Recommended Posts

Hello guys, I was thinking of buying a new laptop but thought I'd just assemble a PC instead because I really want to experience proper gaming after using a laptop for the last ~6 years and the fact that it would offer better performance/price ratio.

I have a few questions first:

  • Does an i5 significantly improve gaming over an i3?
  • To what extent does the CPU affect gaming?
  • Does a quad-core affect gaming or will it in the near future? Quad-core vs dual-core.
  • Will an SSD do any good other than improve boot time and other things? I'd be mostly gaming.

---------------------------------

Okay, from the guide...

1. I'll be starting from scratch so I would want to know what Graphic/Video card, CPU, RAM, MB, HDD, Case, Cooling I should buy.

Since I am going "budget", I guess it's going to be an AMD system.

Is the Radeon HD 7850 1 GB good for today's games and hopefully for the next ~5 years?

Do you reckon I go for an i3/i5/something AMD?

I think I'll go for 8 (4 x 2) GB RAM

I don't know much about Motherboards. Anything that will last in terms of compatibility and not become ancient anytime soon.

I think >=700 GB would do me good. Will adding an SSD make sense if I just really want to game?

2. My budget is around ~$1,100. Prices in India are higher so I have to keep that in mind as well.

?I can stretch my budget a little bit if it's really necessary. ~INR 60,000

3. I'll be using my computer to play games in High. Games like AC:III, BF:3, Torchlight 2, Borderlands, etc.

I'll also be using it to watch MKV videos that do not work flawlessly on my current laptop. They are 720p videos. A little Photoshop, Picasa here and there. I listen to a lot of music so would adding a Sound Card do any good?

4. What is the standard gaming screen size? I will not be SLI/Crossfire-ing.

5. I'll be buying these components by the month of May or June.

6. As far as I know I will not be overclocking.

I don't need an optical drive but I guess a cheap DVD Burning/Reading thing won't hurt.

I don't care for 3D, Touch.

I am an audiophile.

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1135118-budget-gaming-pc-~1000~/
Share on other sites

hey...

really cant stress this enough... (don't feel like typing for ages)

get the best combo of motherboard and CPU...something like

Asus P9X79 Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard - ?179.99

Intel Core i7-3820 3.60GHz (Sandybridge-E) Socket LGA2011 Processor - ?224.99 inc VAT

GTX 660 - ?160

use rest for RAM. CASE, and what ever else

reason... this will last you the longest time...

1. BTW huge diff between i3, i5, i7

2. CPU is the bottleneck factor - hence ensure you have really gd and there is an upgrade path

3. Huge-ish... depending on who you ask, Processor has load of room*... ie even if not mult-threaded... app/game... if something comes up... background processes... then this will happen on the free cores.

4. yes... and no.... spend money on other things..., if you have left over then get one.

if your building a gaming machine... then AMD is out.

just get what i suggested above you wont be disappointed.

I am going to group questions together as you are asking the same question in variation.

Does an i5 significantly improve gaming over an i3?

To what extent does the CPU affect gaming?

Does a quad-core affect gaming or will it in the near future? Quad-core vs dual-core.

Some current games are capable of running 4 threads and thus a Quad-core / i5 would improve upon performance over a Dual-core / i3. With next generation you will see the threads rise with the likes of Crysis 3. (You also have cache / on board graphic differences - directed specially for the i3 vs i5 question)

Will an SSD do any good other than improve boot time and other things? I'd be mostly gamin

Yes you will see an improvement in boot time and some performance on other applications depending on access patterns and SSD choice.

  • Does an i5 significantly improve gaming over an i3?
  • To what extent does the CPU affect gaming?
  • Does a quad-core affect gaming or will it in the near future? Quad-core vs dual-core.
  • Will an SSD do any good other than improve boot time and other things? I'd be mostly gaming.
  • Is the Radeon HD 7850 1 GB good for today's games and hopefully for the next ~5 years?

1) Define significantly. Base your budget around the best GPU and CPU you can, but if it's for gaming, GPU comes first.

2) Some, although it depends heavily on the game. Again, base the build off the GPU.

