Building a new budged gaming PC

[RyanMcKenzie]

Building a new budget gaming PC

Hey. I've been doing all my computing lately via my laptop, plugged into a 24 inch monitor, and it has a mediocre integrated GPU, which has been straining the laptop a bit. So I decided to start a budget PC build, which I'll be gaming on quite a bit, but nothing too serious. Here's the parts I'm about to order, tell me what u guys think

MOBO - ASUS F1A75-V Pro (I'm trying out the FM1 socket)

Processor - AMD Athlon II X4 631 Llano 2.6GHz

GPU - GeForce GT 220

Ram - 4 gigs of OCZ ram (Don't have the specifics with me)

The rest of the components are ones I have already, including a 500w PSU I have lying around here.

Any feedback? I'm curious as to how graphically intensive of programs this build will be able to handle, what do you guys think?

Thanks for giving this a read

Edit: I'll post pics of the build once everything gets here, and I finish her up.

 

[Indigo]

So... question I have is... why bother getting a Llano platform if the CPU you're going to run it on doesn't have the integrated Radeon GPU? The reason I ask is because the GeForce GT 220 is inferior to the GPU that comes with even the A6-3500 APU.

I would ditch the OCZ RAM and get G.Skill instead. You can get 8GB of the stuff for under $40 these days.

 

[RyanMcKenzie]

To be honest, I bought the FM1 socket board from a friend, and I figured gettin a CPU with an integrated GPU as well would be overkill.

 

[RyanMcKenzie]

ummm...

what?

 

[Indigo]

Ummm what to what? The Integrated GPU in the A series APUs (Llano) are faster than that GeForce 220 GT card is.

 

[RyanMcKenzie]

Was saying umm what to the giant spam post that was in this thread lol. Maybe I'm mistaken, but wouldn't having a high end integrated GPU, cause the CPUs performance to suffer?

 

[nathandg2006]

Was saying umm what to the giant spam post that was in this thread lol. Maybe I'm mistaken, but wouldn't having a high end integrated GPU, cause the CPUs performance to suffer?

Not in this case. AMD's new APU (Fusion) has the graphics chip on the die of the processor itself. It actually does graphics work very well.

 

[Indigo]

We buy them for use here at the office, and have run the usual benchmarks on them, 3DMark, Heaven, etc. It's a respectable chip with a pretty darn good graphics engine.

The way the APU is designed, as nathanadg said, doesn't make the chip itself slow. It's quite the contrary. Why do you think vendors are moving to integrate high speed devices? USB 3.0, SATA III, etc. The closer they are to the core of the system, the faster they are. The GPU on a CPU (APU) is no exception.

 

[RyanMcKenzie]

Well I already ordered the Athlon, but if the built in GPU works that well, then I may have to upgrade to an APU in the near future. I changed around my order a bit, so I'll list the updated build below. Just waiting on the case to finish up

MOBO - ASUS F1A75-V Pro

Processor - AMD Athlon II X4 631 Llano 2.6GHz

GPU - GeForce GT 220

Ram - G.SKILL Sniper DDR3 1600 2x4GB

PSU - Rosewill Stallion Series 500w

Case - Xigmatek ASGARD II ATX Mid Tower Case

Pretty stoked

 

[Indigo]

Looks fine, enjoy the PC.