| prayformojo said: I've been a console gamer since the early 80's when I was just a little kid, so I don't know ANYTHING about PC gaming. I have a Steam account, with a few indie titles and free games, but that's all I can play because it's running on a store bought laptop that's a few years old. I am really interested in going PC this generation, but only have about $500.00 to spend on a rig. I wanna know if it's possible to build something that can game at a stable 1080p/60fps...and that can run AAA titles at least CLOSE to PS4 quality. Does anybody think it can be done? |
For US$ 500 you won't have a PS4 equivalent. Currently, no PC is equivalent to it because of its memory architecture and all the optimizations games will have specifically for it (games for PC are mostly bad optimizated). What I do now is having one console (PS3 and next PS4) and a gaming PC, since you can get a lot of multiplats there for good prices. Get some good parts and focus on a good motherboard that can endure some years (so you can upgrade other parts without worring about the MB).
I like MSI and Gigabyte MB, the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 is a good one (MSI has a model with the same chipset that I prefer). The CPU could be one of AMD newer ones, chose accordling to your budget. Put some 16GB of DDR3 RAM (Corsair), HD buy only from Western Digital (Black caviar, it's better than the Green and Blue models). The power source could be from Corsair too, the model will depend on the parts you choose. I mounted mine on a HAF-912 Plus from CoolerMaster, it is decently big and easy to mount. Certify to chose well the case and the MB, because changing one of them is a PITA since you have to remove everything and put it back again. The rest of the money, you put all on the GPU, I mean all, since that will be the part limiting your gaming performance. I can't recommend you AMD GPUs because I always buy NVidia (I don't like AMD video drivers, NVidia in general has better dev tools and a more well engineered video driver. Plus, I need CUDA). I have a GTX650ti and it runs everything pretty well, 1080p at 60fps, not at ultra, but always on high settings (Metro Last Light, AC4, Lost Planet 3, RE6, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, just to name a few). Once again, get a MSI graphics card, I highly recommend. And buy a X360 gamepad, it sucks to play some game genres on keyboard (fighting, platform, etc), it's cheap and works well (I use 2 wired X360 gamepads, because I didn't wanted the hassle of batteries or recharging battery packs and I sit at less than 2m from my PC when gaming. Besides that, the X360 wired controllers have a long, looooong cord).
