Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC
We narrowed the field to five builds for the Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC this quarter.
Zared619’s Instrument of Winning took the lead in the polls at 33 percent of the vote, narrowly beating out Sangeet’s beast for $1000 bucks by three percentage points. Both machines featured many of the same parts, and Sangeet’s build had more power, an SSD and a premium version of the same motherboard. Zared619’s choice to go with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 rather than Sangeet’s AMD Radeon HD 7970 appears to be the deciding factor.
Congratulations to forum member Zared619 for having his recommended build picked by the Tom's Hardware community this quarter!
Unlike the Q1 system, which cost just a measly $500, this year’s Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC actually maximizes out the $1000 budget. At the heart of this rig is the quad-core Haswell-based Core i5-4670K, leaving a fair amount of headroom for overclocking.
Holding everything together is the Z87 Pro3 ATX motherboard from ASRock, sporting 6Gb/s SATA connections, USB 3.0 ports, 7.1-channel audio and gigabit Ethernet.
The component that trumped Sangeet’s better motherboard, higher-capacity PSU, SSD, and nicer case was Nvidia's GeForce GTX 770. His 2GB model from Gigabyte ate up 40 percent of Zared619’s total budget. Was it worth it? Apparently.
This rig packs eight gigabytes of overclocked DDR3-2133 from G.Skill’s Ripjaws X Series, and a terabyte of storage thanks to the Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive.
An XFX 650W 80 PLUS Bronze-certified power supply rounds out this build’s internal component list.
Like last quarter’s winning build by Lunyone, the entire configuration is packed into a Rosewill Redbone case. The obligatory optical drive is a DVD writer from LG.
At the time of submission, Zared619’s Instrument of Winning had a total cost of $996.07. The current prices of Zared619’s Instrument of Winning can be found in the BestConfigs shopping tables.
