Welcome to our 2013 Holiday gaming
system buyers guide we're going to be taking three different price points so
that is $500 or what we're calling just games because it's a no frills gaming
box I mean it doesn't even have USB 3 our second price point is around $11,000
and we're calling that game now because it's a well-rounded gaming box built for
today it's that gamer sweet spot and then our third price point we're calling
game on or the more futureproof and upgradeable gaming box although really I
hate using those words because there's no such thing as a futureproof system
but at any rate it has some extra bells and whistles and it costs a little bit
more to go along with that it comes in at around $1,700 well it always starts
with the CPU doesn't it so the Athlon x4
750k at 80 bucks is a great choice it's about $5 more than the 740 but you get
that K unlocked multiplier which might not be relevant with the hardware we
have in there I really don't recommend overclocking this system in its current config but who knows you might make
changes in the future that'll help that out now the reason we went with an AMD
quad core as opposed to an Intel dual core is that in the past or even really
in the present most games benefit more from fewer but more powerful cor so we
would recommend Corey 3s normally but
we're seeing Frostbite 3 as well as AMD's mantle API upcoming that are going
to make much better use of more cores even if they're less powerful so that
makes me pretty confident in this recommendation for the near future now
for RAM we went with a single 8 gig module of whatever was the cheapest RAM
we could find it's about 60 bucks and the reason we went with a single module
is that our fm2 a55m dgs r2.0
motherboard only has two memory slots so
while we do get slightly lower performance for going with a single
module versus dual Channel operation what that means is we can upgrade to 16
gigs of RAM later on down the road by simply adding another 8 gig module
rather than forcing ourselves to remove two 4 gig modules throw them away and
add two 8 gig modules in order to achieve the same effect now this board
doesn't have really any features to speak of it doesn't even have USB 3 but
for 50 bucks it's hard to go wrong and it does work we do have one so if you
want other stuff you can spend another 20 bucks or whatever else and you can
get a more feature board but this one is just game that's what it does for our
power supply this is where we never recommend buying generic so we went with
the most basic brand name power supply we could get which was the anch basic
350 at 30 bucks it's around $10 $15 more
expensive than a generic power supply but at the very least you know that it's
rated for continuous power and you know that if it says it has over current
protection on it or whatever safety certification on it that it actually has
it and it was actually tested you'd be amazed how many power supplies out there
are not validated and don't have the features that they claim to have so
that's why we went with that um again the not overclocking ready components
and speaking of not overclocking ready we are using the stock cooler and the
like the cheapest Apex case we could find you can get this thing for as low
as 20 bucks it's functional but it doesn't have great cooling so no
overclocking so far except the CPU so guys you would need to make some
upgrades to the config for overclocking now okay the case does have one thing
going for it though and that is it does have ventilation in the side panel above
the CPU area as well as above the graphics card area so when we put that
HD 7850 whether we get a 1 gig card or a
two gig card that'll affect pricing by about 25 bucks but a two gig card will
run you around $155 it'll have somewhere to exhaust the
heat now this card is an Untouchable value I would have loved to present you
guys with here's the AMD option here's the NVIDIA option that makes sense at
this price point NVIDIA doesn't really have anything that's that competitive at
this price point but the cold hard truth of the matter is neither does AMD the
7850 is an outgoing card it's it's a discontinued model so once these are
gone they're pretty much going to be gone so I would recommend grabbing one now if you're interested in it for our
storage you have a couple of options so number one is the Western Digital blue
one terab it's available for around $70
number two is the Kingston v312 20 gig SSD for around $880 I had
people telling me a little while ago I was talking about something oh you're crazy lonus you can't put an SSD in a
$500 machine yes you can and yes it absolutely makes a very big difference
it's a matter of whether you're willing to go for the SSD now install just some
of your games and wait until you can add a hard drive later when you get another
allowance or you get another paycheck or whatever else or whether you must have
the storage now in which case go with the WD blue now our pricing for this
system was before Windows Windows 8 is about $100 but if you already have a
window license that you can reuse or if you're planning to use a free OS such as
Linux then you obviously don't have to buy that so that is what we'd consider
