Is there a gamer on your holiday shopping list? Maybe someone you just want to get your game on with, or someone who's been complaining their old system isn't up to the demands of the latest titles, like Dishonored, Hitman: Absolution, or Call of Duty: Black Ops 2? Hook them up with a custom-built gaming PC this holiday season and they'll love you forever.
We've featured some great all-around PC builds before, but we're going to focus in on gaming this time around. Whether you just want to give the gift of passable frame rates or you're giving away the fine whiskey and caviar of the gaming PC world, we're breaking down our suggested builds into three categories:
- A modest but powerful machine that can play anything you throw at it, but with a few compromises.
- A solid and powerful gaming system that'll let you turn up the effects and enjoy the most all of your favorite titles have to offer.
- The Crazypants Gaming Build: A high-end, ultra-powerful rig that won't blink at today's games?or anything else you do with it?and probably won't blink at tomorrow's GPU and CPU-testing tasks either.
We'll throw down some parts here that we think will work in most cases, but in case you have specific brand loyalties or prefer to make adjustments, we'll provide customization options so you can tweak each build as you wish. Keep in mind that prices are accurate at the time of writing, but can change at any time, especially around this time of year.
The Modest and Affordable Rig
This entry level system hovers around the $500 mark, and it'll still play anything you throw at it. Older titles will fly with all of the settings turned up and even newer titles will give you decent frame rates and smooth gameplay, although you may need to make some compromises in the graphics settings of the most intensive titles. Most notably, we give the nod to AMD's second generation APUs, which are quickly approaching Intel's processors in quality at a much lower cost:
Upgrade Options
If you want to take this build to the next level, here are some affordable upgrades you can swap out or add to the components above for a beefier, more powerful system.
That's all there is here. The beauty of AMD's APUs is that you don't need a graphics card and they come with AMD's graphics built-in and on-board. We didn't even have to go with the A8 here, we could have backed up to the A6 to save a few bucks. Plus, if you run into something that the APU isn't good enough for, you can always add a card later (like the 1GB/2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX560 Ti for $160/$180) without paying for one now that you'd have to toss out. This overclockable A8 APU is DirectX 11-capable and can be tweaked to offer even more graphics performance when you're not using the CPU so you're not bound in one area or the other. Plus, omitting a discrete graphics cards keeps the cost down. Way down.
Buy this build with PCPartPicker ($395.93)
The Powerhouse
Most PC gamers I know walk a very fine line when building their systems. They want machines that can play the titles they love now, but are also up to the challenge of some of the games they know are on the horizon and are coming soon. They're willing to spend more to futureproof as much as they can, but don't want to throw money away at the same time. If that sounds like you, this is the build for you:
Upgrade Options
There's no doubt about it, this machine will fly. When we asked you what computer parts you wanted for the holidays, you noted that OCZ, one of our favorite SSD manufacturers is in the middle of some financial trouble. We still love their drives, but if that makes you nervous, that Crucial in the upgrade options section makes a fine replacement, and if you don't need that much space, this Crucial 128GB m4 SSD ($100) will do the trick as well. We also stuck with 4GB of RAM, per our standard recommendation, but don't hesitate to add more if budget allows, especially if you run VMs or use apps that can leverage the additional RAM.
Buy this build with PCPartPicker ($871.40)
The Crazypants Gaming Rig
Finished parking your Bentley? Ride your Segway up to the PC parts store and pick up the components for this ultimate gaming rig. It's super-fast, water-cooled, and has many best in slot components we could find easily, no compromises made and money no object. It's not for everyone, but if little Timmy deserves only the best (yes, we know you're "Little Timmy") this holiday season, this is the system to build:
Upgrade Options
Buy this build with PCPartPicker ($2739.01)
It's hard to believe this behemoth could possibly be upgraded further, but...to be fair we held back a little bit so we had somewhere to go. Seriously, this machine won't blink at anything you throw at it, and anything you're likely to throw at it likely won't even come close to using most of the resources available in this build.
The motherboard in this build is so expensive because it's an overclocker's dream and comes with pretty much every possible port on the board than you could possibly ever want or need, and if you really wanted to, you could spend $4000 just on the video cards and run them in quad-SLI. We picked the Cooler Master HAF X as the case because you voted it as your favorite, but you could go crazier if you choose. It's ridiculous, and we love it.
Putting Them All Together
Once you've got the parts, consult our computer building guide to learn how to put them together and get everything up and running nicely so that special person can just plug it in, power it on, and spend hours this holiday season getting their game on. Don't forget to check out the Steam sales to grab some affordable titles to put your rig to the test, and happy holidays!
A special thanks goes out to everyone who provided suggestions last week! It made putting together these guides a lot easier, and a better fit for you.
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