Cheap ITX system for casual gaming

Gripen90 · 25 Jan 2013 at 19:20

Hi all.
I'm planning to build a cheap ITX system for the bedroom that will be able to play movies and some games also. I would back it up as a LAN pc too.

I have been thinking of buying the following since I'm on a low budget. I have a 250GB Harddrive I will use for storage/OS.

ASRock B75M-ITX
Intel Core i3-3220 Ivy Bridge w/ Box Cooler
XFX Core Edition PRO550W
Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced
Lite-On iHAS124 DVD-drive
Crucial BallistiX Tactical 8GB DDR3 1600MHz (2x4) CL8

Costs about £300.

As for graphics I have an AMD Radeon HD6990 reference card (review sample) I though of using if the PSU can handle it ?

Else I have a XFX GeForce 8800GTX XXX 768MB I could use untill I can afford a Radeon HD 7870LE.

What do you think ?. The budget is around £300 excluding graphics card for now.

/edit.
NVM..

Gripen90 · 26 Jan 2013 at 07:51

nevermind ordered it.

Gripen90 · 26 Jan 2013 at 17:04

snips86x said:
hmmm...The only think I would have changed would have been:

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI H61I-E35 Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 ITX Motherboard £41.99
1 x Patriot Intel Extreme Masters 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (PVI38G160C9K) £35.99
Total : £88.48 (includes shipping : £8.75).

The AsRock boards are not great and the RAM would have saved you some.

Thanks for the suggestions. I had been looking at H61 chipsets, but chose B75 for the Ivy Bridge support out of the box

Also I'm ordering from Denmark so the prices are a bit different

Gripen90 · 30 Jan 2013 at 11:28

dacads said:
good job mate but the PSU won't handle the radeon 6990 I'm afraid, 650w would have done the job!

I figured that out, so I decided to go with the XFX ProSeries 750w XXX semi-modular (SeaSonic OEM) PSU.

Gripen90 · 4 Feb 2013 at 10:02

Soon to be assembled

Gripen90 · 12 Feb 2013 at 12:19

CEUOTC said:
How has the build gone?

On and off since I'm testing the stuff outside the case. I'm trying go fin a suitable cooler for the ITX board and which doesn't block PCIE/Ram slots. But else it runs fine when testing

Marine-RX179 said:
The i3 3220 would bottleneck the 6990 by quite a big margin.

To be honest, I think you would had been better off getting a 2nd hand non-K i5 2500 (with turbo-boost to 3.7GHz) for around £90...it would have been much better than the i3...

I tried old timers as Crysis, Far Cry 2 and Modern Warfare 2 and they run smooth - even Metro 2033 is very playable (hadn't expected that). I'm not expecting to play the newest games on this system.
I had considered a 2nd hand core i5 2400/2500 but couldn't find any being sold at that price point.
However I have plans going for a Core i5 3470 later on if I fell it's needed.
So far I'm very impressed with the Ci3 3220.
The only times I've seen then "limitations" is when running 3DmarkVantage/11... so I don't do that