High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Building a Value PC with Cooler Master

The Hardware and Conditions for our value gamer

We want a handsome PC in a nicely cooled case, a quality CPU cooler and a solid power supply unit (PSU) that will handle a multi-core CPU and CrossFire – one certified by AMD/ATi for 4870 Crossfire. We expect you are probably upgrading from your current PC and will migrate your keyboard, mouse, optical drives, hard drives, LCD and operating system to your new build. If your PSU and case are already acceptable, you can spend considerably less money than we are spending on this build. You also might consider using Windows7 to save some money for a few months by using the pre-release builds offered by Microsoft.

Cooler Master's Gladiator 600 makes building easy!

Since no 32-bit games benefit from more than 4 GB of system RAM, we will also pick the cheaper DDR2 over DDR3 and we also will chose a CrossFire motherboard as we are going to explore AMD’s value CPU and GPU choices. Perhaps we will get lucky and unlock a Phenom II from a dual or tri core into a quad core! We will also examine the stock and overclocked gaming performance of the Athlon II X2 vs. the Phenom II X2 vs. Phenom II X3 (and if we get extremely lucky with unlocking cores, against Phenom II’s X4). We will match our new gaming build against our current maxed out, and much more expensive, Intel Penryn Core2Quad system – at stock, clock for clock and then at each CPU’s max OC.

When we started out, we had modest goals. We had a budget of just over $200 for our motherboard and CPU combo, and we got them both from NewEgg.com. All we were going to attempt, was to match AMD’s Phenom II’s dual core 550 X2 against Q9550S – both at 3.1 GHz and then at each CPU’s maximum overclock. Q9550S will be tested at 4.0 GHz as its known maximum overclock on maximum recommended voltage against 550 X2’s nearly 3.9 GHz overclock, as it turned out. We also hoped to have a chance to unlock two of the Phenom II’s cores for a very cheap quad core CPU.

Of course, we benched our Q9550S in preparation for this last month with the latest drivers then available to us – Catalyst 9-6 for our HD 4870-X2 and GeForce 186.18 for our GTX 280. Our testing goals seemed simple enough until AMD surprised us by sending AlienBabelTech their new Athlon II 250 X2 which is a budget or value CPU with 2 cores (and with no ‘extra’ ones like the Phenom II’s tri and dual cores have that may have a chance of being successfully unlocked by the end user with the right motherboard).

We also were very curious about the tri core Phenom II 720 X3 and wanted to see where it sits in relationship to dual and quad core CPUs in gaming. We also realized that we would also have a second chance to unlock the 4th core if we failed with unlocking our 550 X2. At the time we purchased it from NewEgg.com, it was $119 shipped; at the time of writing this article it is $99, a good price and an excellent value indeed. Soon, we shall soon see how good.

The Test Setup

To be completely fair in our benchmarking for both Intel and AMD platforms, we will benchmark with two graphics cards each – Nvidia’s GTX 280 and ATi’s HD 4870-X2 and use identically configured PCs and identical hard drives in comparing them. We chose GTX 280 because it represents Nvidia’s upper midrange – just below GTX 285 and very close to GTX 275 and HD 4890 performance – in about the $250 price range. We also picked the Radeon HD 4870-X2 because it is in the $350 price range and represents HD 4870 CrossFire; faster than GTX 285 and perhaps close to next generation’s single fastest GPU. Both of these video cards have proven to be competent performers at our chosen resolutions of 1680×1050 and 1920×1200 for playing DX10 games and we have been benching them against each other for nearly a year.

The Video Cards

-$250 & $350

GTX 280

HD 4870-X2

Of course, this is going to be a very long series and there are literally hundreds of benchmarks to run so as to give a fair comparison between expensive and value; and also to pick among value CPUs. We have already built our first Phenom II 550 X2 based PC successfully and have compared it clock for clock with Q9550S and are overclocking it now. But much of the surprise is yet to be discovered and shared with you in the coming weeks as we compare Athlon II X2 with Phenom II X2 and X3 for PC gaming.