How to Build Your Ultimate Gaming PC, Step by Step

How do you know when it’s time to replace your gaming rig? When you’ve turned down all of the game settings to minimum and you still have to play at 1024x768. Or you’ve just completed the Steam hardware survey and Valve rejects your score because it’ll drag down the curve. Of course, if you’re asking the question in the first place....

In specting this year’s gaming build, we decided to restrict ourselves to a budget of approximately $1,400. This would provide a nice challenge, but would still give us enough cash to build a powerful and feature-filled machine. If you’ve ever tried to squeeze high-end performance into this price point, you already know that the road to our final configuration wasn’t clear, obvious, or easy.

The truth is that there are many ways to skin a Tribble, and there is no single right config for everyone. To give you some insight into how we arrived at our final destination, we’re going to walk you through our decision-making process.

Initially, we decided the foundation for our configuration should be an LGA1366 board with a Core i7-930. We reasoned this would give us the ability to run a quad-core now, and then upgrade to a hexa-core in the future.When we pondered this a little more, however, we reasoned that maybe the LGA1366/i7-930 route wasn’t the best choice for a balanced gaming system. The CPU costs nearly $300, and you have to pay for a third DIMM to keep its tri-channel memory stoked. Furthermore, LGA1366 boards tend to cost $50 to $100 more than LGA1156 mobos. The final blow? As much as we love six-core computing, it’s not essential for gaming. Not yet, at least.

With this in mind, we shifted our focus toward Intel’s LGA1156 platform, which permits a much wider range of processor choices that scale all the way down to $113 Core i3 CPUs. Our first inclination was Intel’s 2.93GHz Core i7-870 chip. Recent price cuts from $562 to $294 make this powerful quad-core with Hyper-Threading mighty appealing. In raw performance it actually comes surprisingly close to Intel’s original Extreme Edition chip, which sold for $999.

Cooler Master's special edition HAF 922 is a great DIY case, and it looks nice, too.

The more we considered the possibilities, however, the more we started to wonder: Given the gaming orientation of this rig, did we really need to pay for Hyper-Threading? Probably not. If you look at any survey of gaming hardware, the vast majority of users are still happily humming along with dual-cores. (We actually considered making this rig a dual-core at one point, but hey, even gamers like to occasionally transcode videos.)

In the end, we picked Intel’s new 2.8GHz Core i5-760. AT $205, the chip gives us four cores but lacks Hyper-Threading. We’re going to pull extra value out of the CPU by overclocking the crap out of it.

Trimming the hundred bucks from our CPU cost and going with LGA1156, gave us more money to play with, which allowed us to do something we’ve never done in a budget gaming rig: add an SSD.

Why SSD? If you haven’t kept up with current events, the simple answer is that they absolutely kick ass. System builders and upgraders who make the leap are shocked at the speedy boot times, and SSDs are ideal for gaming because they shorten level load times to near-zero.

Corsair's Force F60 gives our rig the responsiveness of an SSD.

Of course, the $1,400 question is: How much SSD can you fit into a budget gaming rig? About 60GB. That’s what we got with Corsair’s Force F60 and it only set us back $160. The drive uses the much-beloved SandForce controller, which enables performance that pretty much tops out the SATA 3Gb/s interface. The SSD isn’t the only storage in the system, of course—we also include a 1TB Seagate 7200.12. It’s pretty fast itself, and is a perfect storage drive.As always, we double-checked our decision. Did SSD really make sense? After all, couldn’t we take that $160 from the SSD and put it toward the fattest GPU possible? Well… yes and no. A balanced system isn’t about one single component. We could have, say, poured a ton of the budget into the CPU or GPU. But that would have been a bit like putting a big-block motor into a Miata.

In the end, the GeForce GTX 470 fits our needs well. At $289 before a $20 mail-in rebate, Asus’s ENGTX470 is one hell of a deal. Why not a single GTX 460 1GB? As fantastic as that card is for the money, we’re getting a lot more videocard for just $50 more. We also considered two GTX 460s in SLI but that would have meant spending almost a third of our budget on graphics alone.

That doesn’t mean we weren’t biting our lips over our decisions. For example, we could have actually saved coinage by selecting the black Cooler Master HAF 922 and the bundled 600-watt PSU. On the street, this power supply sells for $160, but it lacks the juice to run SLI’d GTX 470 parts. In fact, it lacks the ability to even run SLI’d GTX 460 components. Better to pay for a quality PSU like Corsair’s TX750. This gets you approved SLI support for GTX 460 and GTX 470 cards.

Yes, we opted to pay more for a red case. That might seem a little frivolous after all our deliberating over parts. At the end of the day though, we decided that even though we were building a budget box, we still wanted a little panache. Something to let fellow gamers know that we didn’t just pick the lowest-price box and click “add to cart.” Call us reckless and irresponsible, but we went crazy and splurged $50 on the special edition red HAF 922. The case’s two-tone red and black design is a head turner, and it’s also a gem of a case to build in.

Budget and gaming go together like oil and water but we’re happy with our gaming rig. You get one of the most powerful DirectX 11 cards out today, an upgrade path that supports SLI (with a PSU to run it), and the responsiveness of a SandForce-based SSD.

Cooler Master's Hyper 212+ has long been a Maximum PC favorite for giving us cooling performance that rivals heatsinks twice its price. Even though our Core i5-760 CPU came with a cooler, we’re ditching it for the Hyper 212+ so we can achieve higher stable overclocks.

The Corsair TX750 can be easily found for less than $100 and is rated by Nvidia to run two GTX 470 cards in SLI. That gives us a solid upgrade path for a second GPU when prices drop. We oriented the TX750 so that its bottom-mounted fan sucks air in and vents it directly out the back.

Some P55 boards in multi-card mode are known to have issues with SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0, but Asus’s P7P55D-E Pro should be less problematic. That’s because the P7P55D-E Pro uses a chip to help alleviate congestion in the P55 chipset.

Tucked into the hard drive tray is Corsair’s F60, a SandForce-based SSD that makes you smile at drive access times.

The special-edition red Cooler Master HAF 922 case was an extra expense, but we decided that its striking two-tone look and spacious interior made it worth the stretch.