Help me build a low power, light gaming PC

[tintinmayo]

First, some background on my needs and motivation:

- I work from home most of the time, and even when I'm not at home, my husband is using the PC for his facebooking and stuff, so it's basically almost 24/7 actual usage (not 24/7 because I'm too lazy to turn it off or because I leave it on for torrents)

- Electricity rates here are no joke due to a number of reasons: a.) our country is currently one of the 12 countries with the most expensive electricity rates in the world, b.) we have an underperforming economy/currency (which means our money buys less of our very expensive electricity), and c.) the sole energy distributor uses a cost redistribution model (the rates are tiered: households that consume a monthly average of less than 400 kWh pays a very low rate because they're subsidised by the people who exceed 400 kWh per month on average, add to the fact that rampant electricity tapping/stealing is charged back to subscribers as "system loss charges.")

- Oh and there's that Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan knocking out several plants that now need to be repaired, prompting the power company to issue a notice that the rates will increase significantly for the rest of the year.

- I could care less about future proofing for games. As long as I can open a dozen Word windows while uploading a video on youtube without chugging and it can run the games I'm playing right now, I'll be happy for a long while.

- As for my gaming needs, right now I have a core 2 duo e8400 and an nVidia GT 440, and it's plenty enough for the games that I play and plan to play eventually (I'm going backwards through my backlog). I don't want to buy something that I will only theoretically need/want in the future.

Technically, I think the best plan is to just buy a high end laptop and get it done with, but I don't really need to take the PC anywhere with me and I prefer a desktop's modularity (I can easily replace parts of a desktop if they break. A laptop, not so much.)

Right now I'm eyeing that that Pentium g2020, reviews say the entire system sips around 30-40w off the wall socket on idle and less than a hundred on full load, but I can't find any info about the IGP it uses. It's just "Intel HD Graphics" with no numerical designation. The HD 2500 is only on the i3 and the HD 3000 is on the i5, and the HD 4000 is i7 only. If it turns out to be a rebrand of the GMA series then it's a no go. Those things suck beyond performance, as drivers are so incomplete that they can't even support OpenGL 2.* fully.

I also saw that AMD has that thingie where you can manually turn off the discrete videocard and rely on the IGP if you're not gaming, but I'm not sure if it's available on desktops. That would have been perfect.

Any build recommendations, considering the points I outlined above?

[fastbilly1]

What kind of light gaming are we talking about?

Because something like the FitPc3/FitPC3-intense will handle what you said in your topic, and pull only 7ish watts. It is not a hardcore gaming device by any stretch. The Intel NUC or an Apple Mac Mini would also pull a low amount of power, but they are not gaming machines (though the new NUC could be one with it's i5 and GMA 5000).

[tintinmayo]

What kind of light gaming are we talking about?

Because something like the FitPc3/FitPC3-intense will handle what you said in your topic, and pull only 7ish watts. It is not a hardcore gaming device by any stretch. The Intel NUC or an Apple Mac Mini would also pull a low amount of power, but they are not gaming machines (though the new NUC could be one with it's i5 and GMA 5000).

Hi!

I just need something that at least comes close to my current rig (a core 2 duo e8400 3.0 ghz/gt 440 combo) but consumes less power. It's considered outdated these days but it's plenty enough for the games I'm playing and I assume there are new budget setups that will provide the same performance while requiring less electricity (I'm looking at the benchmarks of Intel's budget processors and even the G2020 kills the e8400 while requiring less power.) The e8400 also doesn't have the option of running on an IGP that isn't completely crap.

I checked out the fitPC3 thing and the APU wouldn't come close, I think. I have an AMD E-450 laptop at work, which should be slightly similar as it's also a 1.65 GHz APU with an HD 6320, and it's vastly underpowered for my needs. Even outside of gaming, it starts to chug when I have lots of word documents opened alongside a Youtube window (it's a task that I do regularly for work) granted that it only has 4GB of ram compared to the FitPC's 16GB, but I don't think more RAM will help the anemic CPU since word documents shouldn't require a lot of RAM. Oh and before people say it's probably because I have a lot of TSRs - I only have an antivirus, dropbox, and spybot running in the background alongside whatever Windows 7 decides to load.

[fastbilly1]

Again, what kind of games?

For some people, light gaming means Peggle, and for others it means games like Call of Duty.

[tintinmayo]

Oops, sorry. By light gaming, I meant running modern/2 year old games at low to medium settings and at playable fps (i settle for 30-45 fps). As for specific titles, I currently have no problems running Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst, DMC Devil May Cry, Batman: Arkham City, Sleeping Dogs, Street Fighter x Tekken, and Grid 2 on my PC. A rig that will play those games while sipping less power than my current rig will be ace.

[fastbilly1]

Check out the Intel BOXDC53427HYE it is a $400 box (no OS or optical drive) that will run all of those like a champ. Its specs are almost identical to the Macbook Air 2013 (slightly lesser processor), so if you go to youtube you can see what games you can play. However I can understand if you want to build a tower, one that was recently suggested to me when I posed the question to others was this:
CPU/GPU - AMD A10-6800K
Mobo - ASUS A85XM-A
PSU - Thermaltake TR2 TR-600W
Case, Ram, SSD, all up to you.

While the A10-6800k is an APU, so most people write it off. But it has quite a bit of punch. And luckily, I found a video with a similar build playing Naruto Shippuden Ultimate 3:


And if the GPU part of the APU is not good enough, you can always slot in a dedicated GPU later.

[tintinmayo]

Hi!

I went with a Pentium G2020 with a cheap mobo (a biostar h61mvg3), 4 gigs of corsair 1600 ddr3, a 450 watt Antec PSU, and I just reused my old hard disk. Cost me 6,360 pesos (roughly $155).

I've been using the IGP (Intel HD graphics, the same as HD 2500 found on the i5 and i3 minus some of the features) and it's crap. Good for emulation, but for the games I listed above, only the naruto game achieved fullspeed (and only after going through all sorts of hoops). But hey, I have the option to reuse my old videocard if I really need to go back to the PC games. Right now I'm happy with the power consumption. The LCD thingie on the socket says it sips 30ish watts on idle, and never goes past 87 watts during gaming.