How to get a £2,000 gaming PC for £178

What difference does ten years making to a top of the range gaming machine? That's what TechRadar found themselves wondering the other day, and seeing as they're old enough to remember such machines, they set out to find out.

PC Gaming may have been facing stiff competition from the consoles, but a well-specified PC could show those boxes how it was really done. Unfortunately, gaming PCs weren't exactly cheap.

[y0haN]

If only gamers weren't the most impatient bar stewards on the planet this might actually work.

[toaster]

A lot of PC gamers still use old CRT's because you can get a hell of a lot better framerate than an LCD. But LCD's look better.

[SaiyanFury]

Excuse me? Unless you're talking about playing games at a lower resolution, how does playing on a CRT affect a game's framerate? I can play pretty much anything at 60FPS on my 22" monitor at 1680x1050. Unless you have one giant CRT, you're not going to get that high of a resolution.

[y0haN]

Saiyan he's talking about the polling rate of CRTs are typically higher.. most LCD 59 or 60 Hertz.. most CRT 85 or 100 Hertz. Plus I had only a medium-range CRT from 2003 and it was 1600x1200 100 Hz.

[TheIneffableBob]

But there are 120 Hz LCDs now.

[SaiyanFury]

@y0haN

Ah, fair enough, thanks for the input. Personally, I find my 60Hz LCD perfectly smooth enough, not to mention playing games in much higher resolutions with clear colours. I might be able to get a higher framerate with a CRT, but to get a 22" CRT would not only occupy a huge footprint that's not available on my computer desk, I prefer the screen of an LCD, especially with my monitor's 2ms response time. Thanks again. :)

[Bodster]

Thats quite interesting actually, I just paid £427 for my gaming rig which if i bought pre-built woulda cost of £1000 :)

Although my computer is a little more modern than this.

[iamgoatman]

What kind of spec is it? Recently built a £400 myself, be interesting to see how they compare.

[Bodster]

Got myself an Intel core 2 Duo E6300 CPU @ 2.8GHz (Will be overclocking this in a few months), 4Gb DDR2 RAM, ATi Radeon HD 5770 and i got myself Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit ;)

I also got a case, a motherboard and PSU aswell.

[Bodster]

Oh, and a 500Gb Samsung 7200 Hard Drive, lol forgot about that.

[SaiyanFury]

Good job, dude. Building it yourself is always the best way to go if you have the ability to do so. Pick your hardware, avoid the markups, and enjoy the savings.

[iamgoatman]

Pretty sweet, especially the 5770 part. Good deal there.

I went with a E8400 3Ghz (@3.6Ghz OC), XFX 750i mobo, 4GB OCZ 800Mhz RAM, Arctic Power 700W PSU, XFX 8800GT, 500GB Seagate Barracuda, Antec 300 case. Came to around £430 altogether, and that's with added cooling for the case and CPU.

Went with an SLI mobo even though it was a bit more expensive, so if I find another 8800GT for cheap (bloody hard to find), I can up the performance a fair bit.

You have the upper hand in terms of graphics hardware, but I have the edge with the CPU. Still, thats a damn good deal for a pre-built system.

[Bodster]

haha yeh, i would have loved to get a quad core but the money just isnt there atm so im stuck with what i have but my motherboard has the option to upgrade to a quad core later thankfully.

The reason i went with the ATi 5770, apart from the fact its awesome, is the low power consumption which is amazing for what it can do!

[TABSF]

Guys they are taking the piss, Just about get peggle lagging on that.

I could easily build a PC for less than £250 With High end GPU and a good Dual core

[killzowner]

nah. But for 500 odd youd have yourself a really good gaming rig that could destroy most games out there. However if you want a crysis killer youre still going to have to pay for a 2.8+ ghz dual core (as crysis runs best on dual cores, its not optimised at all, especially not for quad cores/i7's) and youll need an ATI 5970. Possibly a GTX 295 but that still doesnt produce the best performance in crysis, far from desirable framerates and resolutions. In addition a beastly motherboard and at least 4ghz of ddr3 ram. Factor all that in and youll find yourself paying 450 for a 3.0 ghz cpu, £450 for the graphics card and £80+ for the ram. The mobo will set you back another 100-150. Its still £1000 for a real crysis killer. PC gaming sucks for prices :(

[Calcio]

You've entirely missed the point of the article.
*applauds*

[jivah]

u fail leave crysis out of it..nobodys talkin bout a crysis killer..
n actually i spent about jus over 700 n i play crysis max enthusiast..u jus gotta kno how 2 shop..n how to overclock

[iamgoatman]

@Killzoner

£450 for a 3Ghz dual core? I picked up an Intel E8400 3Ghz for £120 a couple of months ago, and now have it overclocked to 3.6Ghz stable, but can push it to 3.8Ghz but it can get a little too hot, and that's with a mobo thats pretty unfriendly to overclock.

I'm running with a 8800GT I picked up for £70, with 4GB of OCZ 800Mhz RAM, and an XFX 750i SLI mobo. Can run Crysis on all high settings, 1680x1050 with 2xAA averaging 40FPS, and thats on a rig that cost around £400, with a decent PSU and case.

Buying a gaming PC just to run Crysis well is a total waste, as it will be overkill for any of todays games. I hate how the game is used as a benchmark for modern gaming PC's, and even though it's still one of the best looking games around, its poor optimization lets it down, and leads to the belief that you need a £1000 rig to run Crysis or any game with similar graphics, when in actual fact you don't at all.

[TABSF]

Intel Pentium Dual Core E6300 2.8GHz £59.46
Asus P5KPL-AM £31.45
4GB PC2-5300 667MHz DDR2 £54.92
Zotac GTS 250 512MB £81.87
Western Digital 500GB £35.69
Coolermaster Elite 330 Case with Coolermaster eXtreme Power 460W PSU £49.98
Gigabyte Silver & Black Multimedia Keyboard & Optical Mouse £6.99
Plexus Gold Plated HDMI To DVI £2.99

All cables included with postage Free £323.35

OK is not £250 and there is no monitor or operating system but with the DVI - HDMI cable you can hook to up to your HDTV
also if you have a computer/laptop with windows you could just use that HDD for you OS and the 500GB for every thing else.

All Components was found on EbuyerDotCom, prices was stated when researched on the 15/12/09 at 14:42 GMT

[Dmitry Orlov]

Ahhh... the memories...

[bozebo]

can piece together a great comp for £500
or for an insanely overpowered one, £1000 (like... 10 frames per second better)

[darkequitus]

Exactly.

I laugh when I see the hardware reviews, when they fancy graphs actually should you don't get that much more for a lot more money.

Mine

Self built HTPC
CPU Phenom II X4 945 95W @ 3.6Ghz OC ($149) upgraded from Phenom 9650
MB Gigabyte MA-78G-2SH ($?)
Ati Radeon HD 4870 OC waited on got cheap ($110)
Physx Asus Geforce 8400GS PCI-E x1 ($30)
Main HDD 160GB 10000 RPM ($75)
2nd HDD 500GB 7200 RPM ($50)
Corsair 4Gb 1066 (1280) DDR2 Ram (can't remember)
W7 Ultimate x86-64
Moitors: 2x Dell ST2310N : 1920x1080

Most of the component were bought in the UK so I have converted the price