Need some help with my first budget gaming rig !!!

[riv21]

Hi guys after being referred to this site by a friend I found a heap load of great information here and im glad I joined. Been contemplating which cpu would be the best for my budget build gaming rig and after much debate here between Amd's quad 9 series and the intel's sandy bridge chips.

I decided to take a drive down to the micro center which to my surprise was running a nice sale today. My gaming budget build is between $500 and $600 max, so my choices were buy any amd cpu and receive $30 off any amd mobo or buy any intel k series chip and receive $50 off any intel based mobo along with whatever rebates are avail as well. My luck the sale just started today and will be on for the next 15 days.


Moving on I ended up buying the i-3 2100k for $99 also bought an ASrock P67 extreme4 Gen 3 mobo that was listed for $179.99 on sale for $149.99 with $50 off as well and picked up 2 sticks of 2 gb 1333 kingston ram for $22 for a total of 230.00 even for everything.


Still need power supply ? How many watts ? Corsair>>>>> or Cooler Master

Video card either radeon 6850 or 6870 which ever has the best deal

Hard drive between 250-500gb

Sony dvd drive burner 24x should be cheap....

Hyper master 212 heat sink fan probally won't need since im not oc yet !!

Also ordered my Rosewill Challenger case that should arrive tomorrow.


Any help would be greatly appreciated games I will be playing are Skyrim, Witcher 2 and Bf3 on med to high settings..

 

[CapC]

Your PSU will need to be 700W or better for those GPUs. I'd go with the 6870.

 

[riv21]

Thx CapC I thought the guy at micro center was kidding when he said I needed a PSU of no less than 800w Im guessing the mobo requires a high amount ? I know the hd 6850 needs 500w but I heard of some running them on Corsair430w with no probs but that seems risky don't want to mess anything up !!

 

[NeutralEnergy]

Good choice with the parts and good luck with that ASrock MoBo. Hopefully it doesn't turn out to be buggy as mine did. But they aren't bad boards over-all.

The power supply. If I was the one building this, I would definitely grab a Corsair power supply but the Cooler Master power supplies are much cheaper. I would say getting a 650w psu is good. Nah scratch the Corsair PSU. They are way too expensive for this build. Choose between a Cooler Master 650w or an Antec 650w. I recommend Antec. Never mind again. Lol, just go with an Antec. Cooler Master is slightly more expensive and isn't SLI certified (more on that later). Antec makes great PSUs.

Antec- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371044

If I were you I would just go for a GTX 560 ti.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125401
It has the best performance/dollar ratio out of any card out there. They are about $200-230 but I can tell you they really have amazing performance compared with the price/performance with any other card. All up to you. Otherwise, get the 6870. Also, about the gtx 560 ti. You could get one now and then get another one in the future and stick them in an SLI config. The performance with 2 of these things is about 20% more than the gtx 580 (which is the most powerful single-GPU card out there and is priced at $550). At that point, the power supply has the needed cables for that and the Motherboard has the perfect data transfer rate (x8/x8). I really recommend going down this road.

I would also go for a 250gb Hard Drive as the hard drive prices are still high due to the floods in Thailand. Can you believe that? A really good 1 TB hard drive used to be around $80. Now it's about $130-140. Anyways, here's a good hard drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236105
I've got one of these, and it works. Later on you might wanna get a 1 TB WD Caviar Black (that's what I'm doing). Those are really nice.

 

[NeutralEnergy]

Sorry, I didn't see your posts. Took awhile for me to type that up lol. Anyways, I'd like to simply say that an overclocked i7 2600k with 2 gtx 580's in sli pulls about 525w from the wall. There are recommended power supply wattages but that's just to make sure that even people with a low-end power supply will be able to take that card. Corsair is truly a great company, you can't go wrong with them. So is Antec and Seasonic. But a good Antec 650w will run any 2 cards (except maybe the gtx 590's which are 2 GPUs in one card) on the planet. For future upgradability I do recommend the Antec 750w PSU which is only about $10 more.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371051
It also has an $11 mail-in rebate.

Hope I've helped! Good Luck with the build!

 

[riv21]

Thank you so much for the great info I will deff look into the antec PSU for that price seems to be the cheapest around as far as the GTX560 it seems sweet but kind of out of my price range even the 6870 is a bit steep for my budget right now

Praying that the mobo doesn't act up on me too for the most part seems to have really good reviews I noticed the mobo is huge compared to others I have seen hopes it fits into my case !!!

 

[riv21]

I noticed that my mobo has no hdmi out or vga does that mean I can't hook up my build to my lcd tv ? Also why is the radeon 5770 almost the same price as the 6850 ? I really like the low watts it needs to fire up as compared to the 400w and 500w required by the 6850 and 6870.