We all want to play our favorites games on the PC, but for the price of most solutions offered by manufacturers we can hardly afford it. The alternative of mounting components to arm your own PC should never be neglected, and here we have listed some settings for less than $500 that may be of your interest.
Probably like us, you feel pretty excited when you think on the crusade that Valve and its allies are undertaking to create a new videogame ecosystem based on PCs. This is nothing to be ashamed of, Steam Machines are so impressive that we all want to have one at home, but not everyone feels satisfied with what most manufacturers can offer.
I don’t know if this is due to the incorporation of the new graphics chips from Nvidia, but I get the feeling that the prices of the most interesting units from Nvidia, the classic series within its laptops line for gamers, have extended their range significantly. One of the most striking models is the new GE line. These models of 15.6 and 17 inch screens have always been a reference among users that seek a gaming laptop with interesting features at more attractive prices than other classic brands in this market niche.
The MSI GE62 APACHE-002 is one of the first laptops we’ve seen with a graphics chip such as the Geforce GTX 965M from Nvidia. It comes with quality features and some unconventional elements, which is another thing that we have always liked about MSI laptops. At first glance, this laptop has few weaknesses but, unlike the previous versions of this series, we can’t find it below the 1500 Euros range and that, today, it’s a price high enough so our level of demand and quality must also be consistent with that price range.
Technical Specs
While Intel still has to present the Broadwell varieties for laptops, we must continue conforming with Haswell quad-core processors in more powerful gaming laptops. These processors provide four real cores with eight processing threads, thanks to Intel Hyperthreading technology. Actually, Broadwell processors will not mean great performance improvements over these models but, undoubtedly, it will make for better integrated graphics and more controlled consumption.
This setup is gaming-oriented, but it will of course allow you to handle word processing, photo-editing and web-surfing. The powerful video card associated with a fast CPU ensures good performances even with the most demanding recent games. This configuration represents the minimum required to enjoy today’s 3D games. The PC hosts a 22-inch LCD screen and the sound channel is of high quality to make the most of modern games.
We often receive mail asking what the best stores are to buy online. We’re not going to pretend that we know all of them, but we recommend amazon.com, neweggs.com and bestbuy.com for the number of references they offer, their prices, their seriousness and the overall quality of their service (customer support, product packaging, speed…).
Motherboard: MSI B85-G43
The MSI B85-G43 motherboard supports Intel processors of the 4th generation (Haswell) on a LGA 1150 socket and offers the latest technologies: PCI-Express 3.1 16x video cards, SATA 6Gb/s HDD, DDR3 RAM and USB 3.0. This card doesn’t support overclocking. If you plan on overclocking your video card, you should opt for a motherboard offering a Z87 chipset.
This HTPC configuration (Home Theater PC) is mainly dedicated to Home Cinema and should be the perfect addition to any living room. This configuration allows you to watch and record television, play DVD and Blu-rays, listen to music (CD, MP3…), but can of course also be used as a classic PC: word processing, photos or video games (although a video card is required for recent 3D games.)
This HTPC is encased in a high-end desktop case, fit for powerful components (including a video card) while performing very silently (a must for a living-room setup). Some of the high-end elements presented here are optional; one can perfectly build an HTPC setup for about 800 dollars..
Today we finish with the third installment of our special item reviews in which we chose the best cpu for gaming within different price ranges.
We have talked earlier about the best processors to play games if you have a budget of up to 100 dollars, which would be the basic range, and the midrange, with a budget of no more than 200 dollars.
In this new special article we raise the bar to 300 dollars, a figure that I consider as “the end of the road” as going beyond that means entering a huge gap between quality/price.
By this we mean something very simple, as the difference between a 250 dollars processor and one that costs 400 dollars, for example, is almost nonexistent when playing a game, and this means that for every dollars invested beyond a particular limit you don’t necessarily receive a performance boost that is really worth it.
We continue with our series of articles dedicated to one of the most important components of any computer, the processor, and this time we will focus on choosing the best CPUs to play games for 140-200 dollars.
In our previous special and we already made a short summary of the main advantages of AMD and Intel processors, but now we jump to the midrange and we must introduce some important changes, because though most of the previously mentioned points remain applicable, there are some updates to keep in mind.
Before making our last point, you need to keep in mind that with a maximum budget of 200 dollars you can’t access the Core i7 or the Core i5 with an unlocked multiplier.
The processor is an important component for a lot of tasks, and its election makes many users doubt whether which one could be the best, and that’s why we have launched a series of guides in which we will choose the best CPUs to play with different price ranges.
In this first article we set a limit of 100 dollars, though we will leave a margin of five dollars to not limit our range of options so much, as this is a budget that is usually very common for users who want to mount hardware for very little money or who simply want to renew their PCs.
If you would like to upgrade your Windows 7 or Windows 8 to the newest Windows 10 but the previous installation option seemed too complicated, this is for you. This is the easiest and safest way to install Windows. Right from the Windows O.S, using the Windows Update option.
1: Before installing Windows 10
Normally, if you wanted to try any of the Windows versions prior to their official release, you needed to download the ISO file from Microsoft’s website and then create an installation disk in order to install the new Windows onto your PC.
For those of you looking for a powerful but small graphics card for compact PC’s, we will introduce you to the Inno3D GeForce GTX 970 compact, which integrates within its 172mm length a silicon based GM204 Maxwell GPU, holding a total of 1664 CUIDA Cores running at a frequency of 1015/1178 MHz and accompanied of …
We have new leaks around the AMD Radeon R9 390X, which faced against nothing less than the most powerful Nvidia graphics card, the GeForce GTX TITAN X and the still unannounced Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which uses the same GPU that the TITAN X, the GM200, but in a cropped version.
On the other hand, we can see the one that may be the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Ti at the bottom of the graphics.
To draw a clear conclusion of performance, all graphics were tested under 19 different games reaching 4K resolutions, graphs that were accompanied by an Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.20 GHz with 16 GB of DDR3 memory to avoid any bottlenecks that influence the charts negatively.
