Budget Gaming PC

[MrTechProWannabe]

now that you have your PC on order don't leave the forums! You should stick around, you can learn lots here and we can help you with things in the future.

Oh I definitely will without a doubt, no worries hehe. I'll most likely need help building and putting my PC together, and I'd love to even do some helping of my own. Shipping will take around 2-3 weeks for everything, including Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse, Mouse Pad, OS etc. A few items were out of stock and I'd like for all my items to be delivered at the same time on the same date, seeing as I'm ordering them all from 1 Company. And PP Mguire: I honestly wouldn't know what the difference is, that's way too in-depth knowledge for my brain to handle hehe, I'm just going by the Feedback and comments I've had by Friends and random people on YouTube etc, near enough every comment was based around "Eww Pentium" However I'm here for help and if you say it's worth it I'll definitely look into it. You're right I can always upgrade in the future, unless a Quad Core and the 660Ti instead of the 660 Superclocked and Dual Core i3 would be a substantial change I'd rather not have to upgrade or exchange parts at all, and if I had to not at least for at least a year, I'm not going to be in Employment for much longer, I plan to go back to College and finish my Engineering Degree. Being a retired young Marine Veteran there's not much choices for essentially a trained killer, even though that's not all we do etc, hope you know what I mean. As I said I wouldn't consider myself to be a heavy gamer, I have an Xbox for those sort of games, just standard MMORPG and other games like Soldier Front etc. And also I'm a huge fan film so I'd be watching quite a lot of movies in HD. Sorry once again, I type a lot hehe. But yeah, unless you really think that it's worth downgrading to the Pentium and upgrading to the 660Ti I shall. I personally would hopefully be alright with the Intel i3 and 660 Superclocked, however you're the expert here.

 

[PP Mguire]

You would be alright with either.

Typically when people say "eww Pentium" they are talking about the Pentium of old. The Pentium 4 or Pentium D from back in the day. You might hear the same stuff about the Celeron name too. I agree, BUT these are made with the same architechture as the Core i bigger brothers. The Pentium G2120 is literally the same chip as the Core i3 3220. The only 3 differences are, the Pentium does not include an IGP, the i3 has a 200Mhz increase in core clock, and the i3 has HT which adds 2 virtual threads. None of which really will make a huge difference at all. If you are a gamer your biggest FPS differences are in the GPU. Watching HD movies can be done on practically anything on the market now so that really wont be an issue.

A Pentium G2120 and 660ti should handle any game on the market, as will the i3 and 660 setup. The Pentium and 660ti setup will grant more over all FPS though. Really as always, the final purchase is up to you. Both the Pentium and the i3 will be able to game for quite a while and whenever you are ready you'll be able to upgrade to something like the i5 3570k. In a year or so they will be less than 200 dollars themselves due to new tech so it'll be cost efficient either way.

 

[MrTechProWannabe]

Oh I see, I currently have a Celeron(R) Dual processor in my Acer Aspire 5336 Notebook. To be honest there's really only a couple of games that I play, those couple being Soldier Front, sometimes a few minutes of RuneScape. Hopefully with this new PC I can begin looking into playing other games. I'm signed up to pretty much every single online Film/Movie company out there, Netflix, NowTV, LoveFilm etc. So I'd need a pretty good GPU any way to be able to handle the 1080p HD videos and Films. I haven't actually ordered any parts yet as I explained in my previous post, I had to send Scan an online bank transfer deposit of £10, reclaimable when I order the parts, but I've asked Scan to put all the parts you told me aside, including the Pentium and 660Ti, and they're going to notify me when all of the parts I need are in stock and ready for me to order. So whatever happens I've got to wait at least 2-3 weeks, then a a further week or so for the actual hipping. So I'm not going to be getting this thing any time soon.

 

[PP Mguire]

Yea the Celeron in that notebook is about 2-3x slower than the Pentium in several areas. Clock speed aside, the Pentium has a much much faster architecture, then add raw clock speed on top of that.....you catch my drift.

Like I mentioned before, 1080p video doesn't take a whole lot. The IGP in the i3 3220 can easily handle watching 1080p. The Pentium and 660ti setup you are purchasing will be able to play any game on the market.

 

[MrTechProWannabe]

Yeah I catch your drift hehe. Well I'm honestly in a tie then.. You're the expert and I can't see why you'd have me purchase something bad. If you truly do think that the Pentium CPU you listed and the 660Ti will watch 1080p HD videos/Films, and play any game on the market, then I'll order that! If you read this reply before reading my other Thread, would you kindly check out my latest Thread and see if you can assist? You've done more than enough for me so if you wish to take a break with assisting me for now that's more than alright, however if not then, that's alright too hehe.

