Sunday, August 09, 2009

Revisiting the Desktop: Part 2 - 40K

The last post convered building a Gaming oriented desktop for 30K. This post bumps up that budget by another 10K. Lets see what that extra money brings to the table.

1. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 - Rs.8,800
2. Motherboard: Gigabyte Intel G31-ES3G - Rs.3,550
3. Video Card: Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 - Rs.8,800
4. Memory: 4 GB DDR2 - Rs.2,400
5. Hard Drive: 500 GB Sata - Rs.2,700
6. Case: Cooler Master Elite 355 - Rs.2,150
7. SMPS: Zebronics 500W Platinum - Rs.1,850
8. Optical Drive: Sony DVD-RW SATA - Rs.1,100
9. Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech Black - Rs.700
10. Monitor : Samsung 2033 SW - Rs.7,500
11. Speakers : Creative SBS 5.1 - Rs.2,800

Grand Total : Rs.42,350

As you can see, I have crossed the 40K limit by 2.3K. The alternatives were to buy a cheaper CPU that would surely bottleneck the ATI 4870 or buy a cheaper GPU. The best GPU in terms of performance below the 4870 is another ATI card the 4850. The price difference is about 2K but the performance differnece is about 40%. No Processor bottleneck is going to reduce that much of a gap. If you do wish to remain below the 40K mark, you can use the E7400 used in the previous build along with a good CPU cooler. BUt as it stands the combo of a E8400 and ATI 4870 is great.

This is a system that has parts that can all be overclocked very nicely. This made it important to buy a Motherboard capable of handling overclocks. A good feature of the Gigabyte board is a redundant bios just in case you scramble the original one.

There is a major upgrade to the chassis and SMPS. The CM elite 355 is spacious and has ample circulation. The ATI 4870 needs two 6-pin power connectors and so it's best to play safe and hence the dedicated 500W SMPS. The rest of the system remains the same as our previous build. Some people would be upset to not have a full HD monitor at the 40K mark. Another 2.5 should upgrade you to the Samsung 2233SW.

So how does this system perform ? Well the GPU is pretty damn awesome. The 4870 can run every game at max settings @1600x900 at 60+ fps provided you ditch the anti aliasing. With this setup you have pretty much bettered every gaming console out there. This is also the last price point where you would have option of buying an additional netbook for mobility. Both of these machines put together would total about 60K. That is perhaps the maximum amount of money you should spend on computers while in college. Next up is part 3 where I push the budget to 50K. AMD fanboys might want to read that one.

1 comment:

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