A challange - £300 gaming base unit (already got gfx card)

Soldato
Joined
1 Sep 2007
Posts
5,315
Location
Santa Monica, California
I've come up with a spec but I would like to see what the denizens of ocuk can do. I already have a GTX260 for it, all that is needed is the rest of the base unit (case, psu, mobo, cpu, ram, hdd). Not going to be overclocked.
 
Badabing lol :p
budgetgamingrig.png
 
shazam! (although you can get on the mm and i have seen i7 920 builds going for around £400 on there, take the gpu from that and youd be close to £300)

build.png
 
he doesnt want to overclock and an i5 2500k will eat up more than half of the budget anyway, i have a budget for my new build of £150, we all have to make sacrifices sometimes(i am in love with your sig though)
 
much lower end although the athlon 2 might be able to unlock to a tri core and is easy to overclock, can fit in an ssd boot drive.

You can't unlock dual core Athlon IIs. They're a native dual core. You can unlock tris to quads since the tris are quads with a core disabled. And Athlon II tris and quads should unlock to Phenom IIs if you can enable the L3 cache. And then some quads will unlock to hexes.
 
doh my bad

Heh. It does get pretty confusing. Basically it's a production cost cutting method to make as many chips across as few lines as possible. The dual core Athlon IIs are the base for well, dual core Athlon IIs and Sempron 100s. Then Deneb (native quad core design with L3 cache) is the basis for Phenom II. Disable the L3 cache on Phenom II and you've got quad core Athlon II. Then disable a core and you've got tri core Phenom II or disable a core and L3 cache and you've got a tri core Athlon II. Then you've got Thuban, which is a native 6 core, disable two cores and you've got Zosma quad Phenom IIs.

Native hex with L3 cache.
Native quad with L3 cache.
Native dual core without L3 cache. (I'm not entirely sure the Athlon II duals do or don't have unlockable L3 cache. Someone with a dual can confirm/rebuff)

From three production lines you can make a huge variation of processors.
 
You could try one of those Cheapy H61 chipsets with an I3 or I5, Then a crappy PSU and 4GB of RAM, Although Im not sure how cheap that would be.
 
why do people spec 500gb drives? when 1tb is only £10 or so more?????

There's got to be a cut off point somewhere though. If I always thought like that (which I do haha) I always end up saying, "oh it's only a few quid more." Then you end up 40-50 quid over budget. An extra tenner gets me a better cpu, another tenner for a 1TB. 20 quid more gets me a better GPU.

I always get carried away and spend silly amounts. It's good to stick to a budget and work with that.
 
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition "125W Edition" 3.20GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £99.98
(£83.32) £99.98
(£83.32)
Coolermaster Elite 430 Windowed Case - Black (with 500w Elite Power PSU) £64.99
(£54.16) £64.99
(£54.16)
MSI 870-C45 AMD 770 Chipset (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £54.98
(£45.82) £54.98
(£45.82)
Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DL002) £37.99
(£31.66) £37.99
(£31.66)
Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) £35.99
(£29.99) £35.99
(£29.99)
Sony DVD-ROM 18X SATA DDU1681S-0B (Black) - OEM £13.99
(£11.66) £13.99
(£11.66)
Sub Total : £256.61
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
FREE SHIPPING (DPD Next Day)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : FREE
VAT is being charged at 20.00% VAT : £51.32
Total : £307.93
 
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