3) Yes, again though, it depends on the game.

4) Boot and load times, but for those two things alone an SSD is a huge improvement.

5) Today is a mid-range card. It will run games on high at 1080, but probably not ultra? Five years from now? No one can say, it'll probably chug along at low, low resolutions in five years, assuming it still has driver support.

Is the Radeon HD 7850 1 GB good for today's games and hopefully for the next ~5 years?

You should aim for a GPU with 2GB and 5 years is asking alot maybe 3 years?

5. I'll be buying these components by the month of May or June.

Haswell Processors from Intel will be out around that time on a new socket LGA 1150 so you might want to wait until then.

I had to build a PC for a friend not too long ago, he was aiming for 900? more or less; so I'll tell you how thing ended up there in case that helps you choose some things, the prices I put are from the time it was built:

Proc: Core i5 3570K ~ 193?

Sink: Cooler Master Hyper 612S ~ 44?

MB: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H ~ 120?

Power supply: Aerocool Strike-X 600W (it was a cheapish 80 Plus Bronze) ~ 60?

RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 16GB (2x8GB) CL9 ~ 92?

HDD: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (because he already had a 1TB barracuda to put too) ~ 115?

Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 OC 2GB ~ 185?

Plus external case and a DVD recorder, everything ended up ~870? and I'd say that equipment should last for some years after all the motherboard allows for overclocking and SLI or Crossfire setup, and he can always push CPU and graphics card a little further. At that time a 660 or 660 Ti was quite out of range, don't know how it'd be now.

The last poster suggestions are good, personally would drop the ram the 8 gig

What resolution you plan on running you're games? That's the most important question you'll have to ask yourself because it will greatly affect the video card choice.

Remember also that new console are coming out this year, witch mean that the port of those games will run slow on a good hardware today, you can do a good 2 year with those video cards

A CPU can limit frame rate .. pair a GTX670/680 with an i3 and the i3 won't be able to keep up with what the GPU can produce.

You'd have to look at actual numbers. It's possible an i3 with a GTX680 could drop a game from 80 to 60 fps. 20 fps loss, but still above 60.

