rate my budget gaming pc

heres my gaming pc i built, all from newegg.com with everything except monitor.

atx case, w/ 350W psu, msi neo2-pls mobo.

P4 2.4ghz A prescott core

512 MB Geil dual channel ddr 400 RAM

saphire 9600 xt 256 MB vid. card

52x cd-rom

cd-rw

maxtor 80 gb sata hdd.

mouse, speakers, keyboard.

total was 701.96

plz tell me what u think!!!

 

motherboard fsb???

 

well you could get almost that for 399 from dell it comes with pro all you would have to buy is the other 256 chip. but overall decent deal

 

ya i made a mad 64 3000 with a k8v se deluxe 9600xt cdrw, dvd driver floppy and a media reader driver for under 1k with a x-inifnity case

btw on the 9600 xt the difference from the 128 mb ram and 256 is not really worth the extra money on this type of card until u get to the brand new stuff

 

Tell me what you think??
Raidmax Scorpio case with 420 watt psu
Giga-byte tech. ga-8ipe1000-g rev.4 motherboard
Intel P4 2.8GHz Prescott cpu with hyper threading tech. 800MHz FSB
4 sticks of 256mb Kingston pc2700 (333MHz)
GeForce FX-5500 256mb AGP 8x graphics card
Sound Blaster 24bit sound card
LiteOn 52x cd burner
TDK 8x dvd burner
Zip 100 zip drive
Western Digital 40gb HD 8mb buffer

 

EHH...not the greatest...but ok

 

Your RAM is holding you back you 800MHz FSB (which is actually 200MHz@ Intel QDR= 800 MHz) but your RAM is 167.5@DDR= 333MHz. So if we look at BASE clocks we have FSB@200MHz and mem@167.5MHz giving 167.5/200=~0.83.

Basically your RAM (mem) is not keeping pace with your CPU and holding your potential performance back. Just offering constructive criticisim here, NO OFFENCE intended!

What you want is DDR400=PC3200 RAM

 

also 2x 512 or 2x 1 gig chips would be better than 4x 256 chips

 

mr_painless45,

That's not a gaming pc setup, 350W isn't enough to power a pc for gaming, a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 isn't gonna get you overly far, and I can't even see a DVD-Rom (considering a lot of todays games are released on dvd discs).

I'd recommend you up the power by 100W to at least 450W, up the processor so you have a clock speed of 3ghz (or amd equivalent), double the ram to a gig, and scrap the cd rom and cd-rw and replace with a dvd-rw.

Other than that, you're on your way

 

This can be a bit of a fallacy certain brands can have less proposed output but still have better rails, etc. I certainly wouldn't just buy a PSU on apparent output because rails are the defining diff from what I've read!!!! In otherwords a 350W with good rails willl kick ass of a 550w psu if it has the right delivery. This may be confusing but do a bit of research and you will find that W alone should not define the QUALITIY of the output.

 

No but I'm taking a good assumption that it's not going to be a high end one as he said atx case w/ 350W psu - also looking at the rest of the spec, it seems fairly low.

In a similarly related thread about PSUs, ASUS rightly informed us that it's also the output voltage you need to look at too.

Wattage is an issue though, because certain components require different amounts; so in all, it's best to have a good branded name that you can trust and that will push out the right power.

 

Agreed, some power supplies are better than others in that respect, but not to the point of a 100w difference.

A 350w PSU is damn unlikely to outpower a 450w. By today's standards, anything under 420-450w is ludicrous anyway. Thats not counting OEMs, that stick garbage PSUs int heir machiens then wonder why their customers call in pissed when the machines crash after adding peripherals.

 

I've got a similar rig
3.0 ghz preshott w/ht
800mhz FSB
80gb seagate SATA
128mb DDR vid card by msi
1gb Pc3200 Crucial (should I ad a second gig for balance purposes)
budget box, floppy, cd-rw,Dvd-RW, 12-1 media reader
(I have more usb ports then I can count,(without taking my shoes off))
And I got a 550 W psu with a nifty blue light, and fan control woohoo.
It's a little slower then I would have liked, if I had it to do over again, (and I may) I would have gone AMD dual core.

A better vid card would matter if I were a serious gamer, however I'm not.
I want to add another 80gb and put them in a raid 0 array, which should up my transfer times. I built this rig for about $775.00
I would recommend a CD-RW Combo drive, you can get them for about $34.00 from the egg. so you'll be able to burn cds and watch dvds (or games)

 

look at the pics and i have about $600.00 in it

 

What are we looking at?

I had that case ages ago...

 

I agree with you, only I don't think the extra 512MB is neccessary for a budget PC made to play low end games. Having 1gig of ram is nice for speed increases but dosent improve performance, though RAM is cheap now so it would be something to get when the time came to upgrade. Also I agree with the processor. Having the latest graphics card with a ~2gig CPU makes no sense and you can't go wrong with anything faster than a 3gig P4.

 

I strongly disagree with you there.

 

Youre saying that having 1gig of ram increases ones FPS ingame?

 

I havent seen any gaming performance increase when going to 1gig from 512, if anything it helps with loading times. Doesnt let u bump up the eye candy or anything

 

Is this a single stick of RAM? Definately go for 2 gig read this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/13/how_much_ram_do_you_really_need/

As far as the AMD dual core well Intel has finnnnaaaalllllllyyyy presented a solution and for $130 compared to top end AMD@$1,000:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/

If you add print.html to the end of the link you will get a single ad free page but will take longer to load.

 

I'm not going to argue with the first link there, because well that's commonsense.

