The first 6 pages or so are the instructions and parts. Decent benchmark scores.
How to Build a Kick-ass $800 Gaming PC
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/how_build_a_kickass_800_gaming_pc?page=0%2C5
We put this $800 PC up against our standard zero point machine to see how it matches up against a rig that costs twice as much. It’s not hard to guess that the zero point system with a Core 2 Quad and a Velociraptor would beat our budget rig on every test possible, but the $800 wonder did surprisingly well in some of the tests. Premiere Pro tests showed a two minute difference but in Photoshop we only experienced a 4 second difference while Photodex ProShow Producer showed a 41 second difference. MainConcept Reference hit our budget PC hard, though, and further shows that MainConcept is optimized for four cores.
We went into our gaming benchmark with low expectations from our budget card, the Radeon HD 4850. Obviously, it is no match against the dual GeForce 8800 GTX setup in the Zero Point system. With settings cranked up to the max, our card was barely able to spit out 16 FPS in Crysis. While playing Crysis at the highest settings possible and a resolution of 1920x1200 simply isn’t an option, turning down the graphic settings to medium resulted in 43 FPS made the game much more playable. Unreal Tournament 3 managed to give us a stellar 78 FPS. If you’re running at typical 22-inch LCD resolutions, this machine should kick ass.
So what can we say about this all-around budget PC? We can clearly see the difference between a budget system and performance system. However, we can also see that our budget PC is able to run every game and test we throw at it with very respectable benchmark scores. And if you spend a little extra over the $800 budget, performance can easily be increased – upgrades to video card, processor, or memory – but we are very pleased with the setup and performance we have here.
| Zero Point | $800 PC | |
|---|---|---|
| Premiere Pro CS3 | 1,260 sec | 1,380 sec |
| Photoshop CS3 | 150 sec | 154 sec |
| ProShow | 1,415 sec | 1,456 sec |
| MainConcept | 1,872 sec | 2,716 sec |
| Crysis | 26 fps | 16 fps |
| Unreal Tournament 3 | 83 fps | 78 fps |
Parts List:
Antec Three Hundred ($60, www.antec.com)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz Wolfdale ($165, www.intel.com)
Visiontek Radeon HD 4850 ($185, www.visiontek.com)
Seagate 500GB Barracuda ($65, www.seagate.com)
MSI P45 Neo3 ($110, www.msi.com.tw)
Samsung SH-S223F DVD Burner ($25, www.samsung.com)
Antec NeoPower 500 ($90, www.antec.com)
Corsair 2x1GB DDR2 800 ($40, www.corsair.com)
