[Parts Check] Budget light gaming build under $600?
A family member wants a computer for his 14yo son. He specifically requested a desktop so he could keep an eye on his son in the common area of their house, or I would have suggested a laptop. It will be primarily used for school and light gaming (he doesn't see eye-to-eye with me and letting kids game, so it will primarily be older, bloodless, non-violent games, but that's another discussion).
He is comparing it against a Dell Inspiron One 20, an all-in-one 20" iMac clone with a Sandy Bridge Pentium G620T, 4GB DDR 1333, 1TB HDD, integrated Intel HD graphics, and a slot-loading DVD-RW drive; all for $669.
Let me know what you think of this build--I view it as an extreme budget/light gamer machine.
He already has a spare copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64 OEM, so that saves him a large chunk of change. I am aware I opted for a 500GB vs. 1 TB drive, but it will be more than spacious for the planned uses of the computer.
I think the processor in the proposed build is weak (as well as the PRI built) and will be a severe bottleneck. He would be better off with a more powerful CPU (at least a i3). You could sacrifice some of the memory since it could be added later and use the GPU that's built into the chip for additional savings.
I don't believe it will be that bad of a bottleneck, at least based on a review over at Tom's--it certainly speaks to Sandy Bridge's inherently strong design: »www.tomshardware.com/rev ··· 273.html
I think you need a different graphics card. I would spend more money to get a 6670 and take it out of the ram buget(reduce it to 4 if necessary) or the psu budget and go with the cheaper corsairs as suggested. I have just checked and there are some that are $50 after rebate.
Just point out to him that an all in one has no upgrade path. The machine you are building allows for graphics upgrades. As his son is 14 and his gaming tastes will change quickly this will likely be a big issue.
Another way to do this Kris is to give him a couple nice key building block pieces and go cheap on other stuff that he can work towards upgrading on his own in the future. Is he the type of kid who might enjoy learning how to do this kind of stuff? Might give him some motivation to get out and shovel some snow this winter or mow yards next summer.
Given that he owns Windows 7, I've incorporated everyone's changes and swapped the CPU, ram, GPU, and PSU for the following. Overall, I'm pretty damn proud of the price-point I got on this thing, given that it includes a monitor and peripherals.
Unfortunately the price on the RAM went up I think or the coupon code is no longer valid. With RAM on Newegg Ive found that you kind of have to act fast.
BTW, I just ordered the following from Newegg for $38.99:
That was a day or so ago when I made the order so its back up to ~$49.99 now. Generally I dont like RAM heat spreaders that extend so high but it was a really good price for what seems like good RAM so I went for it.
I think I might add this RAM to my Core i7 3930K / Asus P9X79 Deluxe system for a total of 32GB of system RAM (8x4GB).