The $500 Gaming Machine

Tomshardware has an interesting article up where they try to build a ” reasonable gaming system that will get you through today’s game titles without breaking the bank for around $500″.

The machine won´t of course allow you to play the newest games in high resolution but that’s not what one would expect from a computer that is cheaper than some top graphic cards models.

Lets take a look at the components they selected for the machine.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ : Good choice, the 3000+ (Venice core) is also known for good overclocking possibilities.

ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 : Cheap, that’s all there is to say about the ASRock motherboard.

Corsair Value Select 512 MB (2x 256 MB): 512 is still enough for most games, but 1024 makes a difference, also for normal work.

eVGA 256-A8-N340-TX Geforce 6600 256 MB: The 6600 allows to play most games in 1024*768, maybe with some options turned off and of course AA off.

Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JD 80 GB: Not much to say again, I prefer Samsung drives atm.

The PC is missing some components that they did not list. You definitely need a Tower for the PC,
a keyboard, a mouse and of course a monitor as well. Even if you decide to chose cheap components you will have to pay another 200$ at least for them.

That makes their 500$ PC a 700$ one.

In my opinion a good gaming pc will be around 800-1000$ at least.

Update: Computers have become more powerful in recent years. And while it depends largely on the games that you want to play, it is currently possible to get a solid gaming PC in the $500 to $700 Dollars span. You won’t be able to play latest state of the art games in ultra high resolution, but most games will work fine in a decent solution and with a decent frame rate.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday October 30, 2005 -
Tags:Games, Hardware