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.