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Somewhat related, I wonder why the PC gaming ecosystem has always focused on the extreme high end for everyone. I very rarely see anyone trying to get into PC g

by zanny 9y ago

Somewhat related, I wonder why the PC gaming ecosystem has always focused on the extreme high end for everyone. I very rarely see anyone trying to get into PC gaming considering a very reasonable $600 budget that would in real world performance get them 90% of the way to a system twice as expensive. Back in, say, 2008 the diminishing returns threshold was much higher. But builders have never adapted to how good cheap parts are - games are being designed for the average hardware, and nowadays that is extremely old relative to how it would have been ten years ago. The real winners of Coffee Lake and Ryzen for me are the 8100 and 1200. Quad cores with, respectively, high frequencies or an unlocked multiplayer on almost all motherboards that come in under $120. These chips beat the pants off an i5 2500k and until this year that kind of performance was barely trickling down when suddenly it just windfalled as soon as AMD was competitive again. Same way the winners in the GPU market are either the 1060 or 580. At least before the mining boom, they were both available under $200 and delivered performance comparable to $500+ cards three years ago. The real advent of recent years has not been pushing the envelope in terms of tech - even the most ludicrous builds still cannot handle 4k and VR is still in its infancy - it has been in driving the cost of admission to great looking 3d games at 1080p down to a fraction what it was five years ago. I'm not sure what it will take to break that 4k barrier. Maybe once we are near a mature 5nm node we will be able to stuff enough transistors onto a die to push that many pixels. But until then we should appreciate how affordable PC gaming is becoming for anyone just getting into it. At least when GPU prices come back down to Earth...

0xcde4c3db 9y ago
> I very rarely see anyone trying to get into PC gaming considering a very reasonable $600 budget that would in real world performance get them 90% of the way to a system twice as expensive. It's not especially mainstream in PC gaming culture, but if you search for "console killer" it's pretty easy to find people talking about such builds.
diab0lic 9y ago
I just built a PC and tried to budget as cheaply as possible while still retaining reasonable performance. It ended up costing $1200 (plus monitor, another $200). I went with a Ryzen 3 1300x and a RX580. I'd love some feedback about how I could have got the price down closer to $600 as I was disappointed in myself for only being able to get it down to $1200 + monitor. That said the performance is incredible. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/F87BCy https://pcpartpicker.com/list/F87BCy (NOTE: The GPU price isn't added into the total as they don't seem to have a value for it right now.)
- holtalanm 9y ago
  The build that I ended up settling on was this: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2HBKvV https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2HBKvV Not sure if it helps, but that price is under $1k for reasonably similar performance. RAM could be faster though, I guess. Edit: I just noticed this but the build I linked is also water cooled, while yours looks to be air-cooled? I think it just takes some looking around to find good bang-for-your-buck.
  - diab0lic 9y ago
    Looks like you got two extra cores, and I assume you're overclocking it with that cooler? What frequency did you manage to get it to run at? Looking back I probably should have just bought a 1060 6GB, though then I would have been paying for G-Sync instead of FreeSync.
    - holtalanm 9y ago
      I honestly havent put it to together yet. On paper, it should be similar performance to yours, though. I designed it so that I wouldn't have to get a new CPU for _years_, and am not really planning on OC'ing it until later on when it needs that extra 'boost'. To add to my GPU choice -- I have been bitten before by AMD software that supports their cards. Not going that route again, ever. Had to run an open source graphics card driver a few years back instead of using the proprietary drivers from AMD because the proprietary drivers kept shutting the card off. This was easily 6 years ago so it may not be so bad now.
- zanny 9y ago
  GPUs are definitely overpriced right now, but just some basic arithmetic on pricing a $600 ystem would be something like: $110 CPU + $80 mobo + $60 for 8GB ram (you really don't need 16GB to play PC games - just add some swap space if you are really paranoid, and RAM is still overpriced) + $200 for a 580 at MSRP (whenever it gets back there) + $30 PSU (entry level 450-550w bronze units often go on sales that low nowadays) + $30 case (I know at least the Coolermaster N200 sometimes hits $20-30 and is solid). You can get a budget 22" 1080p monitor for about $85-90 nowadays, and a 5 button mouse + media keyboard are usually only about $20. And there are regularly ~250GB ssds for $80 as well, so the total is just under $700 with peripherals. I'd definitely say your mistakes were the monitor and ram. I was recently shopping for all manner of monitors and generally the following price chart applies: 22" 1080p TN for ~$90 24" 1080p TN for ~$110 22" 1080p IPS for ~$120 27" 1080p for $150 24" 1080p 144hz for $180 27" 144p 144hz for $250 (from Monoprice) Anything beyond that is way overkill for gaming, especially 4k, which also starts around $250. The monoprice monitor I mention goes on sale for $250 often and is an unbeatable deal, but the panel quality is lackluster so it might take an RMA or two of that model to get one without a substantial number of dead pixels. If you want to avoid that hassle more reliable monitors with those specs start around $350 though. For ram, that market is a mess too right now, but just like how i7s and 1080s are overvalued in builds, so is 16GB of ram. Especially with an ssd, especially with an nvme drive, having 8GB of swap is not going to do anything to performance. Same with memory frequency - it really does not matter for gaming, especially not enough to consider spending more money for higher frequency kits. The rest is just waiting for a good sale rather than buying everything at once, and its not like you would wait months, just watch /r/buildapcsales for a few weeks and you can pick up a whole build on the cheap. In your build, it is just nickle and dime differences per part that add up. $20 more on each individual piece comes out to several hundred dollars total.
archagon 9y ago
Agreed, especially when it comes to eGPUs. I built a mid-core, 1050-powered eGPU for my 2013 Macbook last year and I couldn't be happier! It feels like magic that I can plug this relatively tiny box into my laptop and boost my performance by 4x. http://archagon.net/blog/2016/12/31/cheap-and-painless-egpu-thrills-on-a-2013-macbook-pro/ http://archagon.net/blog/2016/12/31/cheap-and-painless-egpu-...

