Best pc gaming rig 2013

For those who do not opt to pay a premium for liquid cooling, noise absorbing foam panels are available as well as anti-vibration fan mounts.

The base Aurora offers a 3. While most gaming PCs are guilty of offering hardware that go well beyond the necessities of any gamer, some opt to embrace this hardware […]. Not to be outdone by the Black Pearl, the Origin Genesis focuses on offering every piece of cutting edge hardware available sparing absolutely no expense.

In truth, the Genesis is more of a three part combination between media machine and gaming PC, including four strategically placed USB 3. Additionally, while supporting nearly two dozen drives, something only servers can usually boast, the PC-oriented motherboard only offers two SATA ports for further expansion.

Nevertheless, the massive 1, watt power supply not only offers full support for all the hardware included, but is sure not to falter when powering the massive overclocked 4.

Happy New Year from all of us at GamersNexus! I can think of no better way to bring in the new year than to build a brand new gaming rig!

Our first budget gaming PC build of takes advantage of some of the new year's sales we recently posted , making for one of the most powerful rigs you could build for such a cheap price. Using overclocking techniques, you'll be able to cut initial cost by amping up the selected RAM and CPU frequencies to exceed more expensive chips; this gives high-end performance at a low-cost, so be sure to take advantage of our beginner's overclocking guide for full potential.

This baby comes with the newest generation architecture to allow much better gaming than the previous HD 6XXX cards and, in terms of cost-to-performance, competes closely with nVidia's GTX The has a now standard bit wide memory interface and 1GB of GDDR5 memory operating on an effective MHz memory clock, making for enough bandwidth to run GPU-memory-intensive games smoothly.

The Phenom II X4 OEM is a quad-core chip sans integrated graphics, meaning more space dedicated to the cores and their functions; although the chip is a few generations old pre-Piledriver , it performs nearly identically to the or better, in some games and has an architecture that we believe is better for the price.

Deneb's architecture. Keep in mind this OEM product does not include a heatsink or thermal compound, but factory stock heatsinks aren't the best anyway, so we decided to couple this with the great deal we found on Corsair's H70 liquid cooler. You get 8GB of quality memory—that should be more than enough for your basic gaming needs. You also get USB 3.

It's important to grab a PSU parallel in quality to the rest of your components; if there's one component we consistently advise builders not to cut corners on, it's the power supply. Here goes For the brain of your computer there are really only two manufacturers in the running: Intel and AMD.

AMD's Bulldozer series was a disappointment for the desktop market. Bulldozer's successor Piledriver was a big improvement in some ways, but by then Intel had moved on as well. Now Steamroller's been delayed until next year, and what I hear isn't very encouraging". If you go with intel, and can afford it, you'll be wanting one of the Ivy Bridge processors, which come in three increasingly powerful flavours: i3, i5 and i7.

But you can still get fantastic performance — and arguably much better bang for your buck — from the i5 series. And here comes your first big construction dilemma: do you want to overclock your PC? Overclocking is when you tweak the settings of the CPU to run at a faster speed than the manufacturer guarantees it is stable at.

It's something many experienced gamers do, and its fine if you have a well-built machine with lots of fans to keep things cool. If you head down this route, you'll want the ik and a Z77 motherboard; if that all sounds a bit scary it does to me , stick with the cheaper combo of i and H77 motherboard. Some PC retailers are suggesting that the bottom of the range i3 is now too slow to handle modern games, but our panel refutes that.

Ah, yes, cores. Currently, most PCs at the lower end of the market will offer dual-core CPUs, which as Hannett says is absolutely fine for most current game releases. However, as goes on, we're going to get lots more Triple A titles looking for quad-core power.

If you're only running indie titles or older budget titles you've downloaded from steam, you should be fine on dual-core for a good while. But with PCs it always pays to think as far ahead as your wallet will allow. At the ultra-budget end, you're going to be wanting at least two cores running at 3Ghz or more.

Bickham says, "if you're on the strictest of budgets, a dual-core i3 such as the 3. And it's a great overclocker if you fancy dabbling in the dark arts…".

Bottom line: The Intel i if you're rich, the i5 K, i or ik if you're doing okay, the AMD AK or i3 if you're just about hanging in there.

This is the thing that does all the calculations for the game visuals, including rendering geometry and spitting out all those lovely special effects. According to most of the developers I spoke to this is where the big money should go if you can afford to max out on just one component. Once again, we're looking at a two-horse race: Nvidia v AMD, the former with its Geforce range, the latter with Radeon. This is a much closer competition though and both brands have their acolytes.

If the phase power design isn't listed in the specifications, it can be easily determined by counting the blocks on the board. Technically, having a more advanced phase power design will improve stability by having more consistently clean power delivery and fewer voltage drops, but neither of those is a likely issue on a mainstream rig.

As a final aside, some boards have special dedicated components on-board that offer advanced functionality. In the case of Killer, you're obviously still throttled by your ISP, but the NIC does prioritize gaming tasks over other tasks; for instance, if you're a YouTuber and upload a lot of files, but want to be able to game online simultaneously, Killer NICs will throttle your YouTube upload speed until your game ping is reliable.

That's really going to be the only significant advantage, though. As for Hi-Fi and other audio devices, since discrete cards have faded from necessity to accessory, it really just depends on how crazy you are about your audio quality. Let's cut to the chase. We're not saying that these are the only good boards available, but we do readily endorse the boards found within for their respective price ranges. I've listed four price-points in the same fashion we categorize our PC builds:.

We generally try to push system builders toward "budget" and "mid-range" categories, as the Cheap Bastard's configurations do come with the inherent risk of lower quality in favor of price. High-end configurations are largely unnecessary for the majority of system builders. The 'given' here is that the socket types must be LGA to be compatible with Haswell. Most of the features are dictated by the chipset, and being that this runs on a business-class B85 chipset, you're going to be limited in functionality.

Best used for single-card configurations and for those who don't care about overclocking. The budget and mid-range price-points tend to be where we feel most comfortable with the compromises made between quality and featuresets.

This board runs on 6-phase power design and has passive phase cooling near most the phases, anyway , so you won't get world record overclocks, but it's stable enough for most entry-level power users.

Spring for the ZG43 Gaming. This is where we've historically recommended ASUS boards for their focus on high-quality components and longevity. Granted, the whole "dragon" aesthetic did feel like an overzealous marketing team screaming "G4M1NG! The GGaming board uses an 8-phase power design with passive cooling on both flanks of the socket, has a large heatsink atop the chipset, and ships with the highest-quality audio chipset and LAN chipset we've seen this side of the market.