The $350 AUD Gaming PC

[Guest]

So a friend of mine wanted to join the glorious PCMR. He's been gaming on his Dell laptop for the last few years. Mobile i5, Radeon M445... it was time for a bit of an upgrade. He had a budget of $350 AUD, give or take $10. I was on Gumtree Gamtrey in seconds. I'm very surprised that I managed to get some of the deals that I did, as the Australian used market is pretty overpriced.

 

SPECS:

CPU: i3-540 @ 3.07GHz - $25

Cooler: ID-Cooling Sweden Series SE-214X - $29

Motherboard: Intel Desktop Board DQ57TM mATX LGA1156 DDR3 - $85

Graphics: Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7870 OC GHz Edition - $90

Memory: Kingston 12GB (3x 4GB) DDR3-1333 - $40

Storage: Seagate ST1000LM024 1TB 5400RPM 2.5" HDD - $0 (Had it lying around)

Power supply: Corsair VS450 450W ATX - $51

WIreless: TP-LINK WN881ND Wireless N PCIe Adapter - $19
Case: Some cheap Huntkey case I found on Gamtrey, can't find it anywhere online - $10

Total: $349 AUD ($278 USD)

 

RATIONALE:

CPU: You don't really need more than two cores for gaming, provided you have four threads. The i3-540 performs quite well for the price we paid for it. That said, I had originally planned to use an i5-760. It arrived from eBay a week late, turned out to be an i5-750 covered in thermal paste, and was also dead. Refunded and tried again from a different seller. It was a clean i5-760 this time, but again, DOA. At this point, I gave up. Found the i3-540 on Gamtrey for half the price of the i5-760, and picked it up straight away.

 

Cooler: As we weren't buying new, we couldn't get a stock cooler with the CPU. We figured if we were gonna pay for a cooler, it might as well be a half decent one. PLE Computers had a sale on and the SE-214X was $10 off. It was more than enough for us, as we have no plans of overclocking the CPU. More on that later.

 

Motherboard: The Intel DQ57TM was the cheapest Buy-It-Now board we could find on eBay Australia. Luckily, the seller was less than 20km away, so we picked it up locally to ensure there was no damage in shipping. The board has 4 DIMM slots, more than enough SATA connectors, and the exact PCIe slots we needed for our graphics card and wireless card. It is capable of overclocking, but as I'm not very comfortable with overclocking (at least on the CPU side), and as the BIOS overclocking tool was absolutely horribly laid out and extremely confusing, we decided to leave that alone.

 

Graphics: The Radeon 7870 is generally the minimum required graphics card for a lot of AAA titles these days (Just Cause 3, DOOM, PUBG etc). It is perfectly suited for a build like this, and according to my quick google searches research, it shouldn't be bottlenecked by the i3. I'd been eyeing one on Gamtrey for quite some time, however my poor Q6600 bottlenecks my Radeon 6850 already, so there was no point in me buying it for myself. Luckily, the ad was still up when I started planning this build. Negotiated the price down from $100 to $90, and picked it up the next day. Not a bad deal at all. I have it stable without touching the voltage at 1100MHz core and 1300MHz memory. Any higher caused occasional issues, and as my friend isn't very techy at all, I decided it wasn't worth it to push further.

 

Memory: The Gamtrey listing we found advertised 8GB (4x 2GB) of DDR3, which would have been just fine. When we got it, it wasn't quite that. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we'd just paid $40 for 16GB of RAM! Then I was less pleasantly surprised when one of the sticks was dead. EIther way, 12GB is more than enough.

 

Storage: I had an old 1TB laptop HDD lying around. If you thought we were gonna try and fit in an SSD, you can go back to your 7700K and 1080 Ti SLI and think about what you've done.

 

Power supply: Before anyone goes mad, the VS series is perfectly fine. We purchased the VS450 brand new, not used. 450W is more than we needed, but considering the VS350 was only $4 cheaper, we thought why not. Yes, it's non-modular. Yes, it has ketchup and mustard cables. No, it will not explode.

 

Wireless: My friend doesn't have easy access to an ethernet connection, so we grabbed a cheap TP-LINK wireless card from PLE. Maxes out at 300Mbps, but he's only dreaming of 30Mbps.

 

Case: We left the case for last. Scouring Gamtrey, we found an old Huntkey case for $10. I still can't identify the model. There's a little metal lip thing at the back right above the top expansion slot that makes the DVI port on our graphics card inaccessible. All the front panel USB 2 ports had no plastic pin-holder-things and the pins were all bent. It also has FireWire. Nevertheless, it fits our components, and has a working power switch. That's really all we needed.

