Barebones vs Hand picked

[Vanman345]

I haven't built a computer for several years (circa 2005) and am not up on all the latest and greatest. Debating the merits of doing lots of research to hand pick parts to build one or just go with a barebones base system and recycling what I can. Looked at this as an example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.752633

I'd like to be able to handle most current games at decent settings at reasonable framerates, but nothing fancy, only have a 19" monitor at the moment since my 21" went TU.

Current frankensystem:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2 Ghz)
GeForce 9400 GT
2 GB ram
A couple 250 GB seagate drives
All cobbled together on a HP pavilion a1600n hand-me-down system

Any and all opinions, sarcastic comments, etc are welcome. I'm basically looking for feedback on how big of an upgrade performance wise I might see from something along these lines.

Dirk

 

[T_Yamamoto]

Buy a dell from outlet for cheap

Or

Build one for better components

 

[RavenSEAL]

You need to redo the whole system, you won't be able to play anything with that hardware.

If you're on the cheap, an AMD APU based desktop would be the way to go. Otherwise, look into an i5 with an HD 6870 for around $500.

I can put something together for you if you'd like, just shoot me a PM.

 

[Vanman345]

I'd like to spend less than $500 if possible but that is negotiable if the performance increase is large enough, I don't mind building it myself. Currently the most taxing game I play on this current build is Fallout:NV, I'm more a casual gamer so it doesn't need to be the latest greatest but don't want a POS either.

One question I do have is, for gaming purposes does spending the money for the Intel solutions (Core i7) make that big of a difference?

I usually have ended up going the AMD route for the bang for the buck, but would like to build something that is sufficient for today but with some upgrade options for tomorrow.

I haven't made a decision on GPU yet, I understand that is going to end up being one of the large portion of the overall cost of the build if I go that route. Hoping to spend less than $150 at the moment, but with upgrade options down the road.

 

[maniac5999]

I'm assuming that you're willing to overclock, since you're considering building your own.
For an overclocker today the best deal in CPUs is an i5 2500k (or 2550--same chip, different stock clocks, which is pretty pointless with an unlocked multiplier) It's a quad that should reliably hit 4-4.5ghz It's about $180 if you live near a microcenter (or $230 on newegg) A basic compatible (non H-series) LGA 1155 motherboard will run you $100-150, and you can probably get 8GB of generic RAM for $30, so we're looking at $300-400 for a working processor upgrade. That leaves $200 or less for everything else. Do you need a copy of Windows? ($100) What PSU do you have? A modern mid-range system easily requires a 500w (or more) PSU (AT LEAST $50)

I'm an AMD fan, but unfortunately, it's very tough to recommend AMD today. They haven't noticably increased IPC since the Phenom 2 was introduced in late 2008. Their Llano APUs are nice, (and have graphics good enough to have killed off low end discrete graphics cards) but for a desktop a discrete card is still the way to go.