Revisiting the Desktop: Part 1 - 30K

Almost 3 months ago I wrote a post on how much better you could spend your money on a desktop rather than a laptop. Well, if you that was good, wait till you see whats happened to the markets in these 3 months. I will be writing multiple posts on buying desktops at various price points. 30K, 40K, 50K, 60K and finally 70K. These desktops are meant for two things: Gaming and watching movies, coz that's pretty much what we do in IIIT :) Today's post is about building a gaming rig for 30k. Here is what we put in.

1. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @2.8GHz - Rs.5,675
2. Motherboard: Asus G31-PK5PL-CM - Rs.2,525
3. Graphics: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4670 - Rs.4,300
4. Memory: Kingston 2GB 800MHz DDR2 - Rs.1,850
5. Hard Drive: Western Digital 500GB - Rs.2,700
6. Case + SMPS: Zebronics 400W - Rs.1,500
7.Optical Drive: Sony DVD-RW - Rs.1,100
8.Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech USB KB+Optical Mouse - Rs.700
9.Monitor: Samsung 2033 SW - Rs.7,500
10.Speakers: Creative SBS 5.1 - Rs.2,800

Grand Total : Rs.30,600

In some ways building a PC like this is the hardest thing to do. Most components have to be entry level yet at the same time they shouldn't introduce bottlenecks anywhere into the setup. Lets have a look at some of the components chosen. The processor is a mid range dual core processor. At this price range there isn't much more any processor can get significantly get out of any of the other components. The motherboard is a very bare-bones platform. At this price range motherboards aren't expected to have great overclocking potential or anything. The Asus board has decent expansion options as well as good integrated 8 channel sound.

The choice of GPU is rather straightforward. The competition is blown away by the ATI 4670. The nearest competition from Nvidia costs a good 2K extra. An additional thing working in favor of the ATI 4670 is it's amazingly low power requirement. It doesn't need any external connectors! Just the PCIe interface power suffices. As the card doesn't need any connectors any decent power supply would do. Zebronics offers a decent combo of a cabinet and a 400W PSU.
Choosing a monitor was a tough tough call.There were lots of good deals from LG, Viewsonic and Acer, but in the end getting a 21.5" LCD with a max resolution of 1600x900 for 7.5K is a great deal. The Samsung 2033SW is a steal at such a price.
The rest of the components are very basic. A 500GB HDD from Seagate, 2Gigs of RAM from Kingston, a DVD writer from Sony, and a basic multimedia keyboard and optical mouse combo from Logitech. An entry level 5.1 speaker system from creative completes the list.

To give you in idea of how such a system performs, I benchmarked some games on my lab machine. This system runs a E7200@2.4 GHz, an Asus G31 board, a powercolor ATI 4670, 1 Gig of ram and a 160GB HDD. Surprisingly a 285W PSU seems to drive the system quite well. The monitor has a max resolution of 1440x900. Essentially it's very close to the machine we built with but with slightly lower specs on each component. This is system can handle any modern game at max settings @1440x900(Crysis included) at 45+ frames/second if you turn off Anti Aliasing, Volumetric effects and Specular occlusion. This things are hardly noticeable but can cut your FPS down to half!! Our 30K system is likely to perform 10~15% better due to a better CPU and loading times would be better due to some more RAM.

So there you have it. A 30K desktop that would perhaps smoke any laptop. If you had a budget of 50K, you could spend 30K on such a desktop and buy a netbook like Dell Inspiron Mini-10 for 18K for the sake of the Oh so hyped "Mobility". Coming up in a day or two is Part-2 where I increase the budget from 30K to 40K.