$300 Hardcore Budget Gaming PC

SYSTEM WAS BUILT ON April 10, 2009

Yes, I built a complete running $300 dollar gaming pc that runs the entire list of Valve's games far cry 2 on high settings @ 1680 X 1050 and this is $300 after tax and shipping.

What inspired me to build this pc was all these budget PC articles and guides. I felt like something was very wrong about the the way they approached the whole budget concept.

When you are on a strict budget you don't buy a new car, you get a good running used one if you can find one.

I took that concept and wanted to see what would happen if I built a complete gaming pc with that theory in mind. It works in all of the budget race car articles I see so why wouldn't it work with a gaming pc?

Here's what I found for $300




The CPU, Motherboard, HDD, Case and GPU were bought used off craigslist (GPU was new but open box).
The Memory and PSU were free shipping deals from Chief Value and Newegg

and

The Free windows XP was downloaded through MSDN AA

The funny thing is, I could have went with 2GB of ram(sells for $5-10 used) a 8800 series card and slightly slower CPU and would have saved around $70 which have made this a $230 gaming pc but the deals on the 9800 GTX and E7300 were too good to pass up.


I wrote a fairly lengthy article on the build my forum if any of you want to read up on it further.


So my question is:

After seeing what I was able to find for used and put together are you likely to do something similar for you next pc build if you were on a strict budget?


If you want to know more about the build go ahead and check it out HERE:

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.

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,

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.