Chapter 5: The Budget Rig: Components on the Cheap
...With enough money left to buy games...
Want to put together your own custom gaming rig? Want to do it for less than $1,500? If you answered yes, this chapter is for you. Here, we look at all the components you need to make an excellent gaming machine, which we affectionately call The Budget Rig.
The Challenge
I get a lot of e-mail about my choices for the two GameSpot Ultimate Game Machines (called the Lean Machine and the Power Rig). It's great fun - and almost always a learning experience - to hear from readers. Whenever you get a bunch of hardware-savvy people together, even in a virtual sense, there's always endless discussion and argument about which component is the best.
Recently, though, I've been getting e-mail from readers who have taken me to task about the prices of the two Ultimate Game Machines. Most of these suggest that even $2,500 is too much. I don't agree that $2,500 is too much for a top-end machine, but I definitely agree that there's room for a lower-cost system. Suffice it to say there are a lot of gamers who, for varying reasons, can't afford to spend several thousand buckazoids on a PC. If this is you, this chapter is for you.
NOTE If you have more than $1,500 socked away for the purpose of improving your gaming rig, check out Appendix A: Ultimate Gaming Machine.
This component list as been compiled, at best, during a single snapshot in time. As time passes, new products come out that offer more features, better performance, and lower cost. But the principles still apply: shop carefully and pick components with care.
But before we get down and dirty, we must cover a few issues, namely why one Budget Rig just isn't enough, and the question of clock rate.
