Features - QOTW: Can you build a gaming PC for less than an Xbox One?

[koocha]

here's my idea:



Advantages over some of the other builds I've seen:

1. 8GB RAM (The builds with 4GB RAM won't play CoD: Ghosts)
2. Decent graphics card
3. Decent PSU
4. Gaming keyboard and mouse
5. DVD Writer

The idea would be to run SteamOS on it. The only thing missing is a gamepad.

Any thoughts?

[Chris1808]

Unless I'me missing something no sign of keyboard/mouse/monitor

[kalniel]

I hate these stupid 'just a question' articles without any decent premise or editorial direction.

The point is to boost forum activity. You're free to ignore them If you rise to the bait they've succeeded

[aidanjt]

The idea would be to run SteamOS on it. The only thing missing is a gamepad.

Any thoughts?

Yeah, you'd want to swap out the R7 with something nVidia if you're going with SteamOS, AMD's binary Linux drivers have been plagued with performance and stability problems since forever.

[koocha]

Yeah, you'd want to swap out the R7 with something nVidia if you're going with SteamOS, AMD's binary Linux drivers have been plagued with performance and stability problems since forever.

I thought they'd got their act together with all the mining?

[directhex]

I thought they'd got their act together with all the mining?

Lolz. You must be new to ATI's Linux engagement

[koocha]

I thought they'd got their act together with all the mining?

Lolz. You must be new to ATI's Linux engagement

It'll all be sorted with the final release of SteamOS

[aidanjt]

It'll all be sorted with the final release of SteamOS

As ATi has been saying all along, since ATi was known as ATi, and long before that, too. Honestly, it's not going to happen. The entire driver is an unfixable mess.

[jimbob9713]

Using my discounts ( I own a small retail operation) here's what I was able to come up with for £350
£95.65 AMD FX-8350 with closed loop cooler
£38.97 Coolmax ZPG-600B 80 Gold PSU
£45.67 ASUS M5A99X EVO R2.0
£37.68 Gskill Sniper Series 8 GB (2x4GB sticks)DDR3 @ 1866
£42.73 PNY XLRB 240GB SSD
£81.37 Power Cooler AX7870(Radeon 7870)
£4.50 used Xbox 360 wired controller
£0.99 LG BDXL blu-ray burner (I actually have 25 of these in stock at the moment so I am giving myself the employee discount )
£0.00 Raidmax Raptor Case ( my supplier has a ton of these and has given me about 6 of them for custom rigs in the past and shows no signs of letting up)
£0.00 Windows 7 OEM enterprise edition install
£0.00 Generic Keyboard and Mouse
Grand total of £347.66
I could probably do better but I think this is sufficient to kick the Xbox One to the curb.

Able to share the name of this generous supplier? or by "my supplier" do you mean local company?
I have a friend who runs a PC shop and afaik he always go to the same place for parts, but was complaining the other day that he's got to spend over a certain amount before he starts getting any sort of discount, which surprised me because they seem to order a lot!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

? SteamOS is perfectly usable. Also you don't have to deal with the mess of Windows updates and manually staying on top of drivers and 3rd party utilities and their multitude of different updating programmes wasting resources in the background and all the other Windows junk which makes it a hassle to maintain.

Yet it is still in a worse state as a gaming OS than Windows. Linux has been "perfectly fine" for gaming according geeks for the last 10 years,yet funnily Windows for all its flaws still seems to be more popular and has more games.

Two out of the three major desktop graphics companies(AMD and Intel) ATM,don't even support Linux that well ATM.You only have to look at the marketshare of desktop Linux OSes to understand why this is,and that is not even taking into consideration fragmentation.

Nvidia only gives a damn since its main cash cow is compute based cards sold for commercial and scientific computing,which means they need decent Linux support.

Moreover,those consoles are plug and play. None of the users need to give a damn whether their hardware or software is good enough. It just runs,be it now or in 5 years time.

Geeks/hardware enthusiasts don't seem to understand at all why consoles are popular and complain about consoles,even though they continue to sell well.

BTW,quite a lot of my mates run Linux as dual boot to Windows(they work in science and the computing/softwate development area) and yet nearly every single one of them has Windows as a dual boot primarily for gaming,and quite a number of them were in the Linux is fine/viable for gaming camp for years too. Yet with MS having their pre-launch £25 to £30 Win7 and Win8 offers,many of them just bought them instead.Its quite telling TBH.

Its also quite telling how many people on forums like Hexus and the like used such offers too.

Moreover,we saw what happened with Netbooks with Linux. Despite running better than the more expensive Windows versions,people tended to return the Linux versions at a much higher rate.

You underestimate how much people like to stick with something familar even if it is just a brand.

If anything OS X is taking more desktop marketshare from Windows than any of the desktop Linux distros.

Right, although current engine development includes Linux support from the outset, so we wont need to wait for engines to be retrofitted into each individual game where the developer wants to take a chance, as used to be the case.


Unfair generalisation not related to this thread. Technically, right now, SteamOS has more than twice as many games available for it since the XBone eschewed the 360's library. The Steam Linux library has grown 900% since last year, and while I don't expect it to continue or increase at that rate, it's still going to keep growing fast, and we should see a sharp rise in AAA titles over the next year or so as the next gen engines come into fruition.