to be optional our game now system I actually struggled with a fair bit I um
I ended up with some recommendations that I think are going to sound a little bit unusual but if you guys hear me out
maybe you'll agree and if you don't of course let me know in the comments so for the CPU I went with a core i5
3330 this is a nonk skew but unlike
Haswell ivybridge nonk CP use can be
overclocked a little bit and you can get around 3.6 comfortably out of these
chips which will put it in about the same performance range as something like
a 4670k which costs a full $50 more that
gives us a lot of money to work with elsewhere in the build so for memory we
went with 8 gigs of RAM again at around 60 bucks you can get either a single
module or a dual Channel kit and you can
decide whether you care more about having the extra little bit of
performance from Dual Channel now or if you care more about being able to expand
to 32 gigs of RAM in the future depending which way you go because both
boards that are options at this price range the z77 Pro 3 or Pro 4 are
available for around $95 however z77
boards are becoming less common so pretty much buy whatever you can for the
power supply we went with the cic 620 wat this is the s122 this is a much
better power supply than the one in the last system which was nothing special
other than that it just had a proper brand name and like prop certifications
on it at $65 to $80 the cic 620 wat unit
is efficient it's quiet and it is just fantastic um speaking of things that are
efficient and quiet we went with the hyper 212 plus again we're talking about
a moderate overclocking system here and for 30 bucks this is a great value
because the stock cooler just really isn't good enough for any overclocking
these days for the case we went with the 200r same thing more solid build quality
so this is around a $50 $60 case than that $20 $30 case that we looked at
before much better ventilation better brand a better looks just better in
every possible way in very in very practical ways now the video card is
something that some people will agree with and some people won't but I narrowed it down to I really think the
gtx770 makes the most sense in this
configuration you can get great performance out of it remember this is
basically equivalent to a GTX 680 and with the holiday bundle which includes
Assassin's Creed 4 Batman Arkham Origins and splinter cell black Blacklist
there's just not really much on the AMD side that is comparable to that the 280X
is about the same price I was able to find 770s as cheap as around
$310 and just doesn't have the
same oomph that the 770 does not to
mention I'm a huge advocate of NVIDIA Shield I think it's awesome and 770 is
the lowest end card that allows you to get $100 off a shield so you can get it
for $200 now because of some of the money that we saved elsewhere in the
build our store solution becomes a lot more robust so for our SSD we went with
a Kingston v300 120 gig drive it's not the fastest SSD in the world but for $80
to $90 it is a very compelling value and you will notice a difference if you
install your OS and your most frequently used programs on it then we were able to
grab a 2 tab Seagate hard drive and throw that at the system for mass
storage now this gives us a ton of flexibility we could go with 90 gigs of
os SSD and allocate 30 gigs to use as a c using smart response technology on the
hard drive or we could just go 120/2 terb or whatever else the case may be
either way because of that money that we saved by giving up4 gigahertz and a 10%
IPC Improvement and then doing a little bit of overclocking we were able to get
this great storage solution and a rocking video card then of course if you
need Windows then that's an extra $100 and whether or not you already have that
is your business in the performance uh
game on segment where we're you know future proofing things a little bit and
color matching them a little bit it became a lot easier because I have a bit
of flexibility I don't have to worry about every $3 that I'm spending and is
it contributing to the bottom line in terms of performance so we started with
the 4770k which gives you pretty much no
benefit today over something like a 4670k but again Frostbite 3 and mantle
coming with you know there being more benefit to more threads we're going to
go ahead we're going to sort of place our bets and spend an extra hundred bucks on something with hyper threading
and overclocking potential and all that stuff for RAM we went with 16 gigs right
out of the gate both of the other configs went for 8 gigs and while there's really no benefit from a gaming
perspective to 16 gigs of 1866 Corsair Vengeance blue today it matches our
motherboard and it is a little bit more future proof although again I really
hate that word I hate that word for motherboard we went with the ASUS Z87
Pro it's got Wireless AC it's an extremely solid board ASUS really is my
number one choice when it comes to motherboards so anything other than ASUS
you know that I'm probably making a compromise somewhere along the line
either of those other configurations you could pay an extra 2030 or even $40 and
get an ASUS equivalent board but that's exactly the problem is on a$1 th000 rig
