.. When we last left our hero, he had just finished two different builds for a friend of his. Now it’s time for him to think of himself..

As I said in the previous article, I prefer to deal with actual stores. Given I’m Canadian, I was happy when I found that not only did Newegg.com have a Canadian site, but also a warehouse in Canada (Mississauga, just west of Toronto). I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that if you have a newegg.com link, you can change the beginning part to newegg.ca instead (or vice versa), and it will take you to the same corresponding page. The only thing that changes is the price output – and everything else based on location, such as shipping information. All the other data, such as specs, reviews, and the like, is the same on both sides.

Also, in the part of the country where I live (Ontario), most products and services have a 13% sales tax you have to add on – the HST (Harmonized Sales Tax). Of that, 8% is taxed by the province (Ontario’s Provincial Sales Tax) and the other 5% is by the federal government and is across the entire nation (Goods and Services Tax). Suffice it to say that if you want to buy something and have $20 to spend, you’re looking at only about $17.70 before tax. This is relevant for these next two builds because the budget is to include taxes.

BUILD 3: $1000 Canadian, including tax

This means that I’m looking at an actual budget of about $885. Since Newegg has a Canadian site, I can do the exact same kind of searching as on newegg.com and go from there. And so it begins..

First, what I did in this case was divided the price up into six sections. The first was $85, and the other five were $160 each. That gave me a ballpark to start with for pricing. I knew I’d be moving numbers back and forth – take $20 from this section and add it to that one – but at the end of the day, I needed something to start with before I could build. And here’s where I went.

Three of the 160’s were slotted for motherboard, processor, and video card. From this I spent $130 on an Intel CPU – the Core i3-4130 processor, a dual-core Haswell chip running at 3.4GHz. I’ve always been partial to Intel myself for processors, but I do acknowledge that for a low-priced gaming system, AMD is the way to go. I think most of this stems from how I remember boards being designed years ago (think the 386, 486, etc era): boards were produced around an Intel chip and then other manufacturers would have their own board-compatible variants. And while Intel would stop at, say, 486 DX-50 or 486 DX2-66, AMD would turn around and produce a 486 DX4/100 – a processor that operated faster internally but communicated on a slower bus than the DX2. And the processor would be marketed at a competitive price point, and board manufacturers would build accounting for that too. In the meantime, Intel was busy trying to create the next generation of processor while other companies were building “upgraded” versions of current ones. Nowadays, the question to which CPU to get is a matter of budget, planned use, and preference – both make good solid processors but are better at different things.

But Intel is generally assumed to be better for the higher-end CPU’s, so a board that can support that is the better option, and thus picking a relevant CPU is a good idea. So an Intel chip to me makes sense, and now to an Intel-based board. I ended up putting $150 toward a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-HD3 motherboard. I knew I wanted LGA1150, full-sized ATX (micro-ATX just don’t pack enough into them for me), four memory slots (here’s part of why), and at least two PCI Express 3.0 slots so I had the option of SLI or Crossfire. The Gigabyte board seemed to get me the best mix of quality and functionality for what I wanted.

Of course, the computer needs memory, and on any sort of gaming rig, 4 GB is pretty much the minimum. I started with that and had in mind a plan to add more on the build if I still had the room. Of course, it didn’t come out that way, but I did choose a pretty decent stick: G.SKILL’s Ripjaws X series, 4 GB of DDR3-1600 memory (model F3-12800CL9S-4GBXL) at $50. I wasn’t in the mood for fiddling with two 2 GB sticks instead and I’m aware I’ll only get single-channel times, not dual-channel. That being said, we’re looking at 9-9-9-24 for a reasonable price – I don’t think I could find anything better for less. For what it’s worth, I was expecting that 8’s and 7’s would cost a fair amount more, and as I type this I’m doing a quick check and finding that I could have got DDR3-1066 7’s for $58 by G.SKILL or DDR3-1600 7’s by Corsair for $65. Now I’ll know for next time!