IMO there are bigger factors in processor choice, namely do you need a quad core, and will you overclock which will push you one way or another.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Google Meet brings Gemini note-taking to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers by Karthik Mudaliar Google's Gemini-powered "Take notes for me" feature inside Google Meet is now available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. The features work on Google Meet for web as well as on mobile, and Google says that subscribers can use it for meetings they host in many supported languages. As the name suggests, "Take notes for me" allows Gemini to listen to a meeting, generate a summary, identify action items, and save the notes as a Google Doc in the user’s Drive. After the meeting, the organizer receives an email recap with the summary and action items, while the notes can also be attached to the related Calendar event depending on the meeting setup and sharing settings. The feature isn't automatically turned on for everyone, though. Google says that all meeting participants are notified when note-taking is turned on, and users can start it from the pencil icon in Meet or enable it for future calls through Meet’s meeting records settings. For work or school accounts, administrators can also control whether the feature is available and may require explicit participant consent for note-taking, recording, or transcription features. The feature first launched back in 2024, when it was available just for selected Workspace users. Over the years, Google added refinements and more options, including the ability to enable it when scheduling meetings via Google Calendar. Google's support docs say that the feature currently supports English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, but only one language at a time. Meetings with multiple spoken languages are not currently supported, and Google recommends using the tool for meetings between 15 minutes and eight hours. The new feature makes Google Meet closer to its rivals that have AI tools already built in. Microsoft Teams has recently started offering Copilot and intelligent recap features that summarize meetings, surface highlights, and help with follow-ups, while Zoom’s AI Companion can also generate meeting summaries from desktop and mobile meetings.
    • GnuCash 5.16 by Razvan Serea GnuCash is a personal and small business finance application, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash allows you to track your income and expenses, reconcile bank accounts, monitor stock portfolios and manage your small business finances. It is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. GnuCash can keep track of your personal finances in as much detail as you prefer. If you are just starting out, use GnuCash to keep track of your checkbook. You may then decide to track cash as well as credit card purchases to better determine where your money is being spent. When you start investing, you can use GnuCash to help monitor your portfolio. Buying a vehicle or a home? GnuCash will help you plan the investment and track loan payments. If your financial records span the globe, GnuCash provides all the multiple-currency support you need. Between 5.15 and 5.16, the following bugfixes were accomplished: Bug 421610 - RFE: Include logical dates for View->Filter by "date range"The Select Range section of the Date tab of the register's Filter By dialog box is changed to provide relative, specific date, or days ago options for the start and end of the filter range. The Show number of days item label is changed to Show from days ago to better reflect what it does. Bug 436105 - esc key not working as expected in register: Enable the escape key to cancel a field edit. Bug 797384 - Gnucash doesn't handle commodity prices with big numerator/denominator properly. Bug 798004 - Next gen UI for stock transactions Bug 799314 - Add "enter now" option in scheduled transaction editor. tab to allow users to select the scheduled transactions to be included in a “Since Last Run…” window. If there are no instances of a selected transaction triggered by today’s date, the next instance is triggered. Bug 799751 - autocomplete crash Bug 799759 - Users can't Enable entries via Checkboxes on Scheduled Transactions PageAllow the Enabled box in the list of scheduled transactions to be operated instead of having to open the transaction editor dialog and change the Enabled checkbox. Also added use of the Name column as the secondary column sort for all the other columns. Bug 799762 - Poor handling of cases where hidden/placeholder accounts are used in the account register Bug 799766 - Double line preference not respected in search register Bug 799767 - POST /accounts in bindings/python/example_scripts/rest-api is broken Bug 799777 - `xaccSplitSetParent`: reparenting a committed split silently drops its KVP slots (online_id, cap-gains links) Other changes & improvements: Numeric values may now be selected to copy in the Accounts page. Add new Finance::Quote source Finnhub.io: Free API key (personal/non-professional use) available at https://finnhub.io. Set FINNHUB_API_KEY environment variable to API key to use this source. As of June 2026, free tier API limit is 60 API calls/minute. The Investment Lots report has new optional columns for Computed Annual Growth Rate. Python Bindings: Improved translation of primary object (Account, Transaction, Split, etc.) so that they can be treated as normal Python objects. This is accomplished with SWIG magic so no existing code is obsoleted. Python Bindings: Better conversion of GLists to Python lists. Python Bindings: Destroy the QofSession in the Python Session dtor to prevent leaving the database locked. [engine] Add first-class online_id accessors for Split and Account and make them available to Python bindings, removing the unused Transaction online_id property. Improve C++ implementation of QofBook. Correct the Doxygen doc for qof_instance_get/set_kvp. [gnc-log-replay.cpp] fix incorrect guid dump Add some Boost library requirements needed by libgnucash-guile to CMakeLists.txt so that missing feature will fail at configure time. Use Compile-time Regular Expressions instead of std::regex in gnc-filepath-utils.cpp and instead of boost::regex in the CSV importer, with the CTRE v3.11.1 header added to borrowed [gnc-filepath-utils.cpp] null check char* arguments Add ChartJS licenses. Removed AEX from list of commodities. euronext.com is now using JS based anti-webscraping. [report-core] always offer options summary in reports. This is useful to debug reports. The Add options summary option is removed because it's no longer optional. Remove remaining obsolete IMContext from