Building a gaming PC?

Kerouac

Kerouac

weird musical dildo
So I've been in the Mac only world for many years now and most of my gaming since then has been on consoles. But lately I've been interested in building a new gaming PC, mostly to actually play some older games: Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3/NV, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft and Diablo 2, etc. Being able to play some newer games would be cool too, but this is more about exploring older games I know well with some mods and other tweaks.

I have an older Dell with a Core 2 Duo, but I know that will be too slow for games like Skyrim. I do have a couple of older ATX cases, but would need to use a new motherboard and chip in them I'm sure. I've got CD/DVD drives and even a couple of extra hard drives, as well as three or four different monitors and a wireless keyboard/mouse, but it's been a LONG time since I looked at PC specs. Any ideas on where to start?
 
Everything you already have, is useless.

Sorry.

The processor itself is rather moot. Sure, you want at least an I5, but gaming is ALL about RAM, Bus speeds and Video.

Video card is the most important thing. Anything under a couple hundred bucks is likely useless.

RAM amount and speed are next. At least 16gb and at the very least 1866Mhz. 2400 and up is better.

Solid State drive is a MUST.

A couple standard HDDs are great to supplement storage, but the OS needs to be on an SS.

Motherboard is crucial. MSI or ASUS Gaming boards are about $200.

Cooling: crucial. A good case with plenty of airflow and fans.

Power Supply: Make or break component that is often overlooked. You will need a higher end PS with at least 650 watts (more is better). If you cheap out on the PS, you'll be sorry.

Overall, you're looking at a grand to build anything remotely capable.
 
If you're going to do it, don't cheap out on parts a couple of years old. Get the best components you can get for your budget, especially processor and graphics card. And get a 700-plus watt power supply.

All that said, I found building my own to be a big pain in the ass. You don't save that much money in the end over buying from IBuyPower, Cyberpower, etc.
 
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I agree you shouldn't go cheap if you want a decent machine. I've built my last 2 desktops and it's not that big of a pain in the ass at all IMO. Additionally you'll probably know a lot more about your system if something should go wrong in the future. Furthermore you get the products that you want. For example OGG is right, a good PSU is worth it. The last system I bought, the PSU blew up and fried the HD and MB.

Tom's Hardware is a good place to look for information. For example AFAIK few games (if any yet...maybe some of the newer ones :shrug:) can even make full use of 16G of Ram so 8 is generally more than enough, however, Ram is still relatively cheap I think so more isn't so bad for the future. A good GPU is a must for good gaming. I also would disagree that a SSD is a must but it certainly makes it faster to start for the OS. IF the games are on a HD then there will be no performance improvement for gaming. For the CPU while it doesn't matter too much I personally wouldn't get an AMD chip...I think they are inferior to Intel in general and yeah I used to work for AMD too so...:P

Tom's has a bunch of "best xxx" for the money that generally break things down by need (surfing vs gaming vs hard core gaming for example) and price. Like this
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gpus,4380.html
A lot of these comparisons will also do frame rates on popular games so you'll get an idea of what you would be getting/giving up with certain components. Good luck
 
Kerouac said:
Or like this:

https://choosemypc.net/build/?budget=500&oc=false&options=os,rebates#
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Kerouac said:
So you don't think something like this is feasible?

https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/fCZx...n-in-depth-guide-for-choosing-the-right-parts
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Both seem to be fairly bare bones. Not too sure I would recommend either.
Grant Gross said:
If you're going to do it, don't cheap out on parts a couple of years old. Get the best components you can get for your budget, especially processor and graphics card. And get a 700-plus watt power supply.

All that said, I found building my own to be a big pain in the ass. You don't save that much money in the end over buying from IBuyPower, Cyberpower, etc.
Click to expand...
Yup. Power Supply is the real heart and soul. I run 750 Watts.

Seem many otherwise capable systems rendered useless because the PSU couldn't hang. The quickest way to smoke a MB is with an inadequate PSU.
Intel chips are "better" for gaming overall. Don't get hung up on number of Cores though. Sometimes more cores can work against you. It depends on how the software can or can't utilize the threading capacity of the CPU. Generally speaking, clock speed trumps all. 4 cores at 3.7 ghz will run circles around 8 cores at 3.2.

The days of saving a ton of money by building your own system are over. Honestly, you're probably better off buying a pre-built machine like was already suggested.
 
