Custom Built for $650-$700

I'll give it a shot. <3

pretty Newegg list here.

I'm assuming that you don't need a monitor or a copy of Windows XP. To be honest, I don't really think that you can build a good gaming system for $700 and have enough leftover for a decent display, unless of course your tastes run towards Spider Solitaire. ^^ This price also doesn't include input devices and speakers, though you can probably recycle those from your friend's old system. If you need to cut costs, you could always buy a smaller hard drive (I prefer Hitachi drives, though you should be fine with anything but Maxtor) or drop the DVD burner for a standard CD burner.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Arainach

Video Card: For gaming, this is key. $300 is a sweet point in terms of great performance without totally breaking the bank. I'd go there. 7900GT.

Motherboard: NForce4, Abit, Asus, or MSI. I'd avoid the DFI boards - I've dealt with 4 of them, and 3 were DOA. Make sure it has onboard LAN and sound to save money for the moment (can always upgrade later).

I don't really think that he can afford a 7900GT unless he uses a Celeron or Sempron (which defeats the purpose of buying a good video card) or cuts corners badly on parts quality. The 7600GT is over $100 cheaper and it's hardly slow.

I'll agree on DFI boards being junky, though. And why do their Socket 939 boards demand 500+ watt power supplies, anyways? Abit and MSI are good board makers, though I don't think that you should ignore EPoX and Gigabyte, especially since they tend to be fairly cheap.

Contra what I said before, cheap Asus boards are either kinda junky or expensive. Their higher-end stuff ain't bad, though.

Cutting back to a 160GB hard drive's not a bad way to save $20 or so, just make sure that your friend doesn't need the extra space. The three best 160GB hard drives (the fast Hitachi, the balanced Western Digital, and the quiet and reliable Samsung) are also the three cheapest 160GB hard drives, so there's really no reason to buy the outdated Maxtor DiamondMax 10 or the slow and tempermental Seagate 7200.9 IMHO.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

With some fiddling, I managed to build a system that has both an Athlon 64 3000+ and a GeForce 7900GT.

Some of the sacrifices you'd have to make to get the video card in while remaining close to $700 shipped should be apparent. It has a smaller 80GB hard drive, OEM CD burner instead of retail DVD burner. Some of the other issues would only be obvious to someone with at least some experience in the trade...I have a hard time trusting an ECS/PC Chips motherboard, even if they have been improving their parts as of late, and the RAM, case, and power supply aren't of the same caliber the first system I posted. Basically, you'd probably have to sacrifice noise and long-term reliability to get some extra performance, and I think that you'd be happier if you spent the $100 bucks on better quality parts instead of absolute performance. That said, if you could stretch to a better case, a Gigabyte nForce 4 motherboard, and maybe better RAM ($30, maybe $40 more) and you don't mind sacrificing the DVD burner and big hard drive, you could probably do OK with a 7900GT and an Athlon 64.

That said, I didn't exactly spend a lot of time planning the 7900GT system out, so maybe you can do better.

How ya doing, buddy?