[Contest] Design a $500 PC for chance to win 3DMark!

mromutt

mromutt

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Oct 14, 2014
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Rules are simple, design a gaming PC for $500 or less on amazon by posting below with links. Please label each link and keep the post neat as to make it easy for everyone to check them out. Formatting example below.

Most the grading will be done on the hardware itself but style will also be factored. No need to factor in OS, just need everything else, CPU, Motherboard, Ram, PSU, Drives, Case, GPU. Bonus points for getting better cooling and extras in there!

Contest will run till around Friday night PST.

Build Name:

Price:

CPU:

Motherboard:

GPU:

Ram:

Drives:

PSU:

Case:
 
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Floating Cloud

Floating Cloud

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For the fun of it I can see that limiting this to Amazon offered components levels the playing field, but if you would like to get bang-per-buck then opening it up to include major vendors like Newegg would make sense. Also AMD's Ryzen chips are expected to hit the market (along with third party motherboards) in the next thirty days. I think those are definitely worth waiting for, simply due to the huge price/performance advantage that they are expected (based on leaked prices and performance figures) to have over the Intel offerings.

Having said that I will see what I can rustle up tonight when I get home. Challenge accepted! ;)

Disclaimer: I plan to seek inspiration from Tom's Hardware regular 'best of reader suggested builds' section that covers various price categories (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-pc-builds,4390.html#p3).
 
Krystal LeChuck

Krystal LeChuck

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I did my best to design the best computer for $500. I hope I win this.
 
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ChenAU

ChenAU

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Dec 8, 2014
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chenau
Build Name: Pheasant Crusher

Price: $488.27

CPU: AMD FX-8350

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009O7YUF6/ref=ox_sc_act_title_6?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2L77EE7U53NWQ

Motherboard: Asus uATX DDR3 AM3+ AMD 760G + SB710 USB 3.0 HDMI uATX

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0054U7HIO/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2L77EE7U53NWQ

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX OC 3GB GDDR5

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KQUD9U6/ref=ox_sc_act_title_7?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2L77EE7U53NWQ

Ram: Kingston ValueRAM 8GB Kit (2x4GB) 1333MHz DDR3

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BD7QKT4/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2L77EE7U53NWQ

Drives: HGST - IMSOURCING HUA721010KLA330 1TB SATA 7.2K RPM 3.5IN

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013DU7R4/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3A9K7E9ANO2XK

PSU: EVGA 500 W1, 80+ WHITE 500W Power Supply

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H33SFJU/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

Case: Fractal Design Core 1000 USB 3.0 Cases FD-CA-CORE-1000-USB3-BL

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CUSUV0O/ref=crt_ewc_title_dp_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2I4D0WO1JEMBA

Build insight
The plain was to build a dope as fuck $420usd PC build to show mtdew and Dorito consumers that being a pheasent is not an option anymore. Not only is steam os is free it works well now. Anyway my choice in the amd 8350 over the 4core counter part or an i3 was due to both price and performance. Sure the i3 maybe a newer CPU but it's only comparable in single thread application which is on the way out ATM and the 8350's extra 4cores when running more than just your game. Because unlike Intel's i5 you can stream quite well
View: https://youtu.be/eu8Sekdb-IE
so yes now your friends can see you downing a 6pack of the dew with your cheese covered fingers.
Over to the the choice of GPU. I went with NVIDIA not only is it because it's how it's meant to be played but the 1060 is a really solid chip for $166 and for 1080p gaymen. But why not just get a 970? Because Maxwell is gimped for the new APIs also 3.5.
But why did I go all Hard over flash, well that's manly because if you like any pheasent you would need to keep you library of gay porn while SSDs have come down in price nothing is going to beat 40 bucks for 1tb, the 5-10 seconds of boot/load times will give you some time to reload on the doritdews.
2 sticks of 4gb of ram? But of course you are never going to go over it even when streaming. Maybe if you have 10+ tabs of gay porn, but I digress. Windows 10 only uses 3gb of ram on average and most >good games you would be playing use only 4 maybe even 6 if your unlucky. This is even when using bad browsers like chrome (stop using this garbage) while gaymen. Anyway 16gb+ is really only when your video editing but you know what I did my first semester of media production on 4gb, you will live. This system runs on just under 400w so you may ask why did I think of a $5 more expensive PSU that some might say is over kill. Well here is the secret sauce my fam, it's for over clocking which you can do on this system tho you may want to find a aftermarket cooler because that and does run hot, like really hot so hot that MJ will melt in his grave. On the plus side your new computer triples as a hot pocket warmer/space heater.
Now on to the case this is where my budget really takes a hit sending it $60 over but imo the fractal design case is Æsthetic bawhouse design well worth it.
Now go forth and spend the remaining $11.72 on dew and Doritos to enjoy while you quickscope on dust2.

 
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Floating Cloud

Floating Cloud

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Apr 8, 2016
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A tough one to fit in-budget and some hard choices had to be made, but here is my take on the build.

Total price $499.13

Build Name: Ooh that hurt.
Screenshot 2017-02-15 18.22.25.png

So the highlights...

  1. A spanking new Intel 7th generation i3 processor clocked at 3.9GHz. Only two core, but multi-threaded to appear as 4 core, and at least a nod in the direction of that sort of performance.
  2. ASRock, my favourite budget motherboard maker. The i3-7100 is speed locked, but you can still base clock overclock it with certain motherboards, this being one ;)
  3. SSD rather than a hard drive. This really impacted the money available elsewhere, but I find running on hard disks aggravating now that I have been spoiled by solid state drives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  4. Nice 8GB DIMM sitck. Single stick to allow an additional one to be purchased down the line.
  5. Passively cooled GPU. If we can't afford a GPU power-house then lets at least turn one aspect of that to our advantage.
  6. Case. Definitely NOT a highlight. For $15 more there are a huge range of very decent budget cases, but I can live with 'it holds everything together' as this one's high point.
 
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Liszt

Liszt

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Apr 26, 2015
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20170215 192229 Blocked web request to "b.reich.io/oezwsv.jpg" for user xxxxxxxx. 'Mal/HTMLGen-A' has been found at this website, reference ID 623004338.
20170215 192242 Blocked web request to "b.reich.io/oezwsv.jpg" for user xxxxxx. 'Mal/HTMLGen-A' has been found at this website, reference ID 623004338.
(97 items)
 
Floating Cloud

Floating Cloud

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Liszt said:
20170215 192229 Blocked web request to "b.reich.io/oezwsv.jpg" for user xxxxxxxx. 'Mal/HTMLGen-A' has been found at this website, reference ID 623004338.
20170215 192242 Blocked web request to "b.reich.io/oezwsv.jpg" for user xxxxxx. 'Mal/HTMLGen-A' has been found at this website, reference ID 623004338.
(97 items)
Click to expand...
Hey Liszt,

Sorry I think you may need to provide some context for that.
 
ChenAU

ChenAU

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rogesh

rogesh

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rogesh
What's the deadline?
 
Murderer

Murderer

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I surprised none of these are "wall mount" style to have extra funds for Umph!!
 
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mromutt

mromutt

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Ok Contest closed. After looking over the builds @ChenAU has designed the most powerful build pulling far ahead with an fx-8359 and a cut down 1060. Surprisingly pretty powerful, on top of that squeezed in a nice looking case anyone wouldn't mind having. chen pm me for your key
 
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