But the second one, I STRONGLY recommend against it. Not only does the cpu require 216w to run at that, but it runs at 80C, EXCEEDING INTEL'S THERMAL SPECIFICATIONS. There's no sense to do that, just get a single core amd athlon64 and overclock it with a lot less headaches and risk.

 

Yes. Unless you play games that don't use a lot of ram.

Even on an optimized system, Windows XP will be using 150-200mb of ram on boot.

That leaves less than 512 for games.

You WILL see swapping, unless you play games from back when Windows 98 was still in style.

With ram as cheap as it is, it doesn't make sense NOT to go with 1gb of ram.

 

I was quoting on overall performance not FPS.

High end PCs use at least a gig nowdays, I can almost guarantee it.

 

If I'm reading this right FPS (frames Per Second) has to do with the Vid card in three ways the slot it goes in ie (sli which is faster then AGP which is faster then PCI) and the cards ram 256 vs 128 etc. and the clock speed of the cards gpu.
HOWEVER - System memory effects overall performance so in a big ass game that has a lot going on, and say an antivirus program could slow the system down until it is unplayable.

Now if I'm wrong in any part of this I'm sure I will be corrected and quoted to death, but I think I have a reasonable grasp of this subject, hence this post.

 

You're entirely correct thesunscreen, although onboard memory on gfx isn't usually a big issue as of yet, the majority of high end games won't take advantage of it.........yet

 

Yes I also agree having 1gig of ram means faster loading times and less swapping. Having more RAM does not increase FPS, apart from at the moment in time when FPS suffers because of HD swap. However for a budget PC 512MB will suffice, no game currently needs more than this to run, and having more will not as Viper said increase your FPS or let you turn up the graphics. Having more RAM on the video card, and havind say DDR3 ram on the video card, will do this. But not system ram.
On a budget gaming PC, it is not neccessary. For a smoother all round PC experience, it is desireable to have 1gig of ram over 512MB. Also knowing how to set up and tweak WinXP (something I also do when making a budget PC) will give as good an effect as having 1gig of ram, only it will cost you nothing. Conservative Swapfile Usage = 1 etc...

Fastdefrag and TweakXP let you do most of this from the GUI.

Also installing Windows 2000 instead of XP will give a massive boost to a 512MB system without tweaking.

 

I found 2000 to be slower all around OS. XP is more fluid, faster boot times, and easier to use. My server runs on 2000, and my PC's run on a combination of XP Pro and Home.

 

Which means it will raise your AVERAGE FPS.

Thats a fake tweak, it does absolutely nothing for XP.

 

Yes it will increase avg fps, by about 2fps (depending on how long you play, be it 10 seconds or 2 hours).

Thats a windows 98 tweak. It was an example.

 

Depends on how much the paging file gets swapped to, not time played.

 

Well the average consensus is more ram is good. Besides the difference between 1gb and 512mb is like $35.00 no budget is that tight.

I never got my question answered, is it better to have the ram spread out two 512's as aposed to 1 1gb stick? Like a raid 0 array gives faster read times. I have a single stick of 1 gb and I think my computer is holding back, I'm trying to find the bottle neck. Also is there a good article about memory timings?

 

Actually it's both, but one goes with the other. Having 512MB isn't going to be that much of a problem, having 256MB might be, though these days you can't get away with playing games with 256MB.

eg. Run the Doom3 benchmark with 512MB, and record the result. For me this is 21fps, because of HD swap, being that Doom3 uses more than 512MB if available. Now re-run the benchmark, as the cache is already full and the game no longer needs to use the swapfile. I now get 29fps, probably the same as what I would get having 1gig of ram the first time I ran the benchmark.
Open console and type /seta_imageusecache 1 and /seta_imagecachemegs 256

Now Doom3 is tweaked to use all your 512MB as soon as the game is loaded. The same performance as having 1gig for free. Add to this the tweaks in windows and I bet I could get a 512MB machine performing better than you could a 1gig machine with exactly the same spec in most games.

 

To each their own. I disagree with you, regardless.

Not everyone leaves their computer running 24/7 to keep things "cached".

Plus if you quit the game, welcome to swapville again next time you play.

Not everyone wants a giagnatic paging file either.

So, whatever, 35 dollars is nice performance increase.

 

just wanna know....say if u have 2GB or 3GB worth of RAM...do u still need page filing?

 

with 2 gigs most likely you wont but its better to be safe and keep a small page file just in case. 3, you could probably dump the page file altogether

 

3gig of ram? thats just greedy

 

Even if you disable the paging file, Windows XP will still create one, and use it. Of course, MS doesn't tell you that.

A properly setup page file will yield just as good, if not better performance than not using one at all.

 

Are you just anti-ram. The more the merrier. You can never be too young, too rich, have too many fonts, or too much ram.

 

Have to agree. If I had the money I would have 8Gig and although it may seem overkill give it 3-4 years and this will be standard and you may find you will need it.

 

In computers there is no such thing as overkill just controled obsolecence. like you said three or four years who knows. 3 or 4 years ago, overclockers were talking about 1gb of ram like it was the future.

 

Very nicely put, indeed.

I built my system with 1 gig of ram (2 X 512) . . . then after about a year I decided to go with another gig - the board has 4 slots and supports dual channel. I can honestly say that I didn't really notice much increase in overall system performance . . . but would I get rid of the other gig? No way!
I am ram-greedy and proud of it! And like was stated here, who knows what ram-hungry programs the future holds!

But right now, a gig of ram seems to be ok - money in a budget system would best be applied to a better class of video card, in my opinion

 

You would if it ran in dual channel, 2 1gb sticks.