Gadgetory

welcome to our 2013 holiday gaming system buyer's guide we're going to be taking three different price points so that is five hundred dollars or what we're calling just game because it's a no-frills gaming box I mean it doesn't even have USB 3 our second price point is around a thousand dollars and we're calling that game now because it's a well-rounded gaming box built for today it's that gamers sweet spot and then our third price point we're calling game on or the more future proof and upgradeable gaming box although really I hate using those words because there's no such thing as a future-proof system but at any rate it has some extra bells and whistles and it costs a little bit more to go along with that it comes in at around $1700 well it always starts with the CPU doesn't it so the athlon x4 750 K at 80 bucks is a great choice it's about five dollars more than the 740 but you get that K unlocked multiplier which might not be relevant with the hardware we have in there I really don't recommend overclocking the system in its current configuration in tell dual core is that in the past or even really in the present most games benefit more from fewer but more powerful cores so we would recommend core i3 s normally but we're seeing frostbite 3 as well as AMD's mantle API upcoming that are going to make much better use of more cores even if they're less powerful so that makes me pretty confident in this recommendation for the near future now for RAM we went with a single 8 gig module of whatever was the cheapest round we could find it's about 60 bucks and the reason we went with a single module is that our FM to a 55 MD GS our 2.0 motherboard only has two memory slots so while we do get slightly lower performance for going with a single module versus dual channel operation what that means is we can upgrade to 16 gigs of ram later on down the road by simply adding another 8 gig module rather than forcing ourselves to remove to-four gig modules throw them away and add to 8 gig modules in order to achieve the same effect now this board doesn't have really any features to speak of it doesn't even have USB 3 but for 50 bucks it's hard to go wrong and it does work we do have one so if you want other stuff you can spend another 20 bucks or whatever else and you can get a more feature-rich board but this one is just game that's what it does for our power supply this is where we never recommend buying generic so we went with the most basic brand name power supply we could get which was the enttec basic 350 at 30 bucks it's a ground ten fifteen dollars more expensive than a generic power supply but at the very least you know that it's rated for continuous power and you know that if it says it has over current protection on it or whatever safety certification on it that it actually has it and it was actually tested you'd be amazed how many power supplies out there are not validated and don't have the features that they claim to have so that's why we went with that I've again then not overclocking ready components and speaking of not overclocking ready we are using the stock cooler and the like the cheapest apex case we could find you can get this thing for as low as 20 bucks it's functional but it doesn't have great cooling so no overclocking so far except the CPU so guys you would need to make some upgrades to the config for overclocking now okay the case does have one thing going for it though and that is it does have ventilation in the side panel above the CPU area as well as above the graphics card area so when we put that HD 7850 weather we get a 1 gig card or a 2 gig card that'll affect pricing by about 25 bucks but a 2 gig card will run you around 155 dollars it'll have somewhere to exhaust the heat now this card is an untouchable value I would have loved to present you guys with here's the AMD option here's the Nvidia option that makes sense at this price point and Vidya doesn't really have anything that's that competitive at this price point but the cold hard truth of the matter is neither does AMD the 7850 is an outgoing card it's it's a discontinued model so once these are gone they're pretty much going to be gone so I'd recommend grabbing one now if you're interested in it for our storage you have a couple of options so number one is the Western Digital blue one terabyte it's available for around $70 number two is the kingston v300 120 gig SSD for around $80 i had people telling me a little while ago i was talking about something oh you're crazy Linus you can't put an SSD and a $500 machine yes you can and yes it absolutely makes a very big difference at the matter of whether you're willing to go for the SSD now install just some of your games and wait until you can add a hard drive later when you another allowance so you get another paycheck or whatever else or whether you must have the storage now in which case go with the WD blue now our pricing for this system was before Windows Windows 8 is about $100 but if you already have a Windows license that you can reuse or if you're planning to use a free OS such as Linux then you obviously don't have to buy that so that is what we'd consider to be optional our game now system I actually struggled with a fair bit I I