Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC
The Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC was narrowed to five entries from the forum this quarter. Community members voted to pick their favorite from there.
Dendrotoxin Deluxe took a commanding lead in the polls, earning a 54-percent majority. The second-place finisher was back at 15 percent. It appears that the community has a bit of an issue with the definition of budget, as the Dendrotoxin Deluxe is $400 less than Zared619’s Q1-winning Red Storm.
Congratulations to Dendrotoxin Deluxe on being picked by the Tom's Hardware community this quarter!
AMD’s Vishera-based triple-module CPU, the FX-6300, once again powers this quarter’s AMD budget gaming rig. Due to the self-imposed price drop, the Dendrotoxin Deluxe lacks an aftermarket cooler, which some gamers will lament.
Asus’ M5A97 LE R2.0 pulls the Dendrotoxin Deluxe together. This standard ATX board has all the modern features, including USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s and a UEFI firmware.
A pair of 4GB DDR3-1600 modules from Team Group’s Vulcan Series fill two of the motherboard’s four DIMM slots.
An MSI Radeon HD 7950 with 3GB of GDDR5 brings the graphics muscle, and the full ATX board leaves a little room for future upgrades.
Due to the lowered system cost, there was no room in the budget for an SSD. Instead, the Dendrotoxin Deluxe sports a single 1TB, 7200RPM Western Digital Blue hard drive. Corsair's CX500 provides 500W of 80 PLUS Bronze-certified power.
The Dendrotoxin Deluxe is wrapped in the Zalman Z12 mid-tower chassis, which sports tool-less, side-loading drive trays, a bottom-mounted PSU and interior paint. Lite-On manufactures the DVD writer for this build.
The total price of Dendrotoxin Deluxe when originally configured was $585.58. The current prices of Dendrotoxin Deluxe can be found in the BestConfigs shopping tables.