 

[PP Mguire]

Can't stress enough how much CPUs don't matter much in games anymore. A fast dual core is plenty until the new consoles come out and change the game.

 

[MrTechProWannabe]

Oh I see. Going over the last list you sent me I kept getting muddled up with the Intel i3 CPU and the Pentium G2120. The parts you listed, including VAT but excluding shipping come to around £570. Do you think it would make a substantial difference if I invested the other £35 and getting the Intel i3 CPU? Final price excluding shipping would be around £605, which I don't mind paying seeing as it's only £5 over budget. However I'll only do it if you realistically think the Intel i3 would be a substantial change over the G2120. I know you said that CPU's don't matter a whole deal For Gaming, and I was considering keeping the Pentium CPU but upgrade to a 660Ti, however that's at least £640 excluding shipping, so.. In your expert opinion do you realistically think I should keep the Pentium G2120 or upgrade to the Intel i3?
P.s: I just want to apologize about the drama on my other Thread, mean't no harm to you. I think we was both just misinterpreted each other.

 

[PP Mguire]

Depends on what you mean by substantial change. The 2 are the same CPU except the differences I listed earlier. Gaming doesn't get an advantage over having HT so the only real advantage the i3 has over the Pentium is the 200MHz core clock difference. This wont make a huge difference in gaming, and the difference will probably be 1 or 2 FPS at best.

Just to give you an idea, going from a 4.5GHz clocked 3960x (practically the best and most expensive CPU on the market right now) to this i5 750 stock clocked gave me a 3FPS difference at best globally. The i5 750 is a first gen Core i CPU with 4 cores, no HT, and a stock clock of 2.66GHz. Plain and simple, besides the CPU demanding tasks I do every day for gaming the Pentium would even be an upgrade to me lol. If you want to spend the extra money for the i3 that is up to you, but IMHO you wont see a difference unless you went from the Pentium to an i5.

Edit: I'll elaborate more on my last statement. 99% of the games on the market utilize at most 2 cores, and having 2 extra cores on a quad gives you extra freedom for background tasks. The 1% is left for the odd RTS that actually will utilize 100% CPU for AI. If I was purely gaming though, I could easily get away with disabling 2 cores on my current i5.

 

[MrTechProWannabe]

Depends on what you mean by substantial change. The 2 are the same CPU except the differences I listed earlier. Gaming doesn't get an advantage over having HT so the only real advantage the i3 has over the Pentium is the 200MHz core clock difference. This wont make a huge difference in gaming, and the difference will probably be 1 or 2 FPS at best.

Just to give you an idea, going from a 4.5GHz clocked 3960x (practically the best and most expensive CPU on the market right now) to this i5 750 stock clocked gave me a 3FPS difference at best globally. The i5 750 is a first gen Core i CPU with 4 cores, no HT, and a stock clock of 2.66GHz. Plain and simple, besides the CPU demanding tasks I do every day for gaming the Pentium would even be an upgrade to me lol. If you want to spend the extra money for the i3 that is up to you, but IMHO you wont see a difference unless you went from the Pentium to an i5.

Edit: I'll elaborate more on my last statement. 99% of the games on the market utilize at most 2 cores, and having 2 extra cores on a quad gives you extra freedom for background tasks. The 1% is left for the odd RTS that actually will utilize 100% CPU for AI. If I was purely gaming though, I could easily get away with disabling 2 cores on my current i5.

I see, I'm going to be doing a lot of web browsing too though, I say Gaming PC and yeah that's what I mean however, I'm going to be watching a lot of Films just as much as Gaming. And when I say Films I also mean 1080p videos on YouTube and having like 3 or 4 browsers open at a time, one on RuneScape, one or two on YouTube, another on Forums and another on a random website etc. Also I must mention that I have Virgin Media Fibre Optic Broadband, so The Internet I have is decent, I'm not going to put random programs and stuff I don't need on it etc but with this PC I don't want it to be slow opening up programs or Tabs etc, and also considering my Internet is pretty decent, will I get good download speed? So I'm guessing For those Tasks I'd need a Fairly decent CPU anyway, correct? I understand that the 660 Superclocked will demolish 1080p videos easily as you said. And it will be a beast For Gaming. But will I be able to have all those Tabs open at once etc? Alright though, given the already awesomeness of the Pentium and the great FPS I'll get with it, it's practically an extra 2 or 3 FPS For an extra £35, which would be an idiotic Thing To. On that note, I'll stick with the Pentium and 660 Superclocked.

 

[PP Mguire]

The only thing the extra tabs being open will do is hog up RAM. With how fast computers are these days your computer wont hamper the speed of your connection at all. My old 98se box handles my 20Mb cable connection quite well for being so old but I put a Gigabit card in there too.

To speed up general tasks and overall the general speed of your computer besides gaming an SSD will do that twofold.