PC for everything

[Hatta]

Buy a good case. I have half a dozen fans in my PC, and it's whisper quiet because I bought a good case. Good airflow, cable routing, and room to work in is important. And since PCs are sold on specs, OEMs don't invest anything in their crappy cases. Consider something like an Antec Sonata, it has insulated side panels, and all the hard disks are mounted on silicon grommets, really reduces vibration noise.

[RCBH928]

thanks for your help,

My main issue here is that I dont want to overpay here, I want to have a system here that is just about the price of a new ps4 which I am guessing should be around $660.
If the PC is going to cost me much more than that then it will be not worth while because in the end the 2 things will do the same thing, play games and view video.

i looked at the price of Geforce 680 and that alone costs like $500 !!

[AppleQueso]

You don't need cutting edge graphics cards to play modern games, you only need them for either futureproofing or trying to run everything at the highest settings possible.

If you're mainly wanting to just emulate or play slightly older PC games, you can get a really cheap build.

[RCBH928]

@Hatta

Thanks for your tip , I know nothing about cases. There is huge price difference between the cases which i am not sure why but I will do more research.

@AppleQueso

I am not looking to emulate , any PC that has been built in the last 4 years (or more) years should have no problem doing that. I am looking for my PC to run modern games and at least 2 to 3 years in the future in 1080p . I am not sure if this is asking too much , but I believe 1080p capable cards have been at least around since 2007 . It doesn't have to be maximum settings but something around PS4 performance? definitely not 360/ps3 though .

I am willing to get a mediocre card on ps3 level capabilities , but for a cheap price. I am not willing to pay $600 for a machine that is not capable of running 2012 games .

[tintinmayo]

If you want a rig that can play modern games from 2012 upwards, you can't really skimp on the videocard. I've been trying to cheap out on the videocard ever since I started to game, and I kept buying midrange ones (I went from 8600GT to 9600GT, to GT 240 to GT 440), and I kept regretting my purchases as far as gaming is concerned (in the case of the GT 440, it was actually slower than the GT 240, and ran way hotter.)

There are modern games that will run well on the midrange cards (DMC Devil May Cry for one was able to run at max settings on 1080p) but they're more of the exception than the rule. I kept hitting walls on most games and I've had to turn down detail and resolution to get smooth experiences. If you're still willing to game at a 1024 x 768 resolution and don't really mind jagged edges (aliasing and filtering really kills the FPS on midrange cards since they usually have cut down processors), midrange cards will do.

One way you could really cut down on the cost is to go for the budget CPUs from intel, cut down i-cores called the G-somethings. They're basically the new Celerons, but are actually pretty decent for gaming. The G840 is only 2.80 ghz but can already run circles around the 3.0 ghz e8400, which was top of the line for Core 2 Duos.

[isiolia]

Typical for a gaming machine in that kind of price range is to stick a $200 GPU or so into an otherwise bottom end PC. So, yeah, Pentium G-series or maybe an i3 depending.

It's not that CPU doesn't matter, just more what will give you more for the money. Techreport did an article last year showing some of the difference you can see with CPUs - you can see some games, such as Battlefield 3, show little difference where others, like Skyrim, vary a lot. Even so, the difference between a $1000 3960X and a $200 i5 2400 is not proportional to the cost.

At higher settings, it's a lot more likely that the GPU will be the limiting factor. It doesn't tend to take much to run things at the level of a PS3 or 360, as that tends to mean low settings at 720p. But, PC gaming tends to shoot for max settings at native resolution. For 1080p, that really isn't setting the bar too high.

[tintinmayo]

How about AMD's APUs? I've never tried one because I'm heavily into last gen (PS2 and GC/WII) emulation, and those tend to run better on Intels, but I've read that AMDs' offerings have IGPs that perform somewhere around midrange discrete cards and can be used alongside another ATI card for crossfire (basically giving you crossfire for the price of one card?) Maybe the OP can go that route.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I wouldn't go that far, but you can indeed game on them if you're willing to deal with Xbox 360 levels of visual fidelity.

[fastbilly1]

If you want a rig that can play modern games from 2012 upwards, you can't really skimp on the videocard. I've been trying to cheap out on the videocard ever since I started to game, and I kept buying midrange ones (I went from 8600GT to 9600GT, to GT 240 to GT 440), and I kept regretting my purchases as far as gaming is concerned (in the case of the GT 440, it was actually slower than the GT 240, and ran way hotter.)

My 9600gt still runs modern games well. I play Borderlands 2 on it with decent settings and no real slowdown or crashes. Actually BL2 runs alot better than BL1 did. The only game it had issues with (that I tried) was Witcher 2. It just did not like my card at all. Well that and Wii emulation, thats just a tricky beast.

That said, you should get a decent GPU, but thanks to the quasi hardware plateau we have been on for a while you can get more mileage out of order stuff. Back when I really started PC gaming (not just playing on my parents PC) I had to get big updates almost every other year.

[isiolia]

How about AMD's APUs? I've never tried one because I'm heavily into last gen (PS2 and GC/WII) emulation, and those tend to run better on Intels, but I've read that AMDs' offerings have IGPs that perform somewhere around midrange discrete cards and can be used alongside another ATI card for crossfire (basically giving you crossfire for the price of one card?) Maybe the OP can go that route.

They're similar to, if not the bottom of the barrel of discrete cards, those pretty close to it.

About the only thing they compare all that favorably to are other IGPs.

IMO, they don't make a lot of sense if a discrete card is an option.