Comments on: The UPDATED Ultimate $600 Gaming Machine

By: mckirsch

mckirsch — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:02:04 +0000

adding a sound card takes the sound processing off of the main processor…

By: Madoushi

Madoushi — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:03:14 +0000

This is pretty similar to my rig, but I only have a 500GB HD, I only have an Athlon II X2 2.94, I have no sound card and a Radeon HD 4250 vidcard.

Most games I play run fine, but some real resource hogs like Empire: Total War I can only run on minimum settings, and even Star Trek Online I can only run at medium, whith most of the lighting effects off.

I planned to upgrade to a Phenom X3 or X4 anyway, but as my Asus M4 motherboard was optimized with ATI cards in mind, if you were to suggest an ATI card quivalent to the nVidia 9800GT, what would it be?

Would buying an actual sound card increase my performance?

By: damen

damen — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:57:37 +0000

great post, no need to spen a fortune to get a quality PC.

By: Marvin

Marvin — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:29:09 +0000

I sell pc’s for a living, and it rarely happens that my customers expect more from a gaming pc than this setup requires, so I think this is a great article. I do have some customers though, that come back every 18-24 months and spend $1500+ on a new machine. Usually systems like these include multiple video cards, 2 or more harddrives (usually either a WD Raptor or a RAID setup for the OS), water cooling for a better overclock, etc. That’s what I would call a high end gaming machine.

In my book this isn’t a high end gaming machine. And there’s no way this setup will run the latest games with everything on high (including high FSAA & AF, HDR, etc) on a decent resolution (1680×1050 or higher).

Nonetheless, for I guess more than 90% of the gamers out there it’s way more efficient to buy a $600 machine every 2 or 3 years instead of buying a $1500 machine every 4 years.

By: hallo

hallo — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:14:52 +0000

ez : although newegg.com does not ship to canada, they have released a canadian site, newegg.ca , that does.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:29:28 +0000

EZ – try ncix.com they’re a good Canadian online retailer.. ncixus.com for those of us in the US.

By: Dagfari

Dagfari — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:55:04 +0000

re: ez

http://www.newegg.ca

By: reply to ez

reply to ez — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:32:17 +0000

ez, see newegg.ca

By: ez

ez — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:08:03 +0000

Unfortunately, newegg doesn’t ship to Canada.

By: BraveLuxan

BraveLuxan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:22:24 +0000

I always scoff when I see these 3k+ “ultimate gaming” rigs. My personal price point is 500$ every 3-4 years.

Great articles like this + newegg = WIN!