The Frugal Gaming PC

When something is said about a "Gaming PC", this is what immediately comes to mind for most people. Some unmarried twenty-something, sitting in a darkened room with several thousand of dollars worth of computer, pizza boxes, chip bags and Mountain Dew cans! I guess, that'd be right in most cases but, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be that way..... at least in the thousands of $$$ end of things. What? Is the Frugal Propellerhead branching out and about to start playing games? Not so much. Let me explain.

??? It goes back some time ago when my school's librarian asked me to look at a Dell Inspiron XPS M1530 that was acting up. It belonged to her teenage son.... well actually, that's not quite right. Note that it's pink. Apparently what happened was that her other son sent the younger brother his girlfriend's old laptop, that she had used, and abused and cast aside, so that they could play games together online. Kind of a cool idea, but the abused part had taken it's toll on this nVidia GPU'd  (!!!) machine. And of course the chip was failing, succombing to the infamous nVidia chip failures of that generation. It worked for him a a couple of months, then lived for about 6 more months after I "reflowed" it with a torch, but then ultimately died again. So, little brother gave up on the machine and it went to live in a closet. However, as it turns out, that wasn't the end of the story. I vaguely remember telling them that he was better off with a desktop rig and I'd help him put it together when he saved up some money. In the movies; your hero rubs the kid's head, who shuffles off with his hands in his pockets and the scene fades to black. Then about a week ago, the librarian emails me that the boy had taken my advice to heart and now has $600 accumulated and wants to know when we can get started! 

So anyway..... after I got over myself (yup, that's the look I probably had looking at my Outlook), I said; sure, I'll be happy to help (or something to that effect), and I'd get back to them after a little bit of research! Meaning, I'm going to have to bone up on all things gaming and the current state of desktop hardware... which by the way, is NOT what I normally use and make a business out of recommending to people. What follows, is what I've learned over the course of the last week and about to start the process of turning it into an actual computer.

As you've no doubt already told yourself: "IS HE CRAZY"!?! $600 isn't enough to put together a decent gaming rig! But, never fear..... FRUGALMAN IS HERE!!! So lets start with the fact that, I plan to cheat. In the image above is a Cooler Master ATCS 201 which is a VERY nice all aluminum case. If you aren't familiar with this now defunct series (at least around here) from Cooler Master. Think, Lian-Li. My impression is that they tried to see if they could compete in the boutique aluminum case market and decided that there was more money to be made in other areas. Anyway, there's one of them sitting in my garage. Not because I had a use for it. Because it was $35 on Craig's List with a RaidMax 640w modular power supply included! It originally sold for over $200 (case alone)! My plan is to build in it, using that RaidMax P/S and if he decides to go with something else down the road, then so be it. We just don't have to worry about those items now.

Then came the big question: To Haswell, or NOT To Haswell? After two days straight of reading every chance I got, I came to the conclusion that Haswell is:

1. Too expensive to fit in a $600 budget.
2. Too new for any really good deals to be had.
3. Too few benefits to be derived for a low-to-mid level gaming machine.

Sure, there are benefits. Clearly, it's the most future-proof, and it absolutely is the most efficient in a power-in vs. power-out equation. But in the end, the question to be answered is; what is this kid going to get the most bang for his gaming buck at his price-point. 

This became very clearly, a Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor on a Z77 Intel Platform. Yes, yes; I can hear the AMD supporters popping their Cheetos bags now. I know it's cheaper, and you can get more "cores" for your money. However, at the end of the day, you know (as does everyone in the industry), that AMD hasn't been able to touch Intel's mid-to-high-end line since the day the evil empire went to their 2nd Gen "Core" chips. The gap keeps widening as we get into the "Ivy Bridge" series and AMD completely has nothing in the works that can challenge "Haswell". I'm no Intel fanboy, having used AMD for years going back to my "Barton" build, but I just have no loyalty on this sort of thing and absolutely will go with whoever gets me the most computing power for the money. So, that aside; why that chip on that platform? 

 

The socket 1155 on the Z77 platform will give pretty much all the "modern" features (eg. USB 3.0, SATA-III/6.0) that people want without the price of the 2011 and Z87/Socket 1150 boards. It will also take the 2nd Gen Sandy Bridge as well as the still current Ivy Bridge CPUs, thus giving upgrade potential. In this market-space there are a number of attractive options ranging from the rather low-end Asrock/ECS boards to the other end of Asus/Gigabyte models. Then you get into the sub-models which address all manner of arcane features mostly having to do with overclocking. Be that as it may, this is where I decided the fat part of the price/benefit curve is at the moment which fits into the kid's budget.

