Gaming PC for a moderate price

[amarante]

Hello,

I was looking to a buy a new gaming PC because my current one is about 7 years old (YES, I KNOW, THAT OLD! GOOD THING IT ISN'T MADE OF CLAY!). So, I was thinking of buying this prebuilt PC and it's about 600 US dollars or 427 Euros:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 850 4-core 3,3GHz 45nm 2MB-cashe 95W
Memory: 4GB DDR3 1333MHz
GPU: Radeon HD6850 1GB or GeForce GTX460 1GB
Motherboard: not much information but it's with an AM3 socket
Power supply: 500-550W

I almost forgot to mention that my monitor resolution only goes up to 1366x768 so I think the processor should perform well.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Motopsychojdn]

Thats not a bad build for the money,
the psu and ram will be cheap generic stuff, you could build it possibly a touch cheaper yourself but I'd say go for that given that you don't seem a hardcore gamer type
Moto

 

[amarante]

Thanks for the reply. I'm just wondering which GPU to go for?

 

[Motopsychojdn]

I know the 460 is around ATI's 5770 area, not sure how the 68xx series are though, maybe google 6850 vs 460 for benchmars ans reviews?
I'm away from Pc at the moment so cant search :-(
Moto

 

[darkling]

The equivalent card for gtx 460 is 6850. If you go for AMD processor get the 6850 but if you don't change your monitor even that card is an overkill. Maybe you could go for an 6670 much cheaper will work well for your resolution. If you plan on changing monitor in the long run get something between these cards : 6850/460 or 6870/6950

 

[joemama069]

hwcompare.com will tell you how the 6850 and 460 match up

 

[timmybazza]

hwcompare.com just compares bandwidth so it wont really give you too much of an indication. Read reviews on the 6850, im pretty sure its around the same performance of the 460, if not better, as it has less power consumption

 

[jessterman21]

Grab an HD 6850, you won't regret it b/c it will be perfect for this years most demanding games, and will give you playability for a few years.

Here's a good one if you don't plan on overclocking it - you won't need to anyway.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161384

 

[joebakb]

I have both the 1gig 460 and the 6850 and the are pretty much equivalent and both are great mid-range performance cards. I'd get whichever your board supports for SLI/Crossfire just in case you might want to go that route in the future (unless the board that you're getting only has one PCI-E slot).

Personally, I prefer the 6850 just for the easy overclocking and monitoring through CCC Overdrive and as far as I'm aware, you have to download a separate tool for NVidia cards.

 

[amarante]

Hello,

Thanks for all the replies. I just have one final question. I'm about to order a PC with the MSI VGA 1GB GDDR5 PCIE16 HD6850/256B R6850-PM2D1GD5/OC video card. When I read the details for the GPU, I noticed that the VGA output wasn't listed but in the name it does say "VGA" (maybe it's something else). Anyways, I have a monitor with a VGA input. So the question is, will the picture quality be reduced if I use a DVI->VGA converter or a small adapter?

Thanks in advance!

 

[jessterman21]

Hello,

Thanks for all the replies. I just have one final question. I'm about to order a PC with the MSI VGA 1GB GDDR5 PCIE16 HD6850/256B R6850-PM2D1GD5/OC video card. When I read the details for the GPU, I noticed that the VGA output wasn't listed but in the name it does say "VGA" (maybe it's something else). Anyways, I have a monitor with a VGA input. So the question is, will the picture quality be reduced if I use a DVI->VGA converter or a small adapter?

Thanks in advance!

No - it will appear the same way on your VGA monitor, regardless.