ended up with some recommendations that I think are going to sound a little bit unusual but if you guys hear me out maybe you'll agree and if you don't of course let me know in the comments so for the CPU I went with a core i5 33:30 this is a non case cube but unlike Haswell Ivy Bridge non K CPUs can be overclocked a little bit and you can get around 3.6 comfortably out of these chips which will put it in about the same performance range as something like a 46 70 K which costs a full $50 more that gives us a lot of money to work with elsewhere in the build so for memory we went with 8 gigs of ram again at around 60 bucks you can get either a single module or a dual channel kit and you can decide whether you care more about having the extra little bit of performance from dual channel now or if you care more about being able to expand to 32 gigs of ram in the future depending which way you go because both boards that are options at this price range the z77 pro 3 or pro 4 are available for around $95 however z77 boards are becoming less common so pretty much buy whatever you can for the power supply we went with a see sonic 620 what this is the s12 2 this is a much better power supply than the one in the last system which was nothing special other than that it just had a proper brand name and like proper certifications on it at $65 to $80 this is AC Sonic 620 watt unit is efficient it's quiet and it is just fantastic speaking of things that are efficient in quiet we went with the hyper 212 plus again we're talking about a moderate overclocking system here and for 30 bucks this is a great value because the stock cooler just really isn't good enough for any overclocking these days for the case we want the 200 our same thing more solid build quality so this is around a 50 $60 case than that $20 $30 case that we looked at or much better ventilation better brand a better looks just better in every possible way in very in very practical ways now the video card is something that some people will agree with and some people won't but I narrowed it down to I really think the gtx 770 makes the most sense in this configuration you can get great performance out of it remember this is basically equivalent to a gtx 680 and with the holiday bundle which includes assassin's creed 4 baton on arkham origins and Splinter Cell blacklist there's just not really much on the AMD side that is comparable to that the 280 X is about the same price I was able to find 770's as cheap as around 310 dollars and just doesn't have the same oof that the 770 does not to mention I am a huge advocate of Nvidia shield I think it's awesome and 770 is the lowest end card that allows you to get $100 off a shield so you can get it for $200 now because of some of the money that we saved elsewhere in the build our storage solution becomes a lot more robust so for our SSD we went with the kingston v300 120 gig drive it's not the fastest SSD in the world but for 80 to 90 dollars it is a very compelling value and you will notice a difference if you install your OS and your most frequently used programs on it then we were able to grab a 2 terabyte Seagate hard drive and throw that at the system for mass storage now this gives us a ton of flexibility we could go with 90 gigs of OS SSD and allocate 30 gigs to use as a cache using Smart Response technology on the hard drive or we could just go 120 slash 2 terabyte or whatever else the case may be either way because of that money that we saved by giving up point 4 gigahertz and a 10% IPC improvement and then doing a little bit of overclocking we were able to get this great storage solution and a rockin video card then of course if you need Windows then that's an extra hundred dollars and whether or not you already have that as your business in the performance game on segment where we're you know future proofing things a little bit and color matching them a little bit it became a lot easier because I have a bit of flexibility I don't have to worry about every three dollars that I'm spending and is it contributing to the bottom line in terms of performance so we started with a 4770k which gives you pretty much no benefit today over something like a 46 70 K but again frostbite 3 and mantle coming with you know there being more benefit to more threads we're going to go ahead we're going to sort of place our bets and spend an extra hundred bucks on something with hyper-threading and overclocking potential all that stuff for RAM we went with 16 gigs right out of the gate both of the other configs went for 8 gigs and while there's really no benefit from a gaming perspective to 16 gigs of 1866 Corsair Vengeance blue today it matches our motherboard and it is a little bit more future-proof although again I really hate that word I hate that word for motherboard we want the Asus VA t7 Pro it's got wireless AC it's an extremely solid board Asus really is my number one choice when it comes to motherboards so anything other than Asus you know that I'm probably making a compromise somewhere along the line either of those other configurations you could pay an extra 20 30 or even 40 dollars and get an Asus equivalent board but that's exactly the problem is on a thousand dollar rig or on a 500 dollar