Then, on to the CPU. This was a whole new world to me, since I've just now managed to master the miriad number of SKUs of Intels CoreDuo, Core2Duo lineup. So, I now had to learn Intel's "Core" line. Of course, given our platform choice, we've leapfrogged the first (Nehalem) series (3 digit Core, eg. i5-xxx) and move right on to the Sandy Bridge series. Remember; this is a budget build and there isn't enough room to move on to the Ivy Bridge chips. It became fairly evident, that i5 was going to be the way to go. You get quad cores, with plenty of cache, without paying for cores and speed that he won't use in the i7s. Obviously, the budget i3 weren't under consideration unless I simply couldn't find a good enough deal. I'm not even going to address that here, assuming that my readers will already know why.

Then came The Package..... Sometimes, you just get lucky and things fall into place for you and life is easy. This was one of those. Part of what made my decision for me was that while I was researching, I was also looking on eBay to see what the price-points were looking like on the used front vs. buying new. Don't tell anybody that I said this; but sometimes, new ends up being the way to go.... shhhhh.... but not this time. I ran across an eBay listing with an Asus P8Z77v-Pro board, with an i5/2500K (unlocked) CPU, AND 8Gb (2 x 4Gb) of Corsair Vengence DDR3 RAM, all nicely matched and sold together with no bids and starting at $300. After very little activity (4 bids total), I got it for $355 ($340 + $15 shipping). We're talking about a year old equipment at $100-150 less than retail. 

Now that we've spent over half the $600, what else do we need to do? Well, I sent him a series of links to spend the bulk of the $245 he has left. The most important of them is the boot drive for which I'm recommending a 120Gb SSD. For mass storage to go with that, I recommended a 1Tb/7200rpm Toshiba mechanical drive. As I've discussed before, these days, I'm routinely recommending to buy Toshiba desktop drives because they are really Hitachi DeskStars coming out of a Hitachi factory in China that have been rebranded as Toshibas but, sell for less! There's an explanation in an earlier post regarding this situation, so I'm not going to go through that here. I'm also having him pick up a plain-Jane optical drive/burner to load software and burn disks, which pretty much rounds out the necessities.

I know, I know....the heart of a gaming rig..... the Graphics card. You do know that beginning with the Nehalem "Core" processors Intel had DMI (direct media interface) built-in to the chip, right. Now I didn't say that it was good graphics processing, but by the Sandy Bridge chips with their 2000/3000 onboard GPUs, it was decent. No, not for Crysis 3, or Bioshock, but for old Star Wars games.... which by the way, is what he mostly plays right now.... integrated graphics will work.... for now. 

In the meantime, I'm going to have him put stuff on the all-important Christmas List! Things like a AMD Radeon HD 6850, or 7790. Whoa.... slowdown there nVidia fans, here's my take on that stuff. It's not a clear-cut Intel is kicking the stuffing out of AMD situation here. It's a there's so little to give between the two big boys in this area, it completely doesn't matter in the "mid-price" ($125-175) graphics card market-space that I'm just going to cut down on the amount of work I have to do. So I pick AMD because I already know quite a bit about them.... especially the "Southern Island" series. What else is there?

I know this is an area near and dear to the hearts of gamers everywhere. That is their peripherals. And again, I'm going to one of my little tricks:

That's right.... he has a birthday between now and Christmas! Did I mention that I was going to CHEAT! Yup, between those two very important celebrations, I would suspect that he'll be able to nail virtually every other necessity to fulfill a teenage gamers desires! So....., that's a wrap, right?

.......Well, not completely. Some of you may even be doing some mental math and have about a $75 hole not accounted for..... No, it's not for a cheap-o monitor. It's for things like adapters, cables, card readers and other various items. Then, what about a monitor? I'm embarrassed for you that you should have to ask the "king" of $15-25 monitors! What we're going to do is to either snag one, if it conveniently appears on Craig's List (or somewhere else), or we are going to use one of the old CRTs that they already have at their house. That's right, you didn't misread that...... C R T, as in Cathode Ray Tube. They still work! What we're going to do, is to use whatever we can find for free or othewise ridiculously low price, then when the correct time comes that some generous grandparent, or other family member is willing to check the monitor box on the aforementioned Christmas/Birthday Lists, then this monitor will become a "side" screen on the "Super-Frugal-Gaming-Rig"!!! 

YEA.... WE'RE DONE.... FOR NOW!

 

 
 

Don't Buy High End!!!

Some of you guys are now out there going: WHAT THE *%&* !!! First he tells us not to buy the bottom end "consumer" computers, now we aren't supposed to by the "high end"!?! 

