$300 Hardcore Budget Gaming PC

Well for HARDCORE gaming... no.... Wait, earn some cash, then get something better. But thats just me.

Rofl I almost fell outa my chair when i read "hardcore" gaming rig for $300 haha

It will work and play most games out there on decent settings, but it is by no means hardcore by today's standards.

Definitely low budget but still a nice build. Tom's Hardware has published numerous articles about gaming, cpu's, and video cards indicating that it isn't always necessary to have the latest, greatest, most expensive components and very serious overclocking to have a decent gaming experience. It just depends on specific games. Some play quite well with a dual core processor.

I usually recycle components if possible. I've been using the same power supply, cpu heatsink, memory, hard drives, optical drive, card reader, and case fans for over three years.

I play online 95% of the time and as you probably know, crysis, far cry 2 and just about every hardware intensive pc game doesn't have a stable online gaming community. The title was meant to be a joke and it worked if you almost fell out of your chair   and I do have a better gaming pc, I just wanted to see how good a budget one can be and what it can do so I build this one.

Seeing that this $300 pc can get high stable fps at a good resolution and play 90% of the most popular online games without lagging makes this build really interesting to myself even though I do have another quad core gaming pc that was a $1200 and the only difference I really notice is more fps that my eyes can't even notice.

One last thing. Why earn some cash and buy a $2000 gaming pc and see it drop to $1500 a few months later and only go down in value afterwards when you can save $1500 with a budget pc and use the rest to buy games or invest it elsewhere? Its hilarious being on top score in a game with a $300 gaming pc knowing just about everyone else is running $500+ systems. The only reason I would now build a $1200+ gaming pc is if there is some next, highly hardware intensive popular online gaming that requires it other than that I see no reason to pay that much just to play Crysis when all I see are people throwing chickens and playing with the sandbox editor than the actual game. Crysis does have a good single player though.

So, are any of you likely do it this for a budget build (find used bargains)? If I had a $500 budget I could have gone SLI 9800 GTX, bigger HDD and aftermarket HSF,

I didnt know how to build a PC yet. Did do some "reverse engineering" I could have upgraded from there, but went kinda wreckless on my part... Broke the PCI slot..

But hey that was my first time....

hey man my name is hwan do you think you could help me build a computer like yours i just want to play empires total war on full setting. My budget is like 300-400 just for the hardware on the pc.

Did u get ur pc or i will help u ,I am also a gamer like u,My name is Aneesh

hi guys im glad i found this fourm im in need of a upgrade bad i got an old dell demetion 2400 with a 25mb video card i can run fable 1 halo1 but i lag a bit and i want to be able to play tha old games not ones i played 100times already i was on craigs list serching m ass off found a couple of nice pcs but some info was left out like ddr2 or 1 people didnt know tha video card if i knew the video card id just youtube it lol
i found a dell oplex 520 500gb harddrive 2gbddr2 ram but i was looking for tha video cards for it and come to find out its a piece of *** so im thinking at this point to get a barebones pc from tiger for 350$ tha built in graphix can run any game out today its fast quad core 4gb ddr2 its jsut tha tower to i would just build my own but i dont want to fk it up if anyone lives in belleview fla or close can help me get one running for 300 bucks thats really good cuz im a huge gamer utorrents are my friend lol i will pay u like 50 bucks to help me get tha *** i need and put it togather maby even let me watch so i can learn anyways if anyone is up to it
hit me up jigsaw128@hotmail.com im looking to get one as soon as possible so anytime is good i got tha money saved
its 3/23/2010 within like maby a mounth no help im going for tha barebones i cant w8 lol i need it my ps3 died on me and xbox360 suks balls with tha red light of death anyways thx for readin

Been sifting through tiger direct lately and came up with this build. all new parts, $370. could have been cheaper, but I'm kind of new at building computers. enough things could go wrong without faulty parts.

ECS NFORCE6M-A2 Motherboard + AMD Athlon II X2 215 CPU 2.7ghz $98
Corsair Value Select PC10600 RAM, 4g, DDR3 $110
Western Digital Caviar Blue Hard Drive - 320GB, SATA-300 $45
Cooler Master RC-310-BKR2 Elite 310 Mid-Tower Case w/420w psu $55
Sparkle SXG210512D2-NM GeForce 210 Video Card - 512MB DDR2 $40
Sony AD-7240S-0B Optiarc DVDRW Drive $22
TOTAL: $370

at the risk of thread jacking, any feedback would be nice =p

you could save a lot more money on computer parts, i buy my parts at www.123save.webs.com great selection on high end partsat low prices , the bad part is that thier sales last 8 to 12 hours
i got me an
Radeon HD 5850 for $129 at thier 8hour special this card retails for $350 dollars
i also got a power supply 1200 watts 80plus efficiency for $59 dollars
but you have to check often because thier salwes last only 8 to 12 hours

give it a try its www.123save.webs.com

In my honest opinion I'd say the RAM you list is too costly for a budget setup. I'd go for $40-$50 4 gig RAM sticks. That $70 you save would go to a better video card, as the GF 210 is well, kinda useless unless you play 5-6 year old games.   Not sure about prices when you made that post, but now you can get a good ATI or GF 4 series card for $100, if you save money on RAM, since the video card would affect the performance more in most cases than the difference between $40 and $100 RAM of same quantity.

You will find the e7300 massively OCable . Mine runs at 3.6 GHz without extra voltage .
And if you added a card like the 6870 , 6950 , or 560 ti it will play all current games on high settings even on a 1080p monitor

This reminds me of the time i turned an emachines into a gaming pc