A quick check at the Tom’s Hardware article gave me some options. There’s a table on the second-last page that gives the various video cards from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel and where they place relative to each other. For example, it will tell you how an NVIDIA GTX 8500 fares compared to an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470. I theorized that the cards listed, unless the entry mentions otherwise, assume default minimum for memory, and if you increase the amount of memory by an appreciable amount, it moves up the chart one level. So I started with an AMD R7 250. The standard for that is 1 GB of memory. Bring that up to 2 GB and that might be enough to improve it by one level. The 250 with DDR5 is one level higher than the 250 with DDR3, and one level lower than the 260. I told Newegg to list me 250’s, 260’s, and 260X’s – which Tom’s team suggests as being the best GPU for around $150. And then I spent $120 on a card that was, according to my assumption, likely only one level below the 260X: Gigabyte’s GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 2 (GV-R725O5-2GI) card. Seems fine.

Of course, my concern at this point was having a case the card would fit in easily. Newegg’s videos helped answer some of my questions, and a little Googling did the rest. I found the Rosewill Galaxy-02-A case was a good budget option and the card would fit with room to spare inside it. It also came in at only $50. Keep in mind all these prices are in Canadian dollars, not US dollars, so prices are generally a bit more.

Then I needed a power supply. Had to have an 80 PLUS power supply, and amusingly the price difference between 80 PLUS Certified and 80 PLUS Bronze was negligible. Might as well spend an extra $5 or so and get a Bronze supply, like the RAIDMAX Cobra RX-500AF-B. It’s a 500 watt power supply that can handle dual-card configurations as well as being ready for a Haswell system. Also, I currently have a 750W OCZ 80 PLUS Bronze power supply in my main machine at the moment, and if I find I need more power, I can likely just swap them around. And this was about $60, so I was happy there.

This left me with about $335 left, and I still needed a hard drive and an optical drive, and I really wanted an SSD in this box. Another $200 got allocated for the SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE250BW, which is a 250 GB SATA SSD drive with respectable read and write numbers (over 500 MB/s on both). That means lots of room for the OS as well as any speed-relevant games I might be playing, and other software where I don’t want to wait for load and save times. Incidentally, 250 GB is also a pretty respectable size for a hard drive anyways. That being said..

.. a cheap drive for storage is a pretty good idea as well. Enter Seagate’s Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB hard drive at $68 followed by LG’s Blu-Ray reading/DVD writing UH12NS30 at $60. Between the two of them, storage shouldn’t really be an issue until you have to start writing to Blu-Ray discs. In the meantime, this should give lots of room, and the ability to watch Blu-Ray movies at a good price.

But was I done? NOOOOOOO!! See, this is actually the second build for myself. The first one I had started plugging in numbers and found I was going higher than I’d budgeted, so I’d increased the budget from $1000 to $1500 (both including tax). This one was after I’d made the $1500 one. And now I get to the one I came up with before!

BUILD 4: $1500 Canadian, including tax

.. or about $1327.43 before taxes. You can get a pretty good system for $1300 – about $1200 US at current exchange rates. But the extra $450 gives some good wiggle room, and I forgot that I hadn’t included a copy of Windows with it. So what do I get to do with that wiggle room?

To start, an Intel CPU. I now get to upgrade to a pretty good quad-core CPU by going with the Core i5-4670K, a Haswell processor running at 3.4GHz. It has the same clock speed but four cores instead of two will make a lot of difference. Twice the number of cores sets me back twice the currency – $260 all told just for the CPU. But it takes one slot not two!

Speaking of slots, you have to slot that CPU somewhere, and for that you need a good quality motherboard. Back to Gigabyte for a G1.Sniper board this time for $160, only $10 more than the board from the previous build. For that price though, three PCI Express 3.0 slots and some other useful utility. I don’t plan on 3-way SLI’ing or Crossfiring anytime soon but hey, you never know! And honestly, the competition was pretty close, and in the end that was the deciding factor. I think I saw about four or five boards and everything had something going for it, but in the end a third PCI Express 3.0 slot pushed me to the Sniper.