Well....snuggle down and let me tell you a little fairy tale..... OK, no fairy tale, but in a land not so far away, laptop manufacturers started looking for increasingly higher end graphic chip solutions so that everything could look cooler and games (that which laptops were never designed to do) could be played better. Actually, it wasn't even that long ago; about 6-8 years ago, around the time of the late P4-M and early Pentium M processors. ATI was first "out the gate" with full-blown very capable graphics processors (GPUs), of that generation. Around the 2 year (remember this) mark, computers ranging from Apple iBooks to ThinkPads began succumbing to the "black-screen" syndrome. Basically failing to P.O.S.T. due to the graphic subsystem failing. Come to find out, they had developed what became known as the Ball Grid Array (BGA) cracking issue. Essentially, the problem was that over many cycles of heating and cooling the differing materials of the MB vs. the chip's differing cooling rates cause stress fractures to occur at the "ball" of solder that was the attachment point between the two. Over time, this would become severe enough to cause the two to lose communications and the result would be the infamous "black-screen". Occasionally, people would "reflow" them and through heating would create a reattachment, but in most cases, it would fail again. 

Fast forward 5-6 years and the high end of the notebook GPU market had been taken over by arch-rival nVidia. So if you were really interested in power, then you upgraded from the integrated Intel GPU to a full-blown stand-alone graphics solution. Two years and a class action lawsuit later, it was found that these high end chips had a flaw, plus also suffering from the dreaded BGA issue as well! TA-DA!!! 

Light the torches, grab the pitchforks, and let's go get those money-grubbing graphic chip manufacturers and string them up! They must be witches! We'll all run out and get some Savage S3 or better yet, Hercules graphic cards! Derp....... So what happened? The fact of the matter is: that amount of heat is not designed to be contained in a very small notebook computer case. It doesn't matter whether the manufacturer is ATI or nVidia, high end stand-alone GPU are not designed to be sufficiently cooled in notebook computers. I'll go a step further to say that it's mostly the consumers' fault!

Let me start by stating very clearly that what I relate is from my observation and experience talking to original users of failed machines. For the last couple of years, an inordinate number of folks have brought me their dead machines that have suffered similar dead GPUs. In almost every case, the user had been either a gamer (derp), or someone who routinely used the computer on carpet, a blanket, or pillow, and many case....all of the above! You know those funny looking slots on the bottom? Yeah, anything soft that can cover those up.....not good. When you combine a major heat generating chip with covered up vents, that's really not good.

Today, I was brought another machine exhibiting the same symptoms, a HP DV6000 series. That'd be the third one of that series alone in the last 6 months. So imagine what a place like Best Buy's Geek Squad looks like? Last year a co-worker brought me her son's machine that was exhibiting the same issues. I even managed to reflow that Dell XPS M1530 so that it worked for several months.

Now, all isn't lost. If you have a machine that's been office used (eg. on an actual desk) and not abused, then chances are good that it'll run for several years. Actually my wife has been very happily using one of these "defective" T61s for close to a year now. It was used corporately for about 3 years before that. It's fast, does everything anyone who's not a gamer would want and it cost me $65 off of the local Craig's List. After bumping the RAM up to 4Gb, and installing a 240Gb SSD, it and the high res. WSXGA screen is everything that she wants: not one complaint since I put her on it last year! Now, does that mean that I'd recommend that for everyone? The answer is an unequivocal, NO! Just go back and read about the T61 I just did for a friend's wife who had an Acer with a  broken screen. I purposely sorted through literally dozens of T61s for sale on eBay to find one that had the cool running (relatively speaking) integrated Intel GPU that I picked up at an excellent $126. She won't have to worry one bit about that machine. For me; the $65 risk is worth taking given that it's my wife and if it fails, I know it's backed up (because my server automatically does this) and I can put her into another computer in the blink of an eye. 

So, what's the deal? Are those graphic companies just incompetent or are they out to try and take us all to the cleaners? I believe the answer is no on both counts. I believe that the consumer and the market has them in a "no win" situation. We demand new more powerful computers capable of doing more. And as the market shifted from desktop to laptop computing, we asked for something that laptops were never designed to do and we wanted to do it in smaller packages. Smaller means less capability to cool. However, nobody wants to say no, so the engineers do what the managers want, who have been convinced by the marketing guys that it's what the consumers are demanding. So they create designs that stand on the knife edge of functionality that can do exactly that they say it can, if conditions are just right, but only for so long. Then when the consumer pushes the envelop ever so slightly..........