An Entry Level Gamer's Build

If you're starting out building a PC / gaming, you might not be so invested as to drop thousands of dollars on a fantastic rig. You might not even have monitors/speakers set up.

These builds right here are ideal for a newly entering desktop user / gamer, including full desk setups. I did my best to keep the entire build under $1000, some instances the price may go over a little.

Beginner's Intel Rig

This build is quite nice for starting out, I will run down the parts ;

Intel CORE i5 is reputable for being one of the best CPU's at it's price, without overclocks

Gigabyte motherboards are awesome, they just never include a good amount of fan headers. So, I hook ye up with the proper cables to enable all case fans ;

https://www.quietpc.com/gel-pwm-1-4-pwmcable

PSU 6 pin to Molex power - Newegg

The graphics card is good enough to run games on high for a little while, and among the best of it's price point.

I included a big hard drive instead of an SSD. A beginner might not mind the speed difference, plus an SSD is more expensive for a smaller price.

The case is awesome, I use it in my current computer and I love it. It's a bit high for a case but the quality is amazing, and this case will be reusable for any microatx or mini-itx build.

8 GB Ram = more than enough for gaming, plus it's easy to get another stick for intense stuff

This build includes some nice quality speakers, great headphones, a decent monitor (may wanna upgrade later but it does fine for now) and a simple keyboard - bonus for the LEDs.

The price is 80 dollars above the 1000 dollar goal, but the performance should be nice for a while to come.

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Our next build will focus more on trimming down the price. This rig will feature an AMD FX 8 core CPU as opposed to intel, which should trim the total motherboard price by a bit.

Beginner's AMD Rig

Similar GPU to the previous build, (Vram Wise) this should run games on max for a while to come.

The CPU is AMD FX, not many like it because it is old, but it works nicely for a lot of games I play - and I beginner won't need a super good CPU, I hope.

I included the Devastator bundle again because it's the cheapest I've seen and it's glowey. If you want macros, knock yourself out. I included a full speaker set too, and headphones again, alongside a pretty nice monitor.

The Supercheap Desktop for the Desperate :

Ever relied on your old machine and boom ; it breaks, and you really need something to do your work on? Good news for you, a basic home/office/home office desktop could be built for under 300, easily.

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/wjwPXH

For the operating system, you need a USB flash drive (4 GB should do) to install a Linux Mint distro. I personally recommend Linux Mint 17.3 Xfce-64 Bit personally, for this.

This PC has no extra CPU cooler. Use the stock one from the AMD FX's box. A new one shouldn't cost any more than $25, if you wish for a better one.

Now ; this PC is very bare bones. It does not have windows, or a discrete graphics card. So if you, say, were using this for home use and needed to use MS Office, or wanted to play some games, you may need to spend more to upgrade. Not a problem, I got you here :

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gYMpHN

What if you need less? I could make it fit under a 200 dollar budget...

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/YkFTnn

Or 275 With windows 8.1

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/K6YJM8

Are you using this system for now, but making your first desktop setup and planning on expanding later? It would be pricey, so a laptop could be friendlier for a lower budget...

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/hB8d9W

This system runs you for the same price as a decent laptop, but some laptops can go lower. However, this guy could actually run some beyond-basic games well enough, to my knowledge.

Another demonstration of the amazing possibilities that building a computer brings. You could dump twice the price on a simple office desktop (sure it will be relevant for longer) or build one with a little pep for a low price! 

Some of the lower priced computers I mention do use slightly older parts. AMD FX CPU's are fairly good, despite them being a few years old and soon to be replaced with AM4 series processors. AMD A6 seems like a pretty good one, given the price. Not as good as a 4350 but way cheaper.

Every part but the motherboard, cpu, and RAM (depending) could be reused if you decided to make it beefier later down the road. 

Is Alienware Worth The Money?

Hint : It's not, as long as you can build well.

Alienware was formerly a high end PC company until it was bought by Dell. They still continued making these computers and they still do today. You'll note a lot of people dislike Alienware, except for the owners who really like them.

A lot of people's reason for disliking it is the cooling. Nearly every other company beats Alienware cooling wise. Their cases, are just not good for keeping the system cool (more of that in a future article)

I owned an Alienware a while back. It was a nice PC for it's time... but 1.5k? I realized today if me or my father could build, we could have made that rig for 800-1k dollars, including the monitor, speakers, and keyboard/mouse. And that's the reason I personally dislike Alienware. I understand that it is a company whose sole purpose is to sell computers, but take a trip down this article and you shall note that Alienware sells computers for what could be 1000 dollars more than their worth!

*Note ; I am unaware if Alienware/Dell bundles monitors or headphones/speakers with their computers, so I included both in case. If they don't after all, bonus points for me.

**If you actually build one of these, remember that you are the OEM, obviously, so you don't have the edge of AlienRespawn or any of Dell's included services for Alienware products, and obviously no warranty unless your specific part specifies what it is.
***I am aware that Alienware is a business and naturally needs to over-price their items to actually make profit. Still, don't fork over the extra 1k for that! ;)

Let's get going!

Here is Dell's recent line of Area-51 desktop PCs. 

$1700 Area-51 vs. Build

$1,100 Build

The Alienware claims to have an overclocked CPU. With the Corsair H55 and a powersupply with some breathing room, you should have no problem overclocking the CPU. The price difference is 600 dollars, assuming Alienware doesn't bundle monitors with their machines. If not, bonus.

$2300 Aread-51 vs. Build

I won't create a new list, instead, make these tweaks :

• Keep the Radeon R9 370 or opt for a Radeon R9/RX series GPU. NVIDIA's GTX 970 doesn't have the capabilities that they say it has, which is why they were legally in trouble. Basically, you might not be able to run games on as high settings as you thought you would with this. Plus, the R9 370 is cheaper.
• Buy another of the same RAM stick if you need 16 GB RAM
• Get the Intel CORE i7 6800k CPU if you wish to match the CPU power
• Get a 2 TB hard drive if you want to match Alienware's added storage, and a 128 GB SSD

$3250 Area-51 vs. Build

$2750 Build

The price gap is only around 500 dollars this time, meaning we win still. But you can chop off a lot of money from this machine, and make the gap 900 dollars depending on how much you want to sacrifice.

• If you don't game in 4K, a GTX 1080 is a little overkill for you (that said you probably do if you're this invested)
• A Radeon RX 480 halves the price while delivering a pretty close level of performance ; not many programs will max out the power of an RX 480, GTX 1070, or 1080
• You can derp around with the amount of Storage and RAM you need of you want to change it, as always.

$4650 Area-51 vs. Build

I did go out of my way to exactly match Alienware and increase your drive storage a bit. 

$4000 Build

This built machine is 600 dollars less than Dell's offering, but you can cut it by a bunch by doing this.

• Half the SSD space
• -1 TB HDD space
• Downgrade to RX 480 and half the GPU price. 
• Half the ram of you don't need it
• You can cut the storage even further if you don't need so much

$3,350 Build

This build here makes the price difference 1.3k! You can save more by halving the ram, cutting some storage, and making the price gap bigger, if you wish. 

Moral of the story : build trumps buy, as long as you know how. And it's not hard for a first timer to learn! Plenty of places online will show you how to build. I might even make a post for that one day. 

Thanks for reading my first post here! If you like desktops, building desktops, reviewing them, looking at parts, then be sure to check back weekly. I plan on at least doing one post weekly, right here.