by zanny 9y ago

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

> I very rarely see anyone trying to get into PC gaming considering a very reasonable $600 budget that would in real world performance get them 90% of the way to a system twice as expensive. It's not especially mainstream in PC gaming culture, but if you search for "console killer" it's pretty easy to find people talking about such builds.

diab0lic 9y ago

I just built a PC and tried to budget as cheaply as possible while still retaining reasonable performance. It ended up costing $1200 (plus monitor, another $200). I went with a Ryzen 3 1300x and a RX580. I'd love some feedback about how I could have got the price down closer to $600 as I was disappointed in myself for only being able to get it down to $1200 + monitor. That said the performance is incredible. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/F87BCy https://pcpartpicker.com/list/F87BCy (NOTE: The GPU price isn't added into the total as they don't seem to have a value for it right now.)

holtalanm 9y ago
The build that I ended up settling on was this: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2HBKvV https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2HBKvV Not sure if it helps, but that price is under $1k for reasonably similar performance. RAM could be faster though, I guess. Edit: I just noticed this but the build I linked is also water cooled, while yours looks to be air-cooled? I think it just takes some looking around to find good bang-for-your-buck.
- diab0lic 9y ago
  Looks like you got two extra cores, and I assume you're overclocking it with that cooler? What frequency did you manage to get it to run at? Looking back I probably should have just bought a 1060 6GB, though then I would have been paying for G-Sync instead of FreeSync.
  - holtalanm 9y ago
    I honestly havent put it to together yet. On paper, it should be similar performance to yours, though. I designed it so that I wouldn't have to get a new CPU for _years_, and am not really planning on OC'ing it until later on when it needs that extra 'boost'. To add to my GPU choice -- I have been bitten before by AMD software that supports their cards. Not going that route again, ever. Had to run an open source graphics card driver a few years back instead of using the proprietary drivers from AMD because the proprietary drivers kept shutting the card off. This was easily 6 years ago so it may not be so bad now.
zanny 9y ago
GPUs are definitely overpriced right now, but just some basic arithmetic on pricing a $600 ystem would be something like: $110 CPU + $80 mobo + $60 for 8GB ram (you really don't need 16GB to play PC games - just add some swap space if you are really paranoid, and RAM is still overpriced) + $200 for a 580 at MSRP (whenever it gets back there) + $30 PSU (entry level 450-550w bronze units often go on sales that low nowadays) + $30 case (I know at least the Coolermaster N200 sometimes hits $20-30 and is solid). You can get a budget 22" 1080p monitor for about $85-90 nowadays, and a 5 button mouse + media keyboard are usually only about $20. And there are regularly ~250GB ssds for $80 as well, so the total is just under $700 with peripherals. I'd definitely say your mistakes were the monitor and ram. I was recently shopping for all manner of monitors and generally the following price chart applies: 22" 1080p TN for ~$90 24" 1080p TN for ~$110 22" 1080p IPS for ~$120 27" 1080p for $150 24" 1080p 144hz for $180 27" 144p 144hz for $250 (from Monoprice) Anything beyond that is way overkill for gaming, especially 4k, which also starts around $250. The monoprice monitor I mention goes on sale for $250 often and is an unbeatable deal, but the panel quality is lackluster so it might take an RMA or two of that model to get one without a substantial number of dead pixels. If you want to avoid that hassle more reliable monitors with those specs start around $350 though. For ram, that market is a mess too right now, but just like how i7s and 1080s are overvalued in builds, so is 16GB of ram. Especially with an ssd, especially with an nvme drive, having 8GB of swap is not going to do anything to performance. Same with memory frequency - it really does not matter for gaming, especially not enough to consider spending more money for higher frequency kits. The rest is just waiting for a good sale rather than buying everything at once, and its not like you would wait months, just watch /r/buildapcsales for a few weeks and you can pick up a whole build on the cheap. In your build, it is just nickle and dime differences per part that add up. $20 more on each individual piece comes out to several hundred dollars total.

archagon 9y ago

Agreed, especially when it comes to eGPUs. I built a mid-core, 1050-powered eGPU for my 2013 Macbook last year and I couldn't be happier! It feels like magic that I can plug this relatively tiny box into my laptop and boost my performance by 4x. http://archagon.net/blog/2016/12/31/cheap-and-painless-egpu-thrills-on-a-2013-macbook-pro/ http://archagon.net/blog/2016/12/31/cheap-and-painless-egpu-...