 

BENCHMARKS:
I was very pleased with the results here. For $350, we got playable framerates in AAA titles, and a godlike experience in older games. Heaven was run on a smaller monitor, for reasons. I'm too lazy to run it again.

 

Cinebench:

CPU: 227 cb

OpenGL (Normal): 45.46 fps

OpenGL (OC): 46.31 fps

 

Unigine Heaven: (1680x1050, High, Tesselation OFF, Anti-aliasing OFF)

Normal: 57.8 fps

OC: 62.5 fps

 

Just Cause 2: (Dark Tower, 1920x1200, Optimal, Motion Blur OFF)

Normal: 118.03 fps

OC: 120.44 fps

 

Just Cause 3: (1920x1200, Minimum)
Normal: ~37 fps

OC: ~41 fps

 

DOOM: (1920x1200, Default, Motion Blur OFF)

Normal: ~50 fps

OC: ~54 fps

 

Overwatch: (1920x1200, High, 100% Render Scale):

Normal: ~65 fps

OC: ~68 fps

 

THE BUILD:

This was probably more easy to do than I made it. Either way, the build was... less than fun. I was stupid and put the motherboard in first, so I'd have to install the CPU, RAM and cooler afterwards. When I discovered the first CPU was dead, my fingernail nicked three socket pins while removing it. After a bit of help from the forum you're currently reading this on, the pins were back in position and making contact just fine.

Bent:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fixed:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I mentioned some issues with the case in the rationale section. Here's some examples.

Damaged front panel USB 2 ports:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Access to DVI port blocked: (Only one 16x slot on the motherboard)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attempted improvement for Intel stock coolers on side panel:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also didn't get any screws with the motherboard or case. To solve this, I took all the unused optical drive expansion screws out of my PC and my old Dell XPS 420 case, and had just enough for the motherboard, HDD and the IDE optical drive that I put there simply because there was a drive bay cover missing. There's no IDE port on the motherboard. I wonder how confused he'll be... anyway. When I finally got everything working, I was treated to possibly the worst POST screen I have ever seen in my life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gorgeous. Once I'd stopped laughing (I was dying the second I saw it), Windows 10 installed just fine, I got all the drivers set up, and the only issue I had with it was the boot times from the 5400RPM HDD. But hey, it's proof you can build a gaming PC for less than $400 AUD ($320 USD). And now I have a few more days to finish DOOM on it before I have to give it to the owner.

Edited September 4, 2017 by Guest
Formatting

[Jurrunio]

The thing on some Chinese products (including the transistors in Corsair VS PSU) are their bad quality control. Some are perfectly fine while some fail in a short time. That's why we dont like them. It's just too risky to use.

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

The thing on some Chinese products (including the transistors in Corsair VS PSU) are their bad quality control. Some are perfectly fine while some fail in a short time. That's why we dont like them. It's just too risky to use.

I understand that. However, they pass the 80PLUS quality inspections, and they're from a very reputable brand. I've only seen positive reviews on sites like PCPartPicker. They work fine for low-end budget builds, which is what they're intended for.

[Droidbot]

20 minutes ago, LeinadTM said:

I understand that. However, they pass the 80PLUS quality inspections, and they're from a very reputable brand. 

80+ does not do quality testing, it is JUST efficiency testing. 

[Guest]

22 hours ago, Droidbot said:

80+ does not do quality testing, it is JUST efficiency testing. 

Oh. Didn't know that.

[Javier Ewe]

solid build, even though the motherboard was pretty expensive, surely there is a cheaper board on Gumtree? In my area (not in Austrailia) at least, LGA 1156 boards go for 50AUD all the time, I've even seen an MSI P55 board going for 40AUD thereabouts. WIth that money saved, you could definitely get a SSD or at least a Hybrid drive. 

[GrayTech]

I like those used budget builds!

[Guest]

23 hours ago, Javier Ewe said:

solid build, even though the motherboard was pretty expensive, surely there is a cheaper board on Gumtree? In my area (not in Austrailia) at least, LGA 1156 boards go for 50AUD all the time, I've even seen an MSI P55 board going for 40AUD thereabouts. WIth that money saved, you could definitely get a SSD or at least a Hybrid drive. 

That was my plan, but sadly, there were no listings for LGA 1156 boards in my area.