OGG said:
The days of saving a ton of money by building your own system are over. Honestly, you're probably better off buying a pre-built machine like was already suggested.
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True but if you want a certain combination of components building your own might be more cost effective (for example you might want a kickass GPU on an otherwise more budget system, and prebuilts won't necessarily give you that option). There are however some places that will allow you to assemble more or less what you want and build it for you. As I recall they aren't too much more than what it would cost you to DIY
 
Could tell you, but my oldest built one for his brother. Freaking thing thing has 5 fans and actually raises the temp in his room several degrees. He says it kicks major ass.
 
Kerouac said:
One of my students that just built a $1200 machine recommended this one to me.... any thoughts?

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wVx2pg
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without doing a lot of research...the cooler is a good one. G.Skill is decent for memory as well. I'd go with a quad core over a dual core myself. You want the wifi for bluetooth? The MB might already have wifi so if it's not for bluetooth it might not be necessary. A 750 should be ok but isn't that new. However I haven't been keeping up with the technology since I built my system a couple of years ago
 
nuke_diver said:
without doing a lot of research...the cooler is a good one. G.Skill is decent for memory as well. I'd go with a quad core over a dual core myself. You want the wifi for bluetooth? The MB might already have wifi so if it's not for bluetooth it might not be necessary. A 750 should be ok but isn't that new. However I haven't been keeping up with the technology since I built my system a couple of years ago
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I didn't pick any of that; we had been talking about it at his lesson last week and he just emailed me a build he would make for playing Fallout 4 on a budget. I don't need wifi since I can plug right into the router, but bluetooth keyboard/mouse would be awesome since I'd like to use it in the living room. I'll probably use a controller for a lot of games too.
 
I did a bit of research...because I don't feel like play guitar right now :embarrassed:
The G4400 is not recommended for newer games based on a short survey of some forums (Fallout 4 was one specifically mentioned) as it will bottleneck the system and cause slower frame rates.

The best way to go about this is to give a budget and go from there. The reading I did suggests that if you are going to get something budget like the G4400 you are better off getting an AMD chip since the Pentiums don't have enough threads to run the higher performance games
 
I'd say a hard cap of $550 right now, with upgrading to a better card a possibility at the end of the year.
 
Kerouac said:
I'd say a hard cap of $550 right now, with upgrading to a better card a possibility at the end of the year.
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I think you're gonna have a difficult time getting a decent gaming machine, especially a good graphics card, at that price. A decent graphics card alone will run $150. Windows OS is another $100.
 
I agree with Grant. If you must get something the best system I could find (and I cannot vouch for the system but it was the winner of Tom's Hardware best builts of 2016 under $500 so far) is the following

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Case :Enermax ECA3253-BW
Cooling :Xigmatek XAF-F1252
CPU :AMD Athlon X4 860K
Graphics :Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 2GB
Memory :Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x 4GB)
Motherboard :Gigabyte GA-F2A78M-D3H
PSU :Antec 450W
Primary Storage :Hitachi Ultrastar 750GB

The comments on this are
Forum moderator DarkBreeze submitted the best PC build under $500. The “Soup Kitchen Super Gamer” relies on a relatively low-end AMD Athlon X4 860K quad-core CPU able to hit 4GHz out of the box. This relatively inexpensive processor frees up some extra room in the budget, which permitted DarkBreeze to place a Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 on his Gigabyte motherboard. The rest of the PC parts are budget-oriented choices, but are nonetheless decent quality components that come together to create a balanced PC build capable of playing modern games with reasonable settings and frame rates.

There is still the software which would probably put you over your budget though. You might be able to downgrade the GPU and memory to get under budget though
 
Does my current spec inspire you at all?

Desktop: [Processor: Intel Skylake i5 6600K (stock for now)][HSF: CoolerMaster Hyper 212 EVO]
[PSU: EVGA SuperNova 750 B2][Case: Corsair Carbide Series Air 540 Silver]
[Motherboard: AsRock Z170 Extreme4][RAM: 2x8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2666]
[Video: eVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti DS Superclocked 01G-P3-1567-KR]
[Hard Drives: Samsung 850 EVO 500GB]
 
Far be it from me to talk someone out of buying a new gaming computer, but depending on what you currently have in the way of a Mac, have you considered dual booting?

My work macbook pro can totally handle all the games you mention..
 
yabba said:
Far be it from me to talk someone out of buying a new gaming computer, but depending on what you currently have in the way of a Mac, have you considered dual booting?
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+1. If you have a beefy Mac it only costs $100 to download Windows 10 from Microsoft.

That said, my preference is to keep things Mac only and do Windows tasks in virtual machines. Keeps me from getting sucked into all the great games that don’t run on OS X.
 
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