Building a Gaming Rig 101
 

We get asked a lot on this forum about what parts we recommend for certain builds. Many are gaming systems. My passion is to build Multi CPU servers and Gaming rigs so I am writing this to help those who are looking to build gaming rigs, staff are welcome to sticky it.

First thing I recommend is always get a high quality power supply, in my opinion that is the most important part in a gaming rig. I keep seeing part lists that included the best processors and video cards yet the power supply is the cheapest you can get. That makes no sense.
We have a great resource for power supplies in our general hardware forum however I will mention here the brands I recommend: Seasonic, Antec, Corsair, FSP and Enermax.

The second thing to consider is what kind of gamer you are, are you a power gamer (online player vs. player) who must win every time? If you are then you need top notch hardware.

If you are a gamer on a budget or a casual gamer, besides power supply buy the rest of the parts in this order of importance:

1. Video card, buy the best your budget can handle.
2. Memory, get the best memory you can get for the money, brands like Kingston, Crucial and Corsair (those companies actually run memtests before shipping) are your best bet for a gaming rig, the last thing you want is a system crash in the middle of battle.
3. Chipset, a fast chipset will help make sure game data installed on your hard drive will appear on your screen more efficiantly and will enable the video card to perform at it is best.
4. CPU, a dual core CPU is all you need, a base AMD Or Intel dual core will do the job nicely, so don't waste your money on the most expensive i this phenom that, it is all hype and has little to do with how well your machine will game.

EDIT: More and more newer games are recommending a quad core now.

Short post but I hope it helps those who are looking to build gaming rigs!

:)

Stickied.

I'll add that G.skill and A-Data seem to have very decent ram these days too.

As with all sticky threads, please do not use this thread for personal recommendations, open a new thread for that. This thread is only for discussing general recommendations.

EDIT: G.skill recommendation withdrawn due to quality issues and compatibility issues with P55 chipsets.

You are as always 100% correct, I did not list those 2 companies because I am not sure if they test their ram or not. I however now use A-DATA as our primary memory and I am super pleased with them.

I think it would be useful if you guys could put together a series of tiered builds based on budget.
These could be updated based on current technology or trends in reliability etc.

i.e. a $500 budget build, $800-$1000 mid level, and maybe a $1600-$2000 hardcore.

That way people would have an easy reference to start from rather than tons of new threads asking for recommendations.

We tried something like that a few years ago. It's a real chore to keep up to date because of the rate at which new hardware is introduced and old hardware is discontinued, and what given hardware is available at a certain time.. Most folks just go ahead and ask anyway in the BYOPC forum.

Instead of attempting the impossible, perhaps do an update once every three or four months?

That could be a new PMech feature...a recommended game build for a specific budget. I'm thinking the budgets could be $800, $1200 and $1800.

If anyone is interested in writing these and keeping them updated, I'll post the lists in this thread. PM me. :)

Make it a sticky and a new feature and I would be happy to do it every three months. I would imagine Dave D. needs to approve this?

I would use Newegg prices minus sales tax since that varies from state to state.

Sticky threads are no problem. If you were thinking about something we post on the main site, send an email to drisley@pcmech.com , he'll let you know.

Will do. :)

I would like to have more input from some of the rest of the mod team first.

This may kill the purpose of a forum by eliminating discussions, a lot of folks may just come to the site, not bother register and simply buy what we are recommending from newegg without discussing it. I for one want to see this forum far more active with more members posting!
There is a lot of good hardware, how do we choose what to recommend exactly per budget?
Just my thought.

At this time, I'd like to stay away from stickies with canned builds.

I know on other forums some members just make a thread that has their recommended builds for different price points every few months or so. It might give people a good idea of what a proper build looks like, and since it would be a regular thread without any endorsement it won't become the 'be all, end all' for building a pc.

Also, good advice Khalil.

My thoughts are that most people who want to build a gaming computer would look at the three builds and let it be a basis from which to tweak their own build. This means they would be asking questions in the forum regarding how to go about tweaking their own build. More eyes viewing more advertising is a good thing for business. With respect to content, which of course is what attracts people to a website, I think it would supplement this website and not take away from what already exists.

I don't think a sticky would be very effective A sticky would not differentiate a short article well enough from all the other threads. I think it would need its own new distinct category. Whether it is placed on the home page or in the forum would of course be up to David R.

Dris is trying to get away from PC building on the main site, so anything like this will have to be addressed strictly here in the forum. I would rather keep things the way they are, giving personalized build advice.

I am with you 100% George! 6 Years ago when I started coming here it was the thing that got me hooked on this forum, how willing you, Cricket and other members were at helping me in a very detailed way and no matter how many questions I had on the one thread you guys kept answering.
All other forums I posted on, my posts would get short incoherent answers, go unnoticed or directed to links for canned answers that most of the times did not answer my question.
No thank you!

Well stated. You can't beat personalized advice from experts.

Khalil, I know exactly what you mean by other websites that give you incomplete, sometimes terse or rude answers along with answers that are nothing but links to somewhere else that also have incomplete, inappropriate, inaccurate, immature or rude answers to questions.

I think it was worth discussing the idea.

Whenever I'm researching a build for someone, I almost always check each and every component I list. I do this from both a quality and price standpoint, plus I don't want to list components that are deactivated or backordered. This kind of information changes almost daily! What I recommend today will very likely not be what I recommend next week.

I think this kind of thing can easily be done here in the forum, and I think the personalization is good. As Force said, we tried the canned build price guide thing before and it ended up going nowhere.

BTW, I'm not trying to get away from PC building stuff on the main site. A lot of people find this site because of it. Its just that tech has expanded quite a bit since the old days and the numbers of people who actually build their machine is shrinking.

At this point in time, Id probably stray from the dual core idea for a gaming rig. Many of the newer games (BF3, MW3, etc) have quad core listed in their recommended hardware specs.

Quads are definately the way to go now, my original post is 18 months old. You can still work with a dual core but I highly recomend a quad for a gaming rig at this point, specially since you can get a solid Quad for $120

Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: October 2011 : Best Gaming CPUs For The Money, October Updates

Best Gaming CPU for ~$80:
Athlon II X3 455

Best Gaming CPU for $100: Tie
Phenom II X4 840
Pentium G860 (dual core)

Best Gaming CPU for $120: None
Honorable Mention:
Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition

Best Gaming CPU for $125:
Core i3-2100 (dual core)

Best Gaming CPU for $190:
Core i5-2400 (quad core)

Best Gaming CPU for $210: None
Honorable Mention:
Core i5-760 (quad core)

Best Gaming CPU for $220:
Core i5-2500K

Best Gaming CPU for $315: (or for any price)
Core i7-2600K

The $100 spread between the Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K is only recommended if you want to brag, because you're probably not going to notice any appreciable frame rate difference. The Core i7's strength is only really exploited in heavily-threaded workstation applications, rather than games.

Plus the emotional satisfaction of being able to clock a CPU up to 5GHz. :)