The CAN$600 question is, can an uber-affordable machine deliver an acceptable gaming experience? 
And the answer is: with the right expectations, yes.
The first thing that has to go out the window is the idea that you have to play all games at maximum resolution and maximum quality settings. You could do that, of course, as long as you were OK counting to ten between frames. But being willing to compromise on resolution and fine detail will let you play with acceptable frame rates on a machine that won’t break the bank. The exact settings “sweet spot” is going to vary from game to game, so do some testing with your favorites.
For a low-cost gaming build, we are going to sacrifice CPU cores and go for flat out dual-core speed. The Haswell Pentium dual core chips start out fast, and can be handily tweaked, so the the Anniversary Edition Pentium will power our platform. Starting at 3.2 GHz, it can be overclocked to 4.0 GHz with the stock air cooler.
The MSI Intel B85 motherboard has SATA 6.0 Gbps connections, USB 3.0 ports, solid capacitors and “milspec” components for reliability, and unusually for a mATX board, it has four DDR3 DIMM memory sockets and can go to 32 GB of RAM if you wish.
This also means you could populate it with some 2 GB DDR3-1600 MHz DIMMs that you may be able to pick up cheaply from someone who has upgraded.
MSI is big on gaming, and they have overclocking support built into their BIOS.
The big ticket item, and the most direct influence on game frame rates is the video card, so about 30% of our budget will go there.
The Radeon R7 260X 2GB card is reasonably priced with performance close to the NVidia GTX 750ti version (which sells for $40 more). Both cards can run without dedicated PCI-e Graphics power connectors from a 350-400W power supply.
For this build, the first item to get tossed overboard is the hard drive. This is a gaming machine, not a media library. You can add a couple of TB of spinning drive storage later for $100 or so if you really want, or you can re-purpose an drive from an older machine or one from a buddy who has upgraded. (A data storage and backup drive does not have to be fast).
On the flip side, we are going to go with an SSD flash-based drive for the boot drive, because the price point has crossed the critical bar where a 128 GB SSD is as inexpensive as a 500 GB hard drive. Yeah, it’s a small drive. But it is FAST – your mission if you choose to accept it is to keep your system lean and mean, with no superfluous programs or data (lay off of that Download Now button). Apart from the fast booting and lightning-speed loading of programs and data, an SSD exacts far less of a time penalty on virtual memory swap files than an hard drive – near zero latency and triple the bandwidth means that you don’t suffer nearly as bad a performance hit if you exceed your physical RAM capacity.
About that memory: 4 GB RAM is just enough, 8 GB would be better, so that’s the obvious first upgrade. Or you may be able to scrounge up 2 GB module or two to make it 6 GB or 8 GB.
As usual, prices are estimates only, in Canadian dollars, and subject to change.
| Case | GoldenField 3205B mATX case with 500W PSU |
CSE-3205B-500W | $ 45 |
| Motherboard | MSI Motherboard LGA1150 B85 DDR3 max 32GB RAM Sata 6.0Gbps, USB 3.0 |
B85M-E45 | $ 81 |
| Power supply | 500W included with case | ||
| SSD Drive | SanDisk X110 |
SD6SB1M-128G-1022i | $ 79 |
| Memory | DDR3-1600 CL10 4 GB (1x4GB DIMM) | $ 36 | |
| CPU | Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary edition dual core 3.2 GHz |
BX80646G3258 | $ 91 |
| Optical drive | Asus DVD-RW | DRW-24F1ST/BLK/B/AS | $ 20 |
| Keyboard and Mouse | Microsoft or Logitech Desktop combo |
$ 17 | |
| Cooler | Stock cooler | ||
| Video card | Radeon R260X 2GB Overclock | Example Asus R7260X-DC2OC-2GD5 | $ 159 |
| TOTAL | before tax, shipping and assembly | $ 528 | |
| Upgrade RAM | To 8 GB | +$ 36 | |
| OS | Windows 8.1 OEM | WN7-00615 | $ 116 |
| Upgrade video card |
NVidia GTX 750ti | -159 + 199 = +$ 40 |
Looks good, we’re hitting the mark at $528 plus tax, but there’s a cheat here; that’s without the Windows OS, which puts us over the $600 mark by a long ways.
There are a limited number of legal alternatives here. You could install Linux, but then your gaming selection and installation requirements are radically altered.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/
If you have an unused retail copy of Windows 7 (as opposed to a Windows that came bundled with a machine purchase) you could use that.
Or, if you are willing to do a bit of work and take some minor risks of compatibility and crashing, for a limited time you can download the Windows 10 beta (Technical Preview ISO) here http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/preview-iso and follow the instructions to burn it onto a USB stick for installation on the machine.
What are the tradeoffs? Besides the CPU choice, 4 GB of RAM and the small SSD drive, the Golden Field case and power supply combo is, how can we say? Basic. Although the PSU is rated at 500W, I would really call it a 350W unit, which is still fine for this build. If you wanted a more attractive case, a larger power supply or the ability to power PCI-e Graphics cards, you’d have to invest $50 – $100 more
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