[quote name='mutantchipmunk']I got a kit from tigerdirect for a great price. I prefer AMD over intel mainly because intels chips are over priced and for the same price as a dual core i5k or whatever you can get a quad or an 8 core amd chip. Its better to have more physical cores than less cores with hyperthreading like intel. Make sure the psu is 500w or more if your going to put in a big graphics card. I got the gtx 550ti and i dont regret it, plays almost all games on max except for battlefield 3 but i can get it close. The gt650 is better than the 550ti and only $170.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...one-Kits&cm_sp=Masthead-_-Computers-_-Spot 05
Try newegg too.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/MasterComboStore.aspx?StoreID=7&name=DIY-PC-Combos[/QUOTE]
1. Stay away from barebone kits. 90% of the time, you can source the parts separately for cheaper and more than likely they stick some crappy generic tower case, power supply and bland hard drive. Only a few times have I seen good deals on barebone kits from either tigerdirect or newegg, but they always include 1 or 2 crappy parts that will properly fail within 6 months.
2. There's a number of Intel chips that offer way better value than anything AMD makes right now. This is why the i5 and i7 k series chips have been extremely popular even though we are talking about $200-350 chips for consumers who need that kind of processing power. AMD FX chips can't touch Intel or even AMD's older X4/X6 chips for price, performance or value. AMD's lower end and older X4/X6 chips still offer one of the best bang for buck value cpu's on the market compared to Intel's entry level pentium or i3 chips. I would just skip FX unless you find an insanely good deal.
3. "Its better to have more physical cores than less cores with hyperthreading like intel" Uhhhh what? Stop making hugely wild and generic sayings here man. It all depends on the application and what you requirements are. Even the fast dual core i3 ivy bridge chips with HT is faster in many games than similarly priced AMD quad cores, but you do take a hit on content creation software or newer games that do take advantage of 4 real cores instead of 2 physical and 2 logical.
4. You don't NEED a 500w or better power supply. This is all marketing crap and hype. A good quality 400w power supply is more than enough to handle an i7 3750k with a gtx 680 at stock speeds and still have room to spare.
5. GTX 550 ti is NOT a big graphics card. That is an entry level $100 gaming card.
6. No such thing as a "GT 650". There are only a GTX 650 ($70-100) and a GTX 650 ti ($110-140). The normal 650 is slower than the 550 ti, but the 650 ti is faster, but not by much. You'd have to be smoking crack if you think you'd pay $170 for the 650.
As for the build, the build guide isn't too bad, but this is what I'd base your next build idea on instead:
You will be hard pressed to find a better configured set of quality parts for this price with Windows.
It sports the tried and true, AMD x4 quad core black edition processor; its about 3 years old now compared to the more recent FX or Intel cpu's, but for $90, it still kicks ass. Even has overclocking potential if you wanted to explore this route. For this build, I didn't. Paired with cpu is a cheap $50 motherboard that will handle itself fairly well, but I'd do like to point out that you can find similar name brand motherboards on sale for $30 or so. Shop around.
The center piece of this build is the graphics card and its hard to mistake it since its the beefy and great value AMD HD 7850 2GB card. It's about as powerful as a GTX 570 for not a lot of money. Granted, you could probably be fine with a $100 HD 7770 or a $130 GTX 650 ti, but this is the next graphics tier over those and will hold its own for years to come. The only way it could get better is if you could find the same gpu for $150 like it was during thanksgiving sales.
Next, I picked the nice and cheap NZXT source 210 case since its on sale for a fantastic price of $30 shipped. Its usually around $40-50 + shipping so this is a decent amount of savings for your build. It's also a much higher quality product than one would usually get at this price point, so buy with confidence. Paired with the case is the nice Corsair 430w V2 that's more than enough to power your 125w AMD cpu and 130w AMD gpu at stock speeds; all in all, your system would barely hit above 300w on full load. You really don't need much more power than this, specially since its $26 for a quality unit (although you can find them on sale for less than 20, but its MSRP is $40-50; at that price, I'd look at the XFX 550w pro or CX500).
Throw in a set of decent 8GB ram modules, a simple and a great value 2TB 7200 hard drive, a cheapo dvd burner and a copy of windows; your set to go.
Now, you could drop the GPU down a tier to save a few bucks and upgrade the motherboard to a better one that supports overclocking, pair that with a higher wattage power supply in the 500-600 (XFX 550w is $46 @ newegg right now) range to support OC as well as the cheap $20 Cooler Master 212+ cpu cooler to give your system the bones to be faster at the expensive slower graphics for a better PC. But its up to you and OC isn't really for everyone. For the average user for a budget gaming box, above list is more than enough power to choke a dolphin...