Yet,in terms of AAA games its still worse,especially when the few major titles that get released happen MONTHS after their console/Windows PC release dates.

Windows and consoles make up most of the marketshare of fixed point gaming ATM,and Linux for the foreseeable future is not going to be a lead platform for most AAA titles.

Linux has under 2% marketshare in consumer desktops and traditional laptops,and even OS X which has many times the marketshare is still is not as well developed as a gaming platform. That is despite Apple laptops and desktops having better than average graphics chips(than many Windows computers) for the last few years.

Even if SteamOS doubled desktop Linux marketshare it would still be less than OS X. It would be a fraction of what Windows has.

Companies like id supported Linux ports of their games for many years,and in reality despite all the noise,it was their console and Windows PC sales which were more important to their bottom line,and that was down to one metric. Numbers.

At the moment,nothing is definite at all. Its all maybe.

Maybe,in two years time,things might be very different with Linux and gaming.

However,at this very moment in time,SteamOS is not nearly developed enough as a primary gaming OS.

If it were you would be seeing mass migration from paid Windows to free SteamOS right now. I don't see this happening ATM.

The most I seem to hear is people wanting to use it is to stream games from their Windows gaming PC.

Again maybe in two years things might change,but not currently.

Right, but you don't need a core per thread. The OS will happily and fairly allocate thread scheduling time from the available CPU time. Most games are, and will continue to be, primarily GPU bound, so that's where most of the budget should go IMHO.

Yet,we saw the E8400 versus Q6600 argument. The first had around 35% higher single threaded performance than the latter. Guess what lasted much longer?

I have had experience of speccing loads of budget gaming builds on forums and in real life. I have used newer generation Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs,and even a Core i3 has been a limitation in certain games,examples being Crysis3,and BF4 MP. CryEngine3 and Frostbite3 alone are going to be used in a load of next generation titles.

Bethesda is using an engine based on idTech5 and that was quite multi-threaded. All the noise indicates UE4 will be the same.

A Pentium dual core has no legs on it and yes you can replace it but that makes the £350 build,not £350 anymore.

Moreover,the lightly threaded games which are popular,ie,like DOTA,LoL,Minecraft and D3 run perfectly fine on an X4 760K. Games which are more multi-threaded will run better on the X4 760K though.

In fact the Hexus Minecraft server(plus two other MC servers) is run off an A10 5800K,and MC is single threaded.

Even then both CPUs are a compromise,an FX6300 or Core i3 will be a far better compromise longterm,as they have noticeably better multi-threaded performance.

That goes without saying, but it's a budget way off from the scope of this thread.

A £350 gaming PC is full of compromises. There is a limit to cost cutting anything at which it becomes un-economic.

Buying secondhand as some mentioned means no warranty if stuff goes wrong,which is not great if you are building for someone who is not techy.

£400 to £500 is what I have found over the last 5 years as being a good starting point if you want something with reasonable longevity across a wide range of games.

However,I suspect we will have to agree to disagree about this all.

[Tunnah]

Building a potent PC to run steamOS is like owning a Ferrari in a school zone - doesn't matter about the performance, you're never going to get to stretch it's legs.

SteamOS might as well be an emulator for second-rung material, and is plain retarded to own as a primary gaming solution - a windows PC offers you EVERYTHING, SteamOS is and always will be a cool alternative - it's to windows what linux is to desktop alternatives.

[dummbazz]

My fixes:
Take out Windows, put Ubuntu.
Choose a case without PSU.
Pick up a real PSU.
If money is left, improve CPU, then Mobo.

[PewPew]

that is terrible. Yea it will run all games in 30 fps range, but its just not worth building something like that. If you plan on building budget pc work around this
CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor (£77.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£31.85 @ Aria PC)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£59.36 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£42.98 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card (£128.10 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: XFX ProSeries 450W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£34.14 @ Scan.co.uk)
Total: £374.42

Check your storage area for non listed components I'm sure everyone has case, keyboard, mouse widows cd/usb laying around somewhere this build will run latest games on high/ultra at 1080p

[DanceswithUnix]

Video of someone playing BF3 on an AM1 5350 with 6850 GPU plugged in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwvRQ2GGqO8

Looks smoother than I was expecting.

[DanceswithUnix]

that is terrible. Yea it will run all games in 30 fps range, but its just not worth building something like that. If you plan on building budget pc work around this
CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor (£77.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£31.85 @ Aria PC)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£59.36 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£42.98 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card (£128.10 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: XFX ProSeries 450W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£34.14 @ Scan.co.uk)
Total: £374.42

Check your storage area for non listed components I'm sure everyone has case, keyboard, mouse widows cd/usb laying around somewhere this build will run latest games on high/ultra at 1080p

The budget is £349, and note that the xbox bundle includes controllers and a game. You proposal is incomplete, and still nearly 10% over budget.

My father once said to me "An engineer is someone who can design for a quid what any idiot can do for a tenner". It is a tough budget, needs careful compromise.

[3s-gtech]

If SteamOS counts as a valid OS for this, gives a nice big chunk of extra cash. Bump the 750 to a Ti, possibly switch from Kabini to faster clocked FM2 system. That's a cracking system for the price pictured above though.