Thursday, July 24, 2008

Building a Gaming Rig in 60K

I can't play crysis better then medium@1200x800 on my laptop This state of affairs is not limited to crysis and the situation is simply unacceptable. I have decided to purchase a new system. This time I won't go for a laptop. I plan to build a monster desktop. I have 60K in savings and that will be my budget for the new machine. I want to build this desktop without having to sell my laptop. My laptop, having served me very well for almost 2 and a half years now, will retreat onto my dads desk where he will use it for his word-processing needs.

Processor: The 3 contenders
1. Core 2 quad 6600
2. Core 2 quad 9300
3. Core 2 quad 9450

For those wondering where AMD is, there is a simple answer: AMD is totally absent in this segment. Their best processor is in the phenom range and doesn't even come close to the intel ones listed here. After some head-breaking I have decided to go for the 9450. It's damn expensive. But overclocked it comes into the performance range of an stock core 2 extreme processor. Not bad. I don't want my processor to be a bottleneck.

Pehla Jhatka : Intel Core 2 Quad q9450 @ Rs.15,500

Motherboard
1. Intel DP35DP
This was rather straightforward. I want to buy a single card solution. SLI is a pain. You have to buy a higher power supply that will cost a little fortune on it's own. Plus not all games leverage SLI.

Doosra Jhatka : Intel DP35DP @ 5,750

Grafix Card: When I sat down to research the situation on gfx cards I was shocked by how abnormally high these cards are in India. Check this out.

XfX 9800gx2 Price in India 33K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 14K
Xfx gtx280 Price in India 45K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 18.5K

Generally other components like processors and motherboards have a variation of 15~20% from their American prices. But this is fucking insane. The gtx280 and 9800gx2 cost almost 2.5 times their original price. Whats more they come with lifetime warranties in the US as compared to the 3 year warranties here. I will wait for somebody to get me a card from the US. I'm not going to waste money buying them here. As for the card I am going to buy a gtx280. 9800gx2 has outperformed it some games, but not all games are optimized for multiple GPU's and there is also the advantage of higher texture memory and phyXis.

Teesra Jhatka: XfX gtx280 xxx edition @ 19K

Other stuff:

RAM : 2x2GB @ 4K
HDD : 2x250 WD @ 4.6 K

Stuff I already Have:
Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, Wireless card, TV tuner, DVD writer.

Lets see where I am in terms of money

15,500 + 5,750 + 19,000 + 4,000 + 4,600 = 48,850

Which leaves me with roughly 12K to buy a cabinet, SMPS and a monitor. I am terribly overshooting!!!

Assuming a basic cabinet costs 2K and a basic 600W power supply would cost 3K, I am now left with 7 K for a monitor.

I am looking cutting costs possibly on the processor. I don't want to fiddle with the rest of the stuff. The next post when I figure out what to cut out!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahhh u reminded me of blogging ...

gud luck with the config ...

btw we got a gtx280 yesterday :D .. shiben will report gaming experience on the HDTV with GTX280 soon :)....

Unknown said...

hey nice post.
try 2 squeeze in a 24" monitor view sonic 14k u were talking about. Reduce in the processor front i guess for making it for the monitor.

Anonymous said...

you don't need gtx 280 to play most of the games at max settings if you are going for a 19" or 20" monitor. it wud just be a waste of gpu power. u shud go for a gtx 260 and a good monitor.