How to build a £600 Gaming PC
The Rest of the Parts
Obviously there is a danger when you’re building to a budget to end up with parts that aren’t as good as they should be, or will end up being a false economy. We all know that anything is only as strong as its weakest link and so we’ve made sure everything is up to scratch.
To this end we’re powering the system with the excellent Corsair TX650 PSU. This is more than enough oomph to power everything in our system and has the reliability we know from Corsair.
Storage is provided by the super-fast Samsung Spinpoint F3, here a 500GB model which will provide plenty of capacity. For a tenner over our budget you could have a small SSD for the OS and use the Samsung purely for storage, but we all know that “if I just spend another” is a slippery slope and soon you’ll be re-mortgaging your house.
For our graphics we’ve chosen the PowerColor HD6870 which gives us a great balance between power and price. If you wanted to have less of a gaming orientated system and something that was merely alright, then you could switch this out for a GTX460, but you would compromise gaming performance and that’s the key we’re going for, hence the use of the HD6870.
Whilst we could stick this in a cardboard box or nail it to a plank of wood, we’d much rather use a case. There are countless ones available with our remaining budget of about £70. NZXT have produced some fine cases lately, greatly improving upon their earlier efforts. As we wanted a case that looked nice without being huge, but also provided good airflow the NZXT Vulcan seemed like a great choice.
As you can see everything fits into it nicely, we’ve got plenty of airflow and the all-black internals belie the affordable nature of the case.
A Core-i3 4.2GHz, 4GB, HD6870 equipped PC for around £570. Sounds good to us. Let’s see what it’s up against and run it through some benchmarks.
