last year's holiday buyers guide was a big success for us in between Black
Friday and the holiday shopping season rolling around the release of hot games
like Assassin's Creed Unity our performance guide for which is coming
soon so make sure you're subscribed and the requests for me to do another one
well all that added up to I guess it's time to drop another holiday buyers
guide on
y'all Corsair gaming RGB keyboards
feature Precision Cherry MX RGB key switches for 16.8 million color per key
backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more
just like last year I'll be addressing three different price points under 500
around 1,000 and around 2,000 before the cost of Windows with three different
sets of recommendations and rationale for the parts that I chose pricing is
pulled from a combination of newegg.com and amazon.com with a sanity check at
nc.com to make sure that it's not wildly more expensive at you know who knows
some other place so we'll start with just game this system isn't powerful
enough for heavy use outside of you know day-to-day General use and 1080p gaming
and doesn't try to sell itself based on future proofness the CPU was the
toughest decision here because AMD 750k
quad core and Intel's g3258 dual core
are both similarly priced overclockable and can run on cheap motherboards so it
came down to the design Philosophy for the system the best performance right
now and even though AMD's quad core design might give it the edge in future
games the Intel chip gets the nod today thanks to its better single-threaded
performance and lower heat output when overclocked which will allow us to turn
its speed up a fair bit even with the basic included cooler the motherboard
only had to meet a couple of key needs it had to support overclocking on the
g3258 which it does with the latest BIOS and it needed a PCI Express 16x
expansion slot Bingo my RAM choice of a
single stick of the cheapest DDR3 that I could find probably looks a little funny
since this CPU will benefit from a dual Channel configuration with two sticks
but while 16 gigs may be useful in the future we don't really need it today and
my choice of a single 8 gig stick allows me to upgrade to 16 gigs later without
scrapping my existing memory since my board only has two RAM expansion slots
the case and power supply Choice was dictated by the available options really
at this price point case and power supply bundles tend to be available at
lower prices but mostly junk so I went
with the only aggressively priced bundle skew from a brand that I trust that I
could find the video card is where this rig can be a bit flexible based on
regular prices and our Target cost for the the total system the R7 260x is the
clear winner given its similar performance to the 750 Ti at 1080p in
titles that we've tested recently and it's much lower price storage is where
just game gets the biggest upgrade since last year thanks to the plummeting
prices of ssds in the last year and we went with a 120 gig Kingston v300 SSD
man that thing is cheap and a wd 1 TB Green Drive for mass storage and games
so in summary just game is very similar to last year's model with a couple of
key differences it's got similar gaming performance but now it gets USB 3 albeit
not in the front and a much better storage solution which I'd really
recommend keeping in or even bumping up to a 2 terabyte drive if you have a big
game library but you also have the option to take out the hard drive or go
just hard drive rather than having an SSD as well and then dumping that money
back into the graphics card where an r92 2 70 would be a worthy upgrade our
second system is game now similarly to
just game we didn't worry ourselves about performance tomorrow but unlike
just game we really avoided skimping in areas where we felt like we were losing
20% of the potential performance to save 10% of the cost this one is all about
bang for the buck the CPU was another tough call here I wish Intel had
something a lot more competitive in this price range because between the Pentium
chip for 70 bucks and their entry level K series I5 for 240 bucks they have
nothing that overclocks so for an Enthusiast oriented buyer guide like
this one AMD wins at this price point for sure with their six core FX 6300 now
my initial plan was to go with a motherboard that supported SLI but I
scrapped that when I did my philosophy checked and realized that I was spending
about another $40 on a feature that I wasn't using today and so we went with
the m5a 97 a very well proven product
for RAM I went with 16 gigs of hyperx Fury 1866 MHz DDR3 but I could easily
swap that out with a comparable product from another trusted brand like Corsair
or g-skill I added the extra capacity though because while strictly speaking
games might not need more than 8 gigs today web browsers also need to run well
on gaming machines and if you're a tab fiend like me you might enjoy the extra
breathing room that a bit more system memory affords you the power supply was
another component where I picked out something much more expensive than cut
it down dramatically when I realized that I was spending too much this power
supply might not really look like anything special but it will handle our
CPU and GPU just fine as long as we don't plan to upgrade them an
aftermarket cooler to give us more overclocking Headroom is a must on this
chip thanks to its six processing cores and decidedly last gen efficiency but
thankfully there are great choices for around 30 bucks and this one will take
care of our chip nicely for the case we went with the same one that we used for
our cavar build guide about 6 months ago it looks okay to my eyes it has
ventilation over the graphics card area and it's reasonably easy to build in and
cable manage so there you go the graphics card is where we blew most of
our money on this machine but the GTX 970 is just a remarkable graphics card
that single-handedly takes this from a budget box to a very competent gaming
machine and thanks to its power efficiency it saves us a couple bucks on
the PSU to boot for storage I feel like
250 gigs is the sweet spot for SSD capacity where you can install programs
and pictures but not necessarily lots of games and videos on your boot drive
without worrying about it too much and this drive is well known to be reliable
and is at a great price right now we also added the best bang for the buck
capacity of WD green for secondary storage to go with it the 3 terb Model
