Building a Budget Gaming PC

[ncasolo]

I'm looking to spend about $1000 on a new gaming PC. The PC will run 3x24" Viewsonic monitors in 5760x1080 resolution. The primary purpose is to play iRacing and I honestly doubt I will play many/any other games on the system. To be perfectly honest if I do play another game I could care less if the performance is crap as long as it maximizes performance on iRacing.

I've been told the 7970 cards perform better on iRacing than the GTX 670 cards due to how the 7970 does with the DX9 that I believe iRacing is still running off of. On the off chance a video card affects the recommended CPU I wanted to put that out there.

I've built 3 PC's in the past but they were all plug and play. I've never messed with overclocking but the current Intel chips seem like they were designed for it. With that in mind I'm tentatively leaning towards the i5 3570k. I do not know about cooling and if I do overclock I do not plan to be very aggressive with my overclocking.

On a related note should I determine my motherboard first?

All recommendations and help is welcome.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

While if you are going to stay with the Intel® Core™ i5-3570K you are going to want to focus on a board with the Z77 chipset to allow you to overclock it. Since you are looking at a $1000 budget with $220 processor and a $400+ video card you are going to have to keep the board towards the low end. I would look at the ASRock Z77 Extreme4 or I also like the Intel® Desktop DZ77SL-50K both would work well for you.

Matching the CPU, GPU and board up with a nice case like the Rosewill Challenger-U3 and a good PSU like the SeaSonic M2II 620w or the PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II 600w would give you a good bases for your system.

On the memory I would look at something like the G. Skill Ares DDR 1600 8GB kit (2 x 4GB) or the Corsair Vengeance DDR 3 1600 low profile kit (2 x 4GB). Just make sure which memory that you select that it is 1.5v.

 

[rockstar_7]

While if you are going to stay with the Intel® Core™ i5-3570K you are going to want to focus on a board with the Z77 chipset to allow you to overclock it. Since you are looking at a $1000 budget with $220 processor and a $400+ video card you are going to have to keep the board towards the low end. I would look at the ASRock Z77 Extreme4 or I also like the Intel® Desktop DZ77SL-50K both would work well for you.

Matching the CPU, GPU and board up with a nice case like the Rosewill Challenger-U3 and a good PSU like the SeaSonic M2II 620w or the PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II 600w would give you a good bases for your system.

On the memory I would look at something like the G. Skill Ares DDR 1600 8GB kit (2 x 4GB) or the Corsair Vengeance DDR 3 1600 low profile kit (2 x 4GB). Just make sure which memory that you select that it is 1.5v.

+1

 

[ncasolo]

That's all good feedback. Thanks. I have a couple questions about some of the specific parts you've listed, some hardware myths, and some more extensive thoughts that I've had from some of the research I've done thus far.

How much power should I get and should I stick to one of the big name power supply companies. I've actually never heard of SeaSonic. That leads me into my next question. There are a few specific brands for motherboards and RAM that have a brand reputation to me. From past experiences or from reviews in general I prefer some brands, but I'm not opposed to using brands I'm less familiar with. For motherboards ASRock seems to be a pretty common board with solid reviews, but I've never heard of them. ASus, MSI, Gigabyte sure, but ASRock is new to me. For memory I have G-Skill in my system, but is it as good as Crucial, Mushkin, or Corsair?

When I look at the big picture for this PC the savings has to come from somewhere. That's likely going to be in how much RAM (4GB or 8GB not 16+) hard drives (thinking 128gb SSD and nothing else I don't need the storage) power supply (not thinking 750W is going to be necessary) and optical drives ($15 will get the job done).

 

[wr6133]

Well if its just for iracing your planning overkill i looked up the specs mandated it'll run on an athlon X2/ Core 2 duo and a Nvidia GeForce 7800 and needs 2GB RAM.

Going from that about your only expensive requirement is a Graphics card that can drive 3 monitors at that resolution. Choose your GPU then build the rest of the machine around that as Iracing's CPU need will run on nearly anything you can currently buy.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been moved from the section CPU & Components to section Systems by Mousemonkey