Challenge: Sub $500 Budget Rig
By Tim Hage on Jan 3rd, 2009 at 2:20PM
One of our faithful readers wanted to see a $500 gaming system. So, rising to the challenge, here is the system we would build. Lots of these parts you could get cheaper if you where willing to shop around and deal with rebates. You could end up saving close to another $100.
Rosewill R6426-P Mid Tower Case – $26
- Nothing special here, but it’s cheap.
Antec Basiq 500W Power Supply – $40
- Great price for the performance. Antec owns.
GIGABYTE MA74GM-S2 AM2+ – $55
- Supports Phenom chips, for future upgrades.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000 – $70
- 3.1Ghz Dual-core CPU.
MSI GeForce 9800GT 512MB – $125
- A great card with a large cooler.
GeIL Black Dragon 2GB DDR2 800 – $26
- Two 1GB sticks for a great price.
Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB – $42
- 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA 3.0Gb/s.
Samsung 20X SATA DVD Burner – $22
- Just your everyday standard SATA burner.
Microsoft Windows XP Home SP3 – $90
- Could get Vista Home SP1 32bit for the same price.
TOTAL: $496
This is very close to the same PC that I currently run as my primary gaming PC. Although I have twice the RAM and recently upgraded my GPU to the HD4870. Nevertheless, I can run CoD4, CoD:WaW, Crysis (On medium with about 25fps), Photoshop CS3, and have no problems playing and editing HD video.
Now that’s a budget pc! I didn’t even think it could run crysis that well for $500. You squeezed quite a bit into that $500 budget. Thank you for accepting my challenge.
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How about a computer for 100
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It could probably be done. It wouldn’t be a gaming pc though thats for sure. Also it would have to run linux.
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A PC for $100? If it was all used parts maybe. One thing I can tell you is that it wouldn’t do a whole lot :P
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