build | Stochastic Geometry

New Gaming Rig, Part One – The Decision

The last time I built a computer just for gaming was 1998 or thereabouts. Since then, budgets and time and a general loss of interest meant that I didn’t build another one. But the brother’s PS3 hooked up to a 48″ television in the family home meant being exposed to a few of the more recent FPSs and sandbox games, and well, the urge has returned 😀 And it was managable… up until recently, when watching this…

and then this…

came too close to reading the most recent Tom’s Hardware $500 system build… and of course, I went off and priced that exact build and it was only €465 here… and well, the car loan is finally paid off, and there’s no big outlay for a few months yet…. oh what the hell.

Thing is, you say “I think a budget box…” and immediately you get people who know what they’re talking about mentioning i7 builds that cost twice the price, and then you get into the whole cost-performance tradeoff. And I’m not denying it, that’s a fun debate 😀 Many thanks to IrishMetalHead, Monotype and the other guys on the boards.ie PC building & upgrading forum for their help, by the way – definitely a very useful resource for anyone trying their own custom build (or who’d like to start). After a fair bit of chatter, and a lot of digging through Tom’s Hardware (seriously, PC gaming hardware’s changed quite a lot in the last few years – servers, I’m current with, but graphics cards… well, the last gaming rig I had could just about manage Counterstrike at 800×600@20fps…), I had a build manifest that looked like it’d handle everything that the games for the next year or two would throw at it and which wouldn’t fall over for a while yet; and which, when upgrade time came, wouldn’t need upgrading all at once (so that the CPU, motherboard and RAM could go form the heart of a HTPC build or a cheap NAS rig, while the other parts said hello to a proper i7 build for its new core).

Once the final build manifest was put together, it was time to go round the various retailers trying to find one that had the entire list (or as close to it as was possible) and took online payment and preferably would deliver this week. The initial retailer, hardwareversand.de, who were a new crowd to me, had almost everything I wanted at a decent price, but delivery wasn’t going to be fast and it was a pain in the fundament to pay them – bank transfers to germany? Seriously? Yeesh. Dabs.ie looked good for delivery for all but one item (the motherboard) – thing is, I’ve been burned by dabs in the past for restocking time estimates, so no thanks. Overclocking didn’t have everything and the price was a tad high (not to mention the dire warnings from unhappy customers on the net). Simply seems to have gone away, Komplett didn’t have all the parts and so after digging through the boards.ie forum for a recommendation I went to Scan (another new crowd since I last did this) and found all I was looking for (with minor variations) at a reasonable cost and with this-week delivery. So the order went in today, and I’m told I’ll have the parts on Thursday…

Here’s the build:

Description	Ex VAT	Inc VAT
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3Not the original motherboard in the Tom’s build, but a similar model with the same chipset by a decent manufacturer.	£47.77	£57.32
AMD Athlon II X3 450, 3.2GHz	£48.45	£58.14
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2	£12.98	£15.58
1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3	£32.48	£38.98
Gigabyte GV-N560SO-1GI-950 Super OverclockQuite happy at getting this – check out the Tom’s Hardware Review and Benchmarks for it!	£181.56	£217.87
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 Classic, DDR3 PC3-10666, CAS 9-9-9-24	£32.12	£38.54
Samsung SH-S223L/RSMS 22x DVD±R	£14.08	£16.90
500W Corsair CMPSU-500CXUK Builder Series	£37.47	£44.96
Antec 300 Three Hundred, Black Midi Tower Case	£38.83	£46.60
Microsoft SideWinder 2000 Gaming Mouse	£14.99	£17.99
Wolf King DK-2388U Circular Gaming Keyboard	£5.99	£7.19
	Sub Total	£466.72
	Carriage	£20.55
	VAT	£97.45
	Total	£584.72