rig I don't feel comfortable spending that kind of extra money on something that really just doesn't contribute to performance and contributes more to features and robustness so this is something I'd feel very comfortable overclocking as high as we could go speaking of overclocking as high as we want to go we went with a Corsair txm 750 watt power supply it has four PCI Express connectors for a potential dual GPU sli or crossfire upgrade in the future and is very well built and modular it has like disconnectable cables again where we're wasting a few bucks on something that doesn't contribute to performance but it does make your system look better and it does actually make your air flow slightly better depending on how your cable management goes for cooling we went with the Nhu 12s it's quiet it performs extremely well and it's not to us so of course I think it's the bee's knees because just all their stuff is fantastic in fact probably have knock twists up here see this is an excellent fan the NFP 12 although it's not my favorite fan anymore the NFF 12 is now my favorite fan for the case I went with a fractal design define our for the extra like $60 we're spending on this case versus the Corsair 200 our is purely for looks and overall build quality and you know quiet sound dampening material and stuff like that does not contribute anything to performance in fact the thermals probably aren't even quite as good as the 200 are it's just this is a really really really nice case and we're going for a more luxurious build here now while everything else about the system was relatively easy I really struggled with the video card on this one because at this kind of a price range you can probably afford to jump up to a 780 but it costs a full hundred dollars more than a 290 it does come with three games as opposed to one so you can find two 90s that come with battlefield 4 or you can find seven 80s that come with the Assassin's Creed 4 Batman Arkham origins as well as Splinter Cell blacklist bundle but and the 290 is louder noticeably louder runs hotter than the 780 but is near it in terms of sheer FPS performance and costs about $100 less so you guys got to make a decision here do you want to spend an extra hundred dollars for better temperatures lower noise potentially better game bundle depending how you feel about the games that are included it the $200 discount on shield Nvidia g-sync potentially in the future if you wanted to upgrade your monitor in a couple months and get something because it's really as revolutionary it's awesome or if you want to go ahead go for the more value oriented solution now and you're willing to take a hit on power consumption as well as acoustics and temperatures you think md mantle is going to be an outstanding piece of technology even though we really haven't seen it yet then 290 looks like a good bet so if I had to pick one in this price point I kind of had to go with 290 but I think 780 is also a very solid choice if you have the extra hundred dollars to spend now for storage things got easy again because the Samsung 840 Evo is just plain a better Drive than the more value oriented SSD where we're looking at before we can afford a 250 gig drive so you can actually fit your OS and like a fair number of games and programs on it and it's got some awesome features like their data migration software as well as rapid which allows you to use RAM in order to accelerate the drive itself and is very intuitive to setup and actually works really well and then for our storage drive we went with a WD red 3 terabyte this might seem like a weird option because it's a raid drive but the things that make it a good raid Drive like the fact that it's more resistant to vibration just generally more robust you know it's not the fastest drive in the world compared to something like a blue or a black makes it a very compelling option if you're not putting your most you know performance sensitive data on it which you're not because you have a 250 gig SSD in your system so overall this system is very well rounded Windows 8 is of course another hundred dollars very well rounded extremely high performance when it comes to gaming and I think is a more normal overall build I hope that you enjoyed our shopping for a PC holiday build guide generally why did we do this well reason number one was that you guys have been asking us to do this absolutely forever and reason number two is that we've I don't know if you notice this but we did not have a pre-roll on this video so we are experimenting with using affiliate revenue where we take the knowledge that we have about what's good that you guys want to know and we tell you and then you click on the links that we provide you with to buy them and then we get a commission out of that we're experimenting with using that as a way to supplement or even long term perhaps replace paid advertising spots on our videos so let me know what you think of that idea let me know what you thought of the holiday buyer's guide and I think that's pretty much it like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have something to say about my choices and how they were terrible or how they were fantastic and as always guys don't forget to subscribe