It's been quite a while since i posted the article on the gaming PC. Since then Intel has done quite a bit and are now the undispuited leaders, again, in desktop computing; thanks to their new Conroe line, the Core2Duos. This update will not include the Core line processors though beacuse they are still expensive to be considered for a 35K PC. Ok so here goes;
CPU
we'll be using the Pentium D 840 running at 2.8 Ghz. The D line of processors from Intel provide the most overclocking potential of all CPUs. They'll give a better performance over everything in the Athlon64 line, except the FX and X2 line which is way more expensive to consider for this rig. Remeber we used an Athlon 3200+ at Rs.8000 for our previous rig, well check this out, the Pentium D 840 comes at a mere 5500(you can even find such prices on Ebay), it's Dual Core so better performance in multitasking and of course better performance overall. Some people around the globe have overclocked their Pentium D processors to as much as 4.1 Ghz!!.That amount of overclocking would need considerable investment in aftermarket cooling solutions though. And it's totally upto you..Artic Ice, Cooler Master Freezer pro, water cooler ..whatever.
Graphics Card
Prices have fallen considerably and considering the fact we're savign quite a bit on our CPU we'll get GeForce 7600GS card this time. Amazed?Thinking it would be so expensive? Well, check this out...there's a model in the market for this card called the Techcom 256 MB Forsa GeForce 7600GS. what does it cost? 7500 bucks!! What more could you ask? IF you don't know about how the 7 series GeForce isbetter than than the 6 series, I won't bore you with it. Just remember, you'll be able to play almost all your games at maximum setting with no lag whatsoever. The only exception would be Elder Scrolls IV-Oblivion, where, if you crank up the settings/resolution to maximum, it might jerk here and there. FEAR may encounter the occasional lag, if everything is set to max and Soft Shadows are on(it 'may' happen). Beast of a card, DDR2 Memory, TV-Out, DVI, has a built in HDTV Encoder too!! Wow!
HDD
A Hitachi Deskstar 250 GB, at 4000 bucks.
RAM
Transcend again, but this time DDR2-533Mhz, 1GB--2*512 MB sticks to work in dual channel.
4600 bucks.
Motherboard
Asus P5RD1 VM PciE wATIRadeonExpress200 chipset.270o bucks
Optical Drive
Sony DRU again, but it costs less this time--2600 bucks
Zebronics cabinet with 450 watt PS--1500
Mouse/Keyboard--Logitech--700 bucks
Creative Inspire 2.1--1200 bucks(for 1200 bucks this thing rocks!!!) I have it, plus it has a wired remote.
Monitor 17"-Samsung 793S again at 5000 bucks.
ROUNDUP
Pentium D 820--------------------------------------5500
Asus P5RD1 VM-------------------------------------2700
Techcom 256MB Forsa GeForce 7600 GS-----------7500
Hitachi Desktar 250 GB-----------------------------4000
Transcend DDR2 533 1GB(2*512)------------------4600
Zebronics w 450 W PSU----------------------------1500
Sony DRU DVD+-RW-------------------------------2600
Creative Inspire 2.1 Speakers-----------------------1200
Samsung 793S 17'-----------------------------------5000
Logitech Mouse/Keyboard Combo------------------- 700
35,300
Ok, I know i overshot it by 300, but i'm sure if you can bargain and look in the right places, maybe you can bring it down even further, to a 33500-34000 level. So enjoy guys
*Next up would be a Core2Duo PC for decent gaming and blazing performance in under 45K..watch out for that.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
A Gaming PC in Rs. 35000
Alright, so all of you have been there, done that. This question might have crossed the minds of every middle class PC enthusiast about a 100 times. How do you actually build a PC which will not only provide good gaming performance but also be a bit future proof. Before starting, I must all those Intel Inside devotees. The Intel platform is good for desktop applications, audio/video encoding and ripping but when it comes to raw gaming power and 3D performance AMD beats it hands down. I'm not gonna waste your time by going on about benchmarks and blah blah.
A special mention to people who are thinking of investing in a new PC: The Intel platform is very good, but please steer clear of the Celeron line, it's an absolute waste of money and metal.
Any way, getting to the point: Here, I shall be giving you a configuration which will not only play all your latest games including DOOM3, Half-Life2,Quake4 etc but will prove to a be long companion for years to come unless you plan to turn it into a high end 3D content rendering unit (i.e. acutally rendering movies made on Maya or 3DS MAX) or use it for high end server purposes.
