I tend to use PCPartPicker a lot. I often see builds which have an astronomically high price point, most around the $1000 range. The side effect of this is some kind of subtle elitism shows up, and a gaming PC is not a gaming PC if it doesn't cost more than $x for example. In this post, I will attempt to shed light on the bare minimum you need to build gaming PC without breaking the bank.
First of, why even bother building a PC? Other sites have tackled this issue so I won't go into that. There are three major components in a PC that will seriously have effect on the performance of your PC in games and out of them. That being the Central Processing Unit(CPU), Memory(RAM) and Graphics Card(GPU).
For Memory, the minimum you need is 4GB RAM. However, as of 2015, several AAA games have started pushing for a minimum of 6GB RAM for games. To name some, Advanced Warfare, Dying Light and DragonAge Inquisition. Despite this, you can still play all pre-2015 games with 4GB of RAM.
It gets a bit tricky now. You can go two ways, the INTEGRATED and DEDICATED.
- Integrated means that the graphics card is inside the CPU itself.
- Dedicated means that the graphics card has its own hardware and is not inside the CPU.
A quick rule of the thumb is to either get a dual-core Intel or a quad-core AMD. I am not being an Intel fanboy here but it is proven that Intel has stronger single-thread performance. If you go the Integrated route, you need to get a AMD APU or an i3. Do not get an AMD A4 or A6 because it is a dual-core AMD processor which is well, slow. You need to get a A8 or A10 APU such as the A8-7600 or an A10-7800 which is the flagship of the APU line. As for the i3, you could get the i3-4160 (3.6GHZ, Intel HD 4400) or the i3-4360(3.7GHZ, Intel HD 4600. From a budget perspective, upgrading to an i5 or i7 is pointless as the integrated graphics stays the same (HD 4600). The primary difference between the two is that the HD4600 is stronger and trades blows with AMD's A8 APUs. If you are planning on not getting a dedicated GPU, do not even think about using the graphics in a Pentium or Celeron for gaming, normally referred to as Intel HD Graphics Family. They just cannot cope with games.
The dedicated route on the other hand means that you will get a better graphics card at the expense of a weaker CPU. For AMD, you need to find AMD Athlon X4 7XXK or 8XXK such as the X4 760K or X4 860K. The Athlon boasts four threads with no integrated graphics card. For all intents and purposes, the X4 line is exactly the same as the newer FX 4300 line, with the only difference is that the FX4300s are more expensive and use a different socket. For Intel, you would want to get a dual-core Pentium G3XXX such as the G3220(3.20GHZ, Hashwell architecture) or a Celeron G18XX such as the G1820(2.8GHZ, Hashwell architecture) The main difference between the Pentium and Celeron are higher clock rates and a bit more of CPU cache. As for the graphics, the minimum you want to get is either a AMD R7 250 GDDR5 or a Nvidia GT 730 64-bit GDDR5
And there you have it! A barebones gaming PC. I have made a few sample builds for you to check out just so you get an idea of what I'm going on about:
- AMD Integrated Gaming PC This PC should be able to sustain 30fps using high on some games and medium/low settings on 720p in other games.
- Intel Dedicated Gaming PC This PC should be able to sustain 30fps using high on some games and medium/low settings on 720p in other games.
As a side note, do not get the Intel Pentium J2900 or Celeron J1900 which come soldered along a motherboard. Those are low power CPUs meant to act as passively cooled(that's a fancy way of saying it has no fans) low-power HTPCs. Personally, I have a Pentium G3258 and R7 250 and I can play on high in Far Cry 4, medium in Advanced Warfare with around 30 to 40 fps. Please note that certain games have a dual-core lock that do not allow dual-core CPUs to play. This can be easily bypassed with a few mods though.
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