Build a PC on Any Budget: Three Builds from $500 to $2000

Posted 05/02/2012 at 12:58pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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Our Builds Meet the Benchmarks

Price lists are all well and good, but performance is where a config pays off

First, let’s talk about how we priced our PCs. The figures we used are not made up. They were live prices from various etailers at the time of purchase. We also factored in rebate savings. Yes, some of you may cry foul at that, but if you do your part, rebates can actually save you money. The prices will also vary. For example, the Fractal Design R3 was on sale at a certain web store for $99. In fact, it’s often on sale, but by the time you read this, it’s possible it could have climbed up by $10. The prices of hard drives, too, can fluctuate greatly from day to day, and sometimes hour to hour. Still, the pricing templates are pretty close to what you can get and you can perhaps do even better.

For performance, we ran our standard system benchmark suite against all the PCs and also ran an additional battery of tests on the low-end PC so we could compare it to the more economical builds we’ve done over the last year or so.

The What Recovery?! PC

Of the three boxes here, the lowest-cost PC was the most challenging. There are simply so many compromises made to get it under $500 that most would say it’s almost not worth the sacrifice in features. In fact, for many folks, taking our $667 PC from the August 2011 issue and upgrading it with a Radeon HD 6850 and an Asus P8H67-M (the original Gigabyte board is no longer offered) will yield better general performance for just a couple hundred bucks more than this budget box. You should also take a good look at our AMD-based machine from the March 2012 issue, which takes the budget to about $830 for a very respectable PC. But recognize that $830 is a world away from $480 to many people.

For what it’s worth, our sub-$500 PC ain’t bad. It slaps around the $340 box we built in September 2011—if you think $500 is tough, $340 is a serious kick in the performance nads. The Sandy Bridge-based Celeron G530 eats the $340 machine’s Fusion APU as an appetizer and uses its single stick of RAM as a toothpick. In encoding, the Celeron G530 takes a quarter of the time as the $340 box, and in gaming it saw about eight times the performance as the integrated chip. But how does WR?! compare against something stouter? Say, the Core i3 2100-based $667 PC? Not exactly great. The Celeron G530 is about 30 to 50 percent slower than a Core i3 part in most of our application and encoding tests, and its lack of Hyper-Threading hurts it. You've got to take the Celeron for what it is: It isn’t agonizingly Atom-slow, but it’s certainly no Core ix chip. If we had more cash to spend, that would be one of our first upgrades. 

If you’re wondering whether an integrated GPU would make more sense, we’d say it depends on your needs. AMD’s A8 X4 3850 probably has the best IGP out today, yet it still only hits 3,702 in 3DMark Vantage. The HD 7750 spits out 8,664, which puts it in a better ballpark for light-duty gaming. For comparison, we dug around on the Internet and found people with scores of 7,000 using overclocked Core 2 Quads and Radeon HD 3870 x2 cards. We also found people reporting 3DMark Vantage scores in the 5,500 range with GeForce 8800 GTX cards. 

Yes, a fatter GPU almost always helps, but it’s not always that simple. Dropping in a fatter GPU means having to think about a fatter PSU, too. Once you’ve crossed that line, you start to upgrade the case, the motherboard, and, well, you might as well build our Sweet Spot PC instead, or the $830 PC from our March 2012 issue.

Don’t let this totally get you down. We ran our normal benchmarks on this budget box and were frankly surprised we could run everything. Both of our gaming benchmarks, for example—Far Cry 2 and STALKER: CoP—are run at 2560x1600. The HD 7750 managed both—not with stellar frame rates, mind you, but managed nonetheless. We don’t even attempt these tests on machines with integrated graphics. 

The Sweet Spot PC

This PC is pretty much perfect just as it is. Sure, a 480GB SSD would be nice, as would a 7,200rpm drive, but this machine is just right for most enthusiasts who don’t want to sink two paychecks into a PC. OK, if we had to throw a bit more cash at it, a Core i7-2600K/2700K and its extra threads would really help with the multithreaded task battle. Lack of Hyper-Threading, in fact, is probably the main contributor to the performance delta between this machine and the Tax Refund, and the reason even our elderly (but admittedly far more expensive) zero-point box holds its own in some tests against the Sweet Spot. As it is, the Sweet Spot is from 11 percent to 32 percent slower than the Tax Refund PC in our application tests. The biggest gap is in Sony Vegas, which is a thread monster. 

In gaming, it’s also a given that a $270 GPU is not going to outbox a $570 GPU. In our STALKER: CoP test, the GeForce 560 Ti 448 was at a 41 percent disadvantage. In Far Cry 2, where it’s more about the CPU, the GeForce 560 Ti 448 was only 27 percent slower. What would be a nice step up in graphics for this moderate machine? We’d probably spring for the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC card that’s reviewed on page 80. At $480, it’s the cheaper alternative to Nvidia’s top-end GeForce GTX 580 and not as cost-prohibitive as a full-tilt Radeon HD 7970 card. Beyond that, we’d probably look at amenities such as the same Blu-ray burner used in the Tax Refund PC. 

The Tax Refund PC

There is no free lunch, and getting performance costs money. If you want a faster computer, you have to pay for it. Thus, it’s no surprise that the fastest PC here also happens to be the most expensive. But how much faster?

Compared to the Sweet Spot, the Tax Refund PC gave us up to 47 percent faster rendering times in Sony Vegas Pro 9, as well as 33 percent more speed in Lightroom and 31 percent more out of MainConcept in video encoding. In gaming we saw a 69 percent bump in STALKER: CoP and 38 percent in the more CPU-limited Far Cry 2 benchmark. We also ran an overall 3DMark 2011 on Xtreme and the Tax Refund PC produced 44 percent higher frame rates. Heaven 2.5 saw a 144 percent boost in frame rates. But you know this, man: More money spent on hardware means more performance.

We know what you’re thinking, though: What else would we do with this box? Since anyone interested in the Tax Refund PC is already pushing his or her PC pretty hard in content creation tasks, a natural step would be to reach for a six-core Core i7-3930K chip. The only reason we didn’t run with it now is because of the price premium it’s fetching today. The chip would normally be less than $600 but a mysterious shortage of the CPUs has seen the 3930K selling for more than $725 on the few stores you can even find it. The usual storage updates also apply here, such as a 480GB SSD and 7,200rpm HDD, but those are mostly personal choices. If you’re looking for pure fun, filling all eight DIMM slots with 32GB of RAM and running a 24GB RAM disk isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds. Those bent on high-resolution gaming at 2560x1600 may want to consider dropping in a second Radeon HD 7970 card.