
Case: Rosewill Line-M MicroATX Mini-Tower
I swapped my case choice out at the last minute because the mid-tower I picked originally was bigger than it needed to be for my microATX motherboard (and frankly, it clashed with my own sense of style).
I'd personally prefer the reserved lines of Fractal Design's Arc Mini or SilverStone's Temjin on my desk. But both options were a little too pricey. So, I decided that Rosewill's affordable Line-M would work well enough with my entry-level H81-based board.

Read Customer Reviews of Rosewill's Line-M Case
This simple little mini-tower is still a solid choice for gaming, though. First, it can house monstrous graphics cards up to 12.5”-long. There's even a fifth expansion slot, accommodating motherboards with two PCI Express x16 slots for CrossFire and SLI with space in between for ample airflow. Speaking of flow, Rosewill bundles a pair of 120 mm fans to push and pull air straight through the system. And two more can be mounted on the side panel, if you want.
Front-panel connectivity includes a pair of USB 2.0 ports, plus an additional pair of USB 3.0 ports and audio I/O. While space for water cooling and storage is limited, there are three external and three internal drive bays that are more than adequate for our modest Haswell-based gaming PC. We could even add an SSD, fan controller, and card reader, if we had the money.
Power Supply: Rosewill Capstone-450-M 450 W
I wanted to use the 500 W 80 PLUS Bronze-certified EVGA power supply from last quarter, which was still available at the same price. But when it sold out, I stepped back to the company's 80 PLUS-certified model instead. I'm sure it would have worked, but the truth is that I know very little about the PSU.
As an alternative, I went with Rosewill's Capstone 450 W unit, which I've purchased for personal projects on a couple of occasions. Priced similarly, it's a good fit in the small enclosure I picked.

Read Customer Reviews of Rosewill's Capstone-450-M Power Supply
This 80 PLUS Gold-certified PSU delivers between 87 and 92% efficiency between 20 and 100% loads. It is both CrossFire- and SLI-ready, sporting a single beefy 37 A, +12 V rail, and a pair of 6+2-pin auxiliary leads.
Rosewill backs this unit with an impressive seven-year warranty.
Optical Drive: Asus 24x DVD Burner DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS
While an optical drive may no longer be necessary in most builds, they're affordable, and I still think they're useful occasionally. Asus' 24x DVD burner is quite popular with Newegg's customers, so I'm going to give it a shot.

Read Customer Reviews of Asus' DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD Burner
- A More Affordable Gaming Alternative
- CPU And Cooler
- Motherboard And Memory
- Graphics Card And Hard Drive
- Case, Power Supply, And Optical Drive
- Assembling My Gaming Box
- Improving High-Res Gaming By Overclocking Graphics
- Test System Configuration And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Audio And Video
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: Compression
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Battlefield 3
- Results: F1 2012, Grid 2, and Arma 3
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim And Far Cry 3
- Power Consumption And Temperatures
- Summarizing The Performance Of Three Gaming Builds
- Did I Achieve My Goals, Or Is This A Failure?
When I first saw the parts list for this build, I expected myself to be in full agreement with you. I mean, can you imagine someone suggesting paring a GTX 680 with an I3? Ludicrous. They'd be laughed out the forums. However, looking at the benchmarks for the highest settings in 1920x1080 and 4800x900, I found there were 2 types of results
1. Those where the I3 and the GTX 770 build beat, or were within a few FPS of the I5 and R9-280X build:
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 4
Arma 3
Far Cry 3
2. Those where the I5 and R9-280X beat the I3 and GTX 770 build by a significant margin, but where all frame rates were well above 60FPS:
F1 2012
Grid 2
Skyrim
So, while overall performance percentage charts might put the I3 and GTX 770 behind the I5 and R9-280X behind in certain games, in a real-life setting, it seems that the I3 and GTX 770 is an equally good build. Which is really not what I was expecting.
Citations desperately needed. The XBOX 360 had 3 hyper-threaded CPUs and the PS3 had a 7-core cell CPU, but this didn't push PC games during this period beyond dual cores. Indeed, as late as January 2012, Tom's hardware was finding it impossible to recommend any Quad-core AMD processors over intel Dual-core processors and as late as December 2012, dual-core Intel pentiums were taking the low-end recommendations, as they were still better at gaming at this point than 4-core AMD processors. Indeed, it wasn't until February 2013 that they reversed this recommendation, so any assumption that consoles having more cores will result in P.C. games using more cores doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
As explained on page 1, the whole idea here with this build was to spend less on the platform, more-than covering the premiums on graphics, RAM, and ODD vs. our last purchase.
Sure we'd go i5 if priced the same. But the -3330 is $60 more @ $190, just like the -3470 used last quarter. The -3350P saves $10 off that. H61 doesn't save much, starting $5-10 below H81, and then we'd give up capitalizing on the i5's limited overclocking.
I was surprised to see i3 didn't yield any meaningful drop in minimum fps, at all! In fact, minimums often appeared GPU-bound, and the new GTX 770 rig won out, especially OC'ed. System bound at 70+ fps and up full-time in Skyrim or F1 2012 is hardly a loss, but an extra 3-8 fps consistently down low in ARMA III and Far Cry 3 could come in handy.
Well, not really. While I favored keeping Skyrim around this long for popularity, truth is it and F1 2012 (both out and both CPU/system limited) were now a bit long in the tooth and unable to challenge our cheapest rigs for a while now. I expected ARMA III to be more processor bound than it is.
Considering we do average in all resolutions, I think CPU-muscle is more than getting it's fair share of attention. What we lack I guess is a super-strenuous new CPU-bound game sequence able to exploit a weak CPU. Parts of Tomb Raider can do that actually, but not the in-game benchmark or our normal GPU-bound save-game. The TR test I use for CPUs is a bit tedious for SBM use. (EDIT: And actually some of the games we use like FC3 do exploit a WEAK CPU, it's just Core-i3 isn't weak.)
Hey we are always open to suggestions though, but for SBMs have to scale back to four easily comparable & repeatable games. Unfortunately this typically rules out MP testing.
SBMs we just can't pull off more than four games, ( I have tried.
Like I said, we are always open to benchmark suggestions. They'll need to be newer than the Witcher 2 though. =)
CPU: Intel Core i5-3350P 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor ($179.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-S1 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($34.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Blu 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($64.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda ES 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 770 2GB Video Card ($339.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case ($39.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer ($15.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $735.93
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-03-26 07:50 EDT-0400)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139018
the msi gfx card is $20 more than paul's selected zotac now.
and... non modular, cwt-built, 80+ bronze (not even silver) cx500 is a better choice than superflower-built rosewill capstone.. how?
The one thing these charts don't reveal, however, is the real impact of some of the productivity activities. Many of the single-threaded apps really don't take that long, so the overall impact of a lower performing CPU in that case is felt less by the user.
Contrast that to some of the multi-threaded apps. Try transcoding a 2 hour blu-ray movie or 7zipping a backup of a 20GB Skyrim Data folder. The difference in wait times between the i3 and i5 for the Skyrim Data folder zip would be over 13 minutes and for the blu-ray transcoding can take as much as an hour longer. These time differences have serious impact, and more cores/threads will definitely be appreciated in these situations.
So overall I agree with the results. The i3 is a great budget-build CPU, and this article shows you can stretch that all the way up to a GTX 770 - nice! But it's also easy to lose sight of the impacts some of the other activities can have on the time away from gaming.