or on a $500 rig I don't feel comfortable spending that kind of extra
money on something that really just doesn't contribute to Performance and
contributes more to features and robustness so this is something I'd feel
very comfortable overclocking as high as we could go speaking of overclocking as
high as we want to go we went with a Corsair txm 750 W power supply it has
four PCI Express connectors for a potential dual GPU SLI or Crossfire
upgrade in the future and is very wellb built and modular it has like
disconnectable cables again we're we're wasting a few bucks on something that
doesn't contribute to Performance but it does make your system look better and it
does actually make your air flow slightly better depending on how your
cable management goes for cooling we went with the nhu12s it's quiet it
performs extremely well and it's knocked to us so of course I think think it's the bee's knees because just all their
stuff is fantastic in fact probably have no to stuff here see this is an
excellent fan the NF p12 although it's not my favorite fan anymore the NF F12
is now my favorite fan for the case I went with a fractal design Define R4 the
extra like $6 we're spending on this case versus the Corsair 200r is purely
for looks and overall build quality and
you know quiet sound dampening material and stuff like that does not contribute
anything to Performance and in fact the thermals probably aren't even quite as
good as the 200 R it's just this is a really really really nice case and we're
going for a more luxurious build here now while everything else about this
system was relatively easy I really struggled with the video card on this
one because at this kind of a price range you can probably afford to jump up
to a 780 but it costs a full $100 more
than a 290 it does come with three games
as opposed to one so you can find 290s that come with Battlefield 4 or you can
find 780s that come with the Assassin's Creed 4 Batman Arkham Origins as well as
Splinter Cell Blacklist bundle but and the 290 is louder
noticeably louder runs hotter than the 780 but is near it in terms of sheer FPS
performance and costs about $100 less so
you guys got to make a decision here do you want to spend an extra $100 for
better temperatures uh lower noise
potentially better game bundle depending how you feel about the games that are including Ed it the $200 discount on
Shield um NVIDIA gsync potentially in
the future if you wanted to upgrade your monitor in a couple months and get something because it's really is
revolutionary it's awesome or if you want to go ahead go for the more value
oriented solution now and you're willing to take a hit on power consumption as
well as Acoustics and temperatures you think AMD mantle is going to be an
outstanding piece of technology even though we really haven't seen it yet then 290 looks like a good bet so if I
had to pick one in this price point I
kind of had to go with 290 but I think
780 is also a very solid choice if you have the extra $100 to spend now for
storage things got easy again because the Samsung 840 Evo is just playing a
better drive than the more value oriented SSD where we were looking at before we can afford a 250 gig drive so
you can actually fit your OS and like a fair number of games and programs on it
and it's got some awesome features like their data migration software as well as
rapid which allows you to use RAM in order to accelerate the drive itself and
is very intuitive to set up and actually works really well and then for our
storage drive we went with a wd red 3 terb this might seem like a weird option
cuz it's a raid drive but the things that make it a good raid drive like the
fact that it's more resistant to vibration and is just generally more
robust even though it's not the fastest drive in the world compared to something
like a blue or a black makes it a very compelling option if you're not putting
your most you know performance sensitive data on it which you're not because you
have a 250 gig SSD in your system so overall this system is very well-rounded
Windows is of course another $100 very well-rounded extremely high performance
when it comes to gaming and I think is a more normal overall build I hope that
you enjoyed our shopping for a PC holiday build guide generally uh why did
we do this well reason number one was that you guys have been asking us to do
this absolutely forever and reason number two is that we've I I don't know
if you noticed this but we did not have a pre-roll on this video so we are
experimenting with using affiliate Revenue where we take the knowledge that
we have about what's good that you guys want to know and we tell you and then
you click on the links that we provide you with to buy them and then we get a commission out of that we're
experimenting with using that as a way to supplement or even longterm perhaps
replace um paid advertising spots on our
videos so let me know what you think of that idea let me know what you thought
of the holiday buyer guide and I think
that's pretty much it like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have something
to say about my my choices and how they were terrible or how they were fantastic
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