitor: Acer V223WEJbd - $140. Cheap and cheerful, though if you have particular requirements you can probably do a little better.

Mouse: Logitech G300 - $36. If you're gaming, it makes sense to spend a bit more on the parts of the PC you actually interact with. Obviously lots of room for personal preference, this is mostly an example.

Keyboard: Rosewill RK-8100 - $30. Same deal as the mouse, really.

OS: Win7 HP x64 - $100. Kind of a no brainer, unless you need some feature that Win7 Pro has.

Total: $1028

If you have room in the budget from reusing parts, bumping the CPU to an i5-2400 or better, throwing in a smallish SSD, and/or picking up a bit nicer monitor would all be decent ideas. Or just blow it all on Steam sales and beer.

That's a build that's going to be well past "Medium" on most current titles, mind - I'd expect high-to-maxed on most recent titles, nevermind games from a few years ago. If you'd rather keep performance around 'medium', and can post what you have now that can be reused, I'm guessing $500-600 is entirely possible.

I'd also suggest staying away from OEM systems if you're looking at gaming - you have to pay an arm and a leg for them to give you a decent video card, and even then they tend to be weight more towards CPU performance than makes sense. Unless you want a niche product like the Alienware X51, it makes more sense to build it yourself.

[EvanED]

If you're gonna get a new monitor, I'd recommend splurging a little there. 1080p is nice, as then you can watch bluray and stuff at native resolution. I also tend to be a bit pickier than most, and won't buy a TN monitor. The Dell 2212HM for instance is probably very good. (I have had two Dell Ultrasharps and have been quite happy with both. I wish they could dim more, but that's nearly my only complaint, and my impression is that's shared among basically all.) $80 more than Phoenix's choice.

[Cubethulhu]

Let's see my current PC is a HP Pavillion a350n. A fairly old computer. It can do most things I want. Face Book, Minecraft and Word process. It's just getting on in years and I think it might not be upgradable.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te ... =c00041542

[PhoenixEnigma]

It's just getting on in years and I think it might not be upgradable.

You'd be right - assuming you still have the original KB/mouse, it looks like you could keep one of those, if you really wanted to. Everything else is pretty much beyond hope. Is your monitor worth keeping?

[EvanED]

It's just getting on in years and I think it might not be upgradable.

You'd be right - assuming you still have the original KB/mouse, it looks like you could keep one of those, if you really wanted to. Everything else is pretty much beyond hope. Is your monitor worth keeping?

Eh, you could definitely reuse the DVD drive and perhaps the hard drive, though it'd be a squeeze if you're anything like me (to put it mildly). It might even be possible to reuse the case, though I think computer manufacturers like to put non-standard mobo shapes and stuff in there. (Or at least they used to. I haven't really looked for the last, oh, decade.)

Edit: actually, looks like the motherboard is micro-ATX. That's standard, so you'd actually likely be able to reuse the case if you want and save yourself a few dollars. (No guarantees though. You could always assume that you can, try to build it, and buy one if it doesn't work out.)

Oh, and your current motherboard supports "duel channel" RAM! Pew pew pew!

[PhoenixEnigma]

Eh, you could definitely reuse the DVD drive and perhaps the hard drive, though it'd be a squeeze if you're anything like me (to put it mildly). It might even be possible to reuse the case, though I think computer manufacturers like to put non-standard mobo shapes and stuff in there. (Or at least they used to. I haven't really looked for the last, oh, decade.)

Edit: actually, looks like the motherboard is micro-ATX. That's standard, so you'd actually likely be able to reuse the case if you want and save yourself a few dollars. (No guarantees though. You could always assume that you can, try to build it, and buy one if it doesn't work out.)

Oh, and your current motherboard supports "duel channel" RAM! Pew pew pew!

"Definitely " is quite an overstatement unless you specifically plan the build around using old IDE devices. A quick look at newegg only turns up about half a dozen 1155 boards (and the only one comparable to what I linked above is $250), and not a single AM3+ or FM1 board, with an IDE connector. You could do it, but it's a pretty poor tradeoff when building a new system, IMO.

Keeping the case might not be a terrible idea, though- it doesn't look like a particularly fantastic case, but for a uATX build, it'd save a bit and be serviceable.

[EvanED]

Eh, you could definitely reuse the DVD drive and perhaps the hard drive, though it'd be a squeeze if you're anything like me (to put it mildly). It might even be possible to reuse the case, though I think computer manufacturers like to put non-standard mobo shapes and stuff in there. (Or at least they used to. I haven't really looked for the last, oh, decade.)

Edit: actually, looks like the motherboard is micro-ATX. That's standard, so you'd actually likely be able to reuse the case if you want and save yourself a few dollars. (No guarantees though. You could always assume that you can, try to build it, and buy one if it doesn't work out.)

Oh, and your current motherboard supports "duel channel" RAM! Pew pew pew!

"Definitely " is quite an overstatement unless you specifically plan the build around using old IDE devices. A quick look at newegg only turns up about half a dozen 1155 boards (and the only one comparable to what I linked above is $250), and not a single AM3+ or FM1 board, with an IDE connector. You could do it, but it's a pretty poor tradeoff when building a new system, IMO.

Wow, okay, I guess those disappeared sooner than I'd have guessed. You had to try to find a motherboard without IDE last time I did a build; there were only a couple.

Though now that I think about it, that was something like 5 years ago. So I guess that was an unreasonable assumption on my part. Seems much more recent.

[GeorgeH]

PE made a great list; I'll just throw in some alternatives:

PSU - Antec EA-380D (or EA-430D) ~ $45 (save ~$25.) You almost certainly won't notice the difference.

GPU - AMD 6850 ~$130-150 (save $70-90.) Slower than the 560 Ti, but still fast enough for very pretty graphics.

Case - Find something used for free-ish (or change to a mATX motherboard and try reusing what you've got.) Any remotely cuboid object will work fine for an i3-2120 and a 6850/560 Ti.

HDD - I'd spend up and get a 64GB M4 for ~$90. You'll have to do space management (only a couple of large games installed at any one time) but 500GB for $85 makes me sad.

I'd also think about stepping down to a mATX H67 motherboard. You'll only save ~$30 or so unless you get a great deal, but by the time you want to join the "cool kids" with a 4+GHz quad core Haswell will be a much better option and you'll want a new motherboard anyway.