System Builder Marathon: Sub-$2000 PC
Table of contents
- 1. System Builder Marathon: Mid Range System
- 2. CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU
- 3. Motherboard: MSI P7N SLI Platinum
- 4. Cooler, Memory, Hard Drive and Case
- 5. Power Supply, Optical Drive, and Video Card!
- 6. Test System & Benchmarks
- 7. Synthetic Benchmarks
- 8. Application Benchmarks – Media Encoding
- 9. Application Benchmarks – 2d and 3d Rendering
- 10. Application Benchmarks – Productivity
- 11. Game Benchmarks – First Person Shooters
- 12. Game Benchmarks – first person shooters, cont’d
- 13. Game Benchmarks – Real-Time Strategy
- 14. Conclusion
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
In our last system builder marathon, we tried to use up all of the $2,000 in our mid-range PC budget. Because of our readers’ feedback, though, this time around we have done things a little differently. We’re paying less attention to our budgetary limit and concentrating only on bang-for-the-buck components that should provide the biggest dividends.
As a result, our new mid-range system is under $1,400, but holds up well—and in some cases even beats—the $2,000 system we assembled in the previous system builder marathon. (Of course, prices have come down a lot since then.) In any case, here are the components we’ve selected for the new mid-range system, and their current prices:
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- graphic ,
- performance
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Although I fully appreciate the "bang for your buck" approach to this sub $2K build, if you're going to come under budget by over $600 then surely there's room for improving things a little bit more? I thought this was "the best you can get for $2,000" not necessarily the "best performance per dollar for $2,000"
Certainly if I had budgeted $2,000 and came under by that much I'd certainly up a few things simply because I had the room - 80GB OS drive (Raptor?) and upping the graphics to paired GTXs maybe? Even then you're probably still $300 under...so throw in a dedicated sound card.
I agree with the other comment to an extent. However i do thing that this is a very solid build, that if you used the $2000 budget would be phenomenal in performance terms. Perhaps factor in an extra water pump and graphics blocks to get the liquid cooling to the GPUs too? Perhaps even upgrade the graphics cards to HD4870s or similar.
Dedicated soundcard is also a must in my opinion. Apart from those things, good choice!
Apologies if I gave the impression I didn't find this to be a solid build. I was simply voicing an opinion that there's money left over in the $2,000 budget so a little squeezing of extras could've been done. Certainly I always use a dedicated OS drive and at 25GPB for 80GB Seagate Barracuda you can't argue!