costs twice as much as the one tbyte and stores three times as much stuff
yay and then finally we chucked in an optical drive because it's only 20 bucks
and like YOLO right all in all game now
actually has less raw CPU performance than last year's model so if you had a
few more bucks to spend uh power supply with some more room for upgrades or a
better CPU might not be a terrible bet but given the size of modern games I
stand behind the upgraded storage and I felt like the better GPU was also a
worthwhile trade-off for gamers too and that's where that extra money went which
leads us to game on our 4K capable
gaming machine where we stressed less about saving a few bucks and focused
more on having the best possible experience well but without completely
losing track of the value proposition of the parts we were using CPU was an easy
choice this time the Intel 4690k quadcore overclocks like a bat out of
hell and unless you torture it on purpose features enough processing
course for any game and even medium intensity content creation for the
motherboard we went with a Z87 a because
z97 doesn't actually offer a tangible performance benefit and the only thing
we were really after here was support for CPU overclocking and support for SLI
stepping up to a pro model will give you more Creature Comforts like Wi-Fi but we
decided to allocate our budget a little bit differently this year for RAM I
didn't change anything from game now 16 gigs is still enough for most people
today and you can Chuck another kid in tomorrow if you feel like you need 32 at
said time and then for our power supply we actually decided to splurge a little
bit here since we went with two graphics cards and a windowed but fairly small
case so we grabbed a fully modular power supply which provides the benefit of
helping things look tidy since it's windowed and even though it's not all
about the bling bling um you know
doesn't hurt to have an expensive Gadget look expensive rather than shoddy
speaking of expensive I blew over a hundred bucks on the cooler this time
around and there are a couple couple of reasons for that one this is an
excellent cooler and we'll keep our CPU safe while overclocking and two is that
in spite of its power this is shaping up to be a pretty quiet machine so I wanted
something that wouldn't ramp up too hard even when gaming and would stay quite
quiet the case was an easy one the fantex enu pro has the features and
build quality of cases that cost much more and it's compatible with all the
hardware we need with ample Cooling and I think it looks
fantastic and and then where are we spent again all the
budget the Dual GTX 970 graphics cards
that I squeezed into our 2000ish price point now I know what
you're going to say lonus you always say single better GPU versus SLI lesser gpus
and that's actually not what I always say I always add except sometimes the
970 is one of those sometimes it's so similar in
performance to its bigger brother the 980 and is so much less expensive that
two of them costs only about 20% more
than a single 980 but will absolutely
wreck the single card solution in any games that scale basically at all in
SLI for storage we basically yoed out and doubled the capacity of our previous
choices even though a 730 series SSD's performance benefit over the older 520
isn't that huge in the real world and the 6 TB green cost more than twice as
much as the 3 terab green I mean you got to have some you got to have somewhere
to store your stuff though right you know so storage is very flexible you
could decide how you wanted to spend that money but there you go and then
finally morolo we threw in a DVD burner again just in case you want one which
makes our game on machine not only by far the fastest gaming rig in our
buyer's guide which of course I would hope it would be since it's the most
expensive but also the most versatile there are a couple things you could add
like stepping up to a core i7 and doubling up on on RAM if you really need
the extra multi-threading and multitasking performance but other than
that this is about as much as I'd recommend spending on a mostly for
gaming tower that will deliver a great user experience across the board for a
very long time speaking of great user
experiences for years to come 54 Club is
giving our viewers that's you guys a chance to participate in one of their
most epic giveaways ever they're offering 60 months that's 5 years of
their membership absolutely free to one lucky winner in the continental US or
Canada if we're talking dollar values that's
$3600 worth of 54 club membership as
their service cost 60 bucks per month uh for
$120 worth of retail value of clothing
or more so that's up to $7,200 of clothes which is probably more
than I've spent on clothing in my my entire life but I'm sure my wife would
love it if I had that many clothing options especially stuff that
legitimately looks good like what 54 sends out the winner will be sent an
assortment of clothes every month based on the info that they give to 54 they
take your way size top size and style profile type and then one of their style
experts will pick out the new additions that suit your existing wardrobe and
showcase new Styles entry for the contest is pretty simple just visit the
link in the video description and prove that you're a human being by answering a
pretty basic question and then you can also get three more entries for each
friend you refer through social media so pile up those entries and get yourself a
bunch of free clothes and head to the link in the video description that's
bit. lefc giveaway to enter And even if you
don't win the contest you should check out five for anyway it's a great service deliver stylish closed to your door on a
monthly basis it's everything I just described except you actually have to pay for it all right guys thank you for
checking out our holiday PC buyers guide 2014 I hope you enjoyed it like like it
and share it with your friends if you thought it was helpful leave a comment if you have any feedback on our Hardware
choices would love to hear from you guys and as always check out the link in the
video description if you want to help us out by contributing monthly or buying a
cool t-shirt like the one I have or the 541 either of those is okay they both
help us and then what was the other thing right we're changing your Amazon
bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small Kickback whenever you buy say for example PC
components thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe
he