So here it is:
We shall start with the 3 basic and the most important components of your system viz. Motherboard------Processor/s------Hard Disk Drive/s
(1) ASUS A8V-MX : This is a budget category motherboard based on a VIA KM800 chipset. It supports all AMD Socket 939 processors. Has 4 USB 2.0 ports, support for DDR RAM upto 2GB, 1 AGP, 2 PCI and 1 PCI-E slot. Onboard 5.1 channel audio and 10/100 ethernet and support for RAID!!. Though it lacks other premium things like Firewire, Gigabit LAN etc but at a price of Rs. 2600 who minds all this.
(2)AMD Athlon 64 3200+(939) : One hell of a processor!!!!! is all I can say. This beast can beat the **** out of any PIV except the Extreme edition, where it performs at a par level. One of the best processors available in the market for hardcore gaming purposes unless you wanna spend considerably more on the Athlon 3500+ or even the Athlon FX. For a price of Rs. 8000 why would ypu even want to look at those PIV 3 Ghz+ editions priced upwards of 15K.
(3) Seagate Barracuda (160 GB)- Seagate is the leader when it comes to sheer performance and speed of drives unless you want to spend much more on the Western Digital drives which run at 10000rpm. For this rig we'll use 2 Barracudas 80GB each in a RAID 0 configuration, this will further increase the performance twice!! These barracudas will cost you around Rs. 3800.
RAM! RAM! RAM! Most people don't care and are not bothered about the amount of RAM they have in their systems. They think wow! a PIV at 2.8 ghz, 80 GB HDD, all's done. Even those who care won't take time to find out wheher their system has DDR, DDR2, PC3200 type, what is the frquency at which it runs, what are the latency levels. Well I won't bore you with it either but let me tell you that atleast 512 MB of RAM is needed to smoothly operate a PC/Laptop with Windows XP running on it. For a gaming system atleast 1 GB is necessary.
For our system we shall use 2 modules of Transcend 512 MB DDR RAM running at 400 Mhz(just to give our system that extra juice). This will cost you around Rs. 4800.
GRAPHICS CARD : A very important element of our system as we want it to be a gaming system. Graphics cards are available from nVidia and ATI in the market. Both are good brands but nVidia comes out as the winner in performance as well as price. Since we are building a budget PC we won't consider very high end cards which cost as much as Rs. 55000!!!! The card we'll use is the GeForce 7300 GS. Its a great budget category card with 256 MB DDR RAM, TV-Out & DVI. It is DirectX 9.0c compliant and will play games like DOOM3, FEAR etc at high settings with good frame rates. Note: If you opt for Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic filtering and up the resolution more than 1024*768 the frame rates will drop but the game might still be playable. The card will also improve the performance of DVD-MPEG2 movies and WMV files. At Rs. 4800 not bad at all, what do you say?
OPTICAL DRIVE: No blah blah! here. The time requires that you go in for a DVD-+ writer capable of dual layer writing. So we take the Sony DRU priced at Rs. 3100, thats dirt cheap.
Cabinet/SMPS: Get a decent Zebronics or Kunhar cabinet with 400 watt power supply(this system will need it!!!)----Rs.1500-2200
I/O: Logitech Optical Mouse/Keyboard combo-----Rs. 800
Speakers(Yes I've included them too): Logitech M20/Artis 2.1----Rs.1000-1500
Monitor: Any 17' Flat CRT, I recommend Samsung 793S----Rs.5500
A ROUNDUP
ASUS A8V MX---------------------2600
AMD Athlon 64 3200+-------------8000
Seagate Barracuda 160 GB---------3800
Transcend DDR 512MB*2----------4800
XFX-GeForce 7300 GS------------4800
Sony DRU-+-RW------------------3100
Logitech Mouse/KB combo--------- 800
Speakers--------------------------1200
Monitor---------------------------5500
Total------------------------------Rs. 34600
Spend your money the way I've told you and trust me you're gonna thank me for a long time to come. And yes, do spend a little extra Rs.1700-2000 on that UPS, oh! so! necessary in India. You could also add a 56 Kbps fax modem for about Rs.400 if you wanna fax or surf through dial-up!!!??
A special mention to people who are thinking of investing in a new PC: The Intel platform is very good, but please steer clear of the Celeron line, it's an absolute waste of money and metal.