Memory. Ah, memory. Remember what I said earlier about only using one slot? Now I decided I’m taking 8 GB and going for two slots. Plugging into the Gigabyte Sniper board is, well, G.SKILL Sniper memory. An 8 GB package of DDR3-1333 (2 x 4GB, model F3-10666CL9D-8GBSR) seems like a good match, and with the same timing as before. For $85 I wasn’t unhappy. A quick scan now shows me I could have got 2×4 GB of 7’s or 8’s for under $100. As usual, if I knew then what I know now..

Before I got too far, I made sure to account for a copy of Windows 7, 64-bit with SP1 added. $110 for that because it’s kind of hard to run a gaming system without an operating system. I guess the other one would be stuck on Linux or something.. And yeah, 7 and not 8 because among other things, I can’t stand the GUI and can’t be bothered trying to figure out how to disable it. I think having the same UI for tablets, smartphones, and PCs is a laudable idea but I don’t like this implementation at least for the PC end of things. Windows 7, on the other hand.. no qualms here.

I still needed a video card, and Tom’s Hardware suggested that the R7 260X was much better than NVIDIA’s offerings at around the same price point. For about an extra $40 I went with Sapphire’s Radeon R7 260X with 2 GB of DDR5 (model 100366-2L). It’s the least expensive 2 GB card on the 260X chip and $20 or less than the 1 GB versions – in fact, HIS’s iCooler Turbo is the same price, and I think with twice the memory, Sapphire’s will come out on top.

At this point I’m down to case, power supply, and drives. The case and power supply are going first so I know how much room I have for drives. I’m going with the same Rosewill Galaxy series – the Galaxy-02 this time, not the Galaxy-02-A, largely for the extra fans. It’s $50 so there’s no difference there. But more importantly I need a good power supply to put into it. Back to RAIDMAX’s Cobra series, this time for the RX-700AC-B power supply. It’s a 700 watt 80 PLUS Bronze system, so should I wish to SLI or Crossfire I should be all ready. And for an extra $15 ($75 total) I get an extra 200 watts’ worth of support. Can’t really go wrong there.

I still have over $400 left by now. I start with the same SSD I had before but I end up having to trim a bit at the end. I end up with a Crucial M500 model SSD, which I believe is the same series as one in my main machine right now. This is a 240GB drive, model CT240M500SSD1 and I certainly won’t be unhappy with one in my system. The SSD’s primary job for me is a fast bootable drive for the OS; any other use is secondary.

So where do I put all my games, documents, music and pretty much my entire cyber-life? You know that hard drive I listed in the previous build? This would be its big brother: a Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive (ST3000DM001) at $130. And if something goes wrong and I have to back it up? Yeah, this is why I ended up having to trim a bit – I didn’t want to be backing up to DVD if I can get Blu-Ray burning for a good price. And you know what? I can. Pioneer has a Blu-Ray burner for under $100 – model BDR-2209 – and it’s the only Blu-Ray burner that Newegg had listed as 5/5 for reviews. I think that qualifies as “a good buy”, don’t you agree?

So, I’m done now, right? Got two boxes lined up for myself, two quotes for a friend.. so I can take a break now, right? Weeeeell.. as it turns out I have another friend in the States who’ll be moving soon and her computer’s gone on the blink. She’s borrowing one from her sister at the moment, and so maybe it’s not an awful idea if I can come up with a price for her. Would you believe that what I came up for her is Part the Third and Part the Fourth? Yep. Two systems based on “how cheap can I build that I’d be happy with”, and two more based on “how cheap can I build that’s not scraping the bottom of the barrel?” Yes, there’s a difference – the first is assuming certain things I’d assume for myself, such as insisting on an 80 PLUS-rated power supply. The second goes one step lower – not quite the cheapest but I wouldn’t be happy buying lower quality than these.

.. TO BE CONTINUED ..

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