Best System for under 300

Personally, I'd recommend the AMD Athlon II X2 245 and the XFX GeForce 9600 GSO. They are both great components for the price.

Ok so you need:

Motherboard
Processor
RAM
power supply
case
optical drive
hard drive
accessories= fans, thermal paste

I dont see it happening. You might can build something for the internet but thats it. No way are you going to be able to game or do any kind of HD video. No way any graphics card will fit in that budget so you would be stuck with onboard video.
Gaming will consist of solitare and thats about it.

Buy a PS3 or XBox 360 or add at least a few hundred to your budget.


What happened to $680 budget? http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] k-properly

Or $420 budget? http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] g-computer

I'd recommend doing a AMD build instead.

AMD Athlon II X2 240 Regor 2.8GHz - $63

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819103688

MSI GF615M-P33 AM3 Motherboard - $52

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813130243

2GB Mushkin DDR3 RAM - $46

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820146736

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4670 512MB - $65

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814102820

PC Power and Cooling Silencer 370W 80 PLUS Certified Power Supply - $40

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817703018

Western Digital Caviar Blue 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA Hard Drive - $48

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136098

Total so far: $314 excluding shipping

As for the DVD-drive and computer case. I suggest looking on ebay, craigslist or go to your local computer dealer and search for any old 2nd hand stuff as their the things you have to worry the least about in terms of system performance.
You should be able to score an old case for around 5 dollars and probably pay around 5-10 for the dvd-drive.

So that puts you around $340, including shipping, roughly by my estimates.

Ultimately if you do have a hard limit of $300 then your best bet is to drop the 4670 card and stick with the onboard graphics until you save up for an external video card.
With the onboard you'll be fine for browsing and watching video, gaming will be ok if you only play old titles such as Warcraft 3, COD2, BF2 and WoW. But you won't be able to play anything that was released in the last 3 or so years, or if you get it running it will be on low settings at a small resolution.