Any way, getting to the point: Here, I shall be giving you a configuration which will not only play all your latest games including DOOM3, Half-Life2,Quake4 etc but will prove to a be long companion for years to come unless you plan to turn it into a high end 3D content rendering unit (i.e. acutally rendering movies made on Maya or 3DS MAX) or use it for high end server purposes.
So here it is:
We shall start with the 3 basic and the most important components of your system viz. Motherboard------Processor/s------Hard Disk Drive/s
(1) ASUS A8V-MX : This is a budget category motherboard based on a VIA KM800 chipset. It supports all AMD Socket 939 processors. Has 4 USB 2.0 ports, support for DDR RAM upto 2GB, 1 AGP, 2 PCI and 1 PCI-E slot. Onboard 5.1 channel audio and 10/100 ethernet and support for RAID!!. Though it lacks other premium things like Firewire, Gigabit LAN etc but at a price of Rs. 2600 who minds all this.
(2)AMD Athlon 64 3200+(939) : One hell of a processor!!!!! is all I can say. This beast can beat the **** out of any PIV except the Extreme edition, where it performs at a par level. One of the best processors available in the market for hardcore gaming purposes unless you wanna spend considerably more on the Athlon 3500+ or even the Athlon FX. For a price of Rs. 8000 why would ypu even want to look at those PIV 3 Ghz+ editions priced upwards of 15K.
(3) Seagate Barracuda (160 GB)- Seagate is the leader when it comes to sheer performance and speed of drives unless you want to spend much more on the Western Digital drives which run at 10000rpm. For this rig we'll use 2 Barracudas 80GB each in a RAID 0 configuration, this will further increase the performance twice!! These barracudas will cost you around Rs. 3800.
RAM! RAM! RAM! Most people don't care and are not bothered about the amount of RAM they have in their systems. They think wow! a PIV at 2.8 ghz, 80 GB HDD, all's done. Even those who care won't take time to find out wheher their system has DDR, DDR2, PC3200 type, what is the frquency at which it runs, what are the latency levels. Well I won't bore you with it either but let me tell you that atleast 512 MB of RAM is needed to smoothly operate a PC/Laptop with Windows XP running on it. For a gaming system atleast 1 GB is necessary.
For our system we shall use 2 modules of Transcend 512 MB DDR RAM running at 400 Mhz(just to give our system that extra juice). This will cost you around Rs. 4800.
GRAPHICS CARD : A very important element of our system as we want it to be a gaming system. Graphics cards are available from nVidia and ATI in the market. Both are good brands but nVidia comes out as the winner in performance as well as price. Since we are building a budget PC we won't consider very high end cards which cost as much as Rs. 55000!!!! The card we'll use is the GeForce 7300 GS. Its a great budget category card with 256 MB DDR RAM, TV-Out & DVI. It is DirectX 9.0c compliant and will play games like DOOM3, FEAR etc at high settings with good frame rates. Note: If you opt for Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic filtering and up the resolution more than 1024*768 the frame rates will drop but the game might still be playable. The card will also improve the performance of DVD-MPEG2 movies and WMV files. At Rs. 4800 not bad at all, what do you say?
OPTICAL DRIVE: No blah blah! here. The time requires that you go in for a DVD-+ writer capable of dual layer writing. So we take the Sony DRU priced at Rs. 3100, thats dirt cheap.
Cabinet/SMPS: Get a decent Zebronics or Kunhar cabinet with 400 watt power supply(this system will need it!!!)----Rs.1500-2200
I/O: Logitech Optical Mouse/Keyboard combo-----Rs. 800
Speakers(Yes I've included them too): Logitech M20/Artis 2.1----Rs.1000-1500
Monitor: Any 17' Flat CRT, I recommend Samsung 793S----Rs.5500
A ROUNDUP
ASUS A8V MX---------------------2600
AMD Athlon 64 3200+-------------8000
Seagate Barracuda 160 GB---------3800
Transcend DDR 512MB*2----------4800
XFX-GeForce 7300 GS------------4800
Sony DRU-+-RW------------------3100
Logitech Mouse/KB combo--------- 800
Speakers--------------------------1200
Monitor---------------------------5500
Total------------------------------Rs. 34600
Spend your money the way I've told you and trust me you're gonna thank me for a long time to come. And yes, do spend a little extra Rs.1700-2000 on that UPS, oh! so! necessary in India. You could also add a 56 Kbps fax modem for about Rs.400 if you wanna fax or surf through dial-up!!!??
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