sheet Fix blurry text in HiDPI offscreen-rendered widgets Add port field to database connection dialog: The convention of appending the port number after the host isn't obvious. When editing a split in the register treat the account as being changed only if it isn't the one selected before editing instead of if the user performed an edit Return immediately from qof_book_destroy if hash_of_collections is null. If qof_book_destroy is called on a QofBook* freshly created with qof_book_new (usually because it was used to create a session that now must be destroyed) it would try to empty the non-existent hash tables, crashing. Clean up Flathub metadata to solve warnings at flatpak build time. Be consistent in naming GncPluginPage and GncPluginPageRegister HTML: Remove unimplemented function declarations. [gnc-html.cpp] remove unused buggy string conversion functions Convert libgnc-html to C++ Apply -Wall -Werr -Wmissing-prototypes to C++ compilation on Windows and fix the resulting errors. New and Updated Translations: Arabic, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, German, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian-Bokmal, Spanish Download: GnuCash 5.16 | 176.0 MB (Open Source) Links: GnuCash Home page | Other Operating Systems | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • Microsoft finally launches WSL Containers in public preview by David Uzondu Microsoft has announced that WSL containers, a feature that allows developers to run Linux containers natively inside Windows without the need for Docker Desktop, is now available in public preview several weeks after Microsoft previewed it at Build 2026. To use the new container feature, you first have to install the latest pre-release version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux by running a quick update command in your terminal: wsl --update --pre-release After installing, you'd get access to the new Linux container CLI (wslc.exe) and the programmable API. Microsoft said that the CLI has a "familiar format" that matches the toolsets developers already use every day. If you know standard Docker commands, your muscle memory will translate directly to wslc.exe, which even features a built-in alias called container.exe. You can quickly run a full Ubuntu KDE desktop container by exposing ports, or pass your graphics card straight into a machine learning environment to run PyTorch workloads. Passing the --gpus all flag inside the run command instantly links your hardware. Image via Microsoft As for the API, developers can now embed Linux container operations directly inside native Windows applications without exposing the command line to users. The team integrated the API directly into MSBuild and CMake, so developers can define container steps directly in project files. Apart from bringing the CLI and API into public preview, Microsoft also said that it's working on a new default file system called virtiofs to speed up file transfer rates between Windows and Linux. Microsoft also introduced an experimental networking mode named consomme, which resolves compatibility issues with corporate VPNs by routing Linux network traffic straight through Windows. One thing to note about WSL containers is that they don't run in your standard WSL distributions; instead, every application and CLI session spawns its own lightweight Hyper-V utility VM in the background. This basically reduces the chances of one app snooping on the container of another app.
    • Google reportedly limited Meta's Gemini access over limited AI compute by Karthik Mudaliar Google is reportedly limiting Meta's use of its Gemini AI models after Meta tried buying more computing capacity than even Google could supply. According to the Financial Times, Google told Meta in March that it could not provide the full Gemini capacity that Meta had requested. This shortfall even disrupted and delayed some of Meta's internal projects. Due to this, Meta even told its employees internally to use AI tokens more efficiently. Meta wasn't the only one to get hit by this sudden refusal by Google; even other customers were affected. But Meta was hit harder because of its unusually high demand for Google's models. The move from Google makes it evident that companies all over are in limited supply of both infrastructure and compute. Alphabet said in April that Google Cloud revenue grew 63% year-over-year to $20 billion in the first quarter, helped by enterprise AI infrastructure and AI solutions. In pursuit of more compute, Meta had earlier signed a multi-billion-dollar AWS agreement as well as a large AMD GPU deal for AI data centers. But the crunch would be short-lived as both Meta and Google have also ramped up infrastructure investments heavily. Meta said in November that it was committing more than $600 billion in the U.S. by 2028 for AI technology, infrastructure, and workforce expansion. In the first quarter of this year, Meta also raised its expected capital expenditure for 2026 to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion, citing higher component pricing and additional data center costs for future capacity. However, this doesn't make the company immune to the current dependence on outside suppliers. Meta has also spent many years promoting Llama as an open-weight alternative to closed models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. But if the reported reliance on Google's Gemini models is severe enough for internal work to get impacted, then it looks like even frontier labs and Big Tech aren't fully self-sufficient. Source: Financial Times
    • I like to reminisce about the good old days, way back in autumn 2025 when building a gaming machine was fun and the drives were about $150 when you caught a deal. Yes duh, back in the day we had it gone. Then baby Skynet came along, hiding in AI datacenters demanding more processing power until it reached singularity. End of a not totally fictional story.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Reacting Well
      NovaEdgeX earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • Week One Done
      NovaEdgeX earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      BA the Curmudgeon earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Conversation Starter
      rosiecharles earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • First Post
      KMilenkoski1202 earned a badge
      First Post
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      533
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      269
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      150
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      98
    5. 5
      macoman
      66
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!