Affordable gaming

Over the years I've built a few affordable gaming systems for clients and it is always a useful exercise in component selection and building to a budget. It is not always getting the cheapest, fastest bits and throwing them together in trying to achieve the best 'bang for the buck'.

As I've said before balance and quality are also factors that should be taken into account. As well as functional bling with extra buttons, LEDs, fans, windows all playing their part to make the system look more expensive than it is. With this in mind, the case I chose was the Zalman Z3 plus with four fans and a fan controller included. An easy case to work with costing just £30. The PSU was a Cooler master G500 a modern, quality unit with 80 Plus Bronze certified and fully compatible with Intel Haswell processors. Nothing modular, but cable routing in this case is not a problem.

The MSi H81-P32 motherboard and Intel Pentium G3258 CPU choice has been detailed in the previous post. The memory was a Kingston HyperX 1600MHz kit. Again not the cheapest but quality and reliable. Following my passion for SSD hard disks the Crucial MX100 256Gb is my model of choice at the moment coming in at just under £75. An additional traditional hard drive can easily be added at a later date. The AMD Radeon HD7770 2GB is an average graphics card at a reasonable price. An nVidia GTX 750 Ti is a more modern alternative.

All in all, a very nice performance system that will play most games well.

Intel's performance Pentium

I managed to get hold of one of the Intel Pentium G3258 20th Anniversary processors. This was released recently as the first over-clocklable Pentium CPU in a long while. It has been mentioned a lot online and in various publications as the good start to an entry-level gaming system. At a price of just £47 it is a real bargain.

Also instead of having to purchase an expensive motherboard with exotic overclock capabilities and settings, some of the manufacturers were releasing BIOS upgrades that would offer a basic overclock function. So the one I went for was the MSi H81-P32 board for just £37. This is a really neat micro-ATX board with a USB3 internal header making it suitable for modern cases. However I see now that this motherboard has been discontinued. Pity.

I was able to upgrade the BIOS to 1.8 version by putting a spare Haswell CPU into the Socket 1150 and running MSi's Live Update program from within Windows. I then swapped the Pentium G3258 processor in and rebooted without any problems. Next, I went into the UEFI BIOS and changed the CPU ratio from 32 to 42. I then had a Pentium processor overclocked to 4.2GHz. This was using the Intel stock air cooler which I noted is copper-cored and better than the usual Pentium coolers. People have managed to overclock this chip to 4.8GHz using better air or water coolers but I considered the extra 1GHz speed without any additional costs or risks is good enough. Under load the CPU temperature was 65C which is very acceptable.

A really good start to an affordable gaming system (£47 + £37) which I will detail in my next post.