Would this be a good start for a budget machine for GW2

Saw this on newegg and thought it might be a good start. Just add an OS and a video card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.980031

 Thermaltake Armor A60 AMD LEO Edition VM200P1W2Z Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case w/ Side Swap HDD tray & front USB 3.0 port
ASUS F1A55-M LX PLUS FM1 AMD A55 (Hudson D2) Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
Thermaltake TR2 W0388RU 600W ATX 12V v2.2 Power Supply
AMD A8-3870K Unlocked Llano 3.0GHz Socket FM1 100W Quad-Core Desktop APU (CPU + GPU) with DirectX 11 Graphic AMD Radeon HD 6550D AD3870WNGXBOX
G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBSR
Seagate Barracuda Green ST1500DL003 1.5TB 5900 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

The one I just built for budget gaming was: Intel Core i3 2100 - $119.99 MSI H77MA-G43 - $89.99 Crucial Ballistix sport 8GB - $43.99 Crosair CX500 500w PSU - $54.99 Asus HD7750 Radeon HD 7750 1GB - $109.99 Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA - $69.99 Zalman Z9 case - $44.99 Lite-On DVD Burner - $17.99 Total comes out to be $551.92. I love those A8 (Llano) and A10 (trinity) chips for everyday use for people who want something above a Celeron, Pentium, or other low end cpu, but they have no upgrade path. The highest you can do on that motherboard is basically what's already in it. The motherboard I included is an H77 that is capable of running the new ivy bridge (i5/7 3xxx) processors as well as PCI-E 3.0 (with an ivy bridge chip only). Overclocking will be nill, but it'll allow you to upgrade and use any current socket 1155 processor including the i7 3770k and i7 2700k giving you far more headroom than with an FM1 motherboard. Also, those low-end thermaltake PSUs are crap and I try to stay away from those LP/Green hard drives because I've seen higher failure rates with them.

» Edited on: 2012-08-03 14:19:57

What Sarosan said - I've seen a few of his posts on the subject and he clearly knows what he's talking about. The only thing I could add is that w/the Green HD's I've read not only about higher failure rates, but I've had at least two friends start with them eventually go to a Western Digital blue/black Caviar drive due to performance issues. Two friends does not a pattern make, but these guys are desktop engineers and at least have a little knowledge on the subject so I generally put some value in their input.

The green drives are great for storing your videos and music, imo.

If you google "WD green higher failure rates" you'll find all sorts of posts on the subject. I'm not a fan of the intellipower technology in general...and there's a reason they're almost always cheap as dirt. I like WD in general, just not the green drives.

Definitely a good price for a complete system. It's going to be very difficult to beat the $450 price mark in anything else. That being said, if you have an extra $100, I'm going to echo the concerns around the CPU. Hands-down the best gaming CPU's are still the i3/i5/i7's. I did a lot of research into this not long ago when I built my own. I really like the "best for the money" articles these guys put out and would recommend checking this out: http://www.squidoo.com/build-gaming-pc

» Edited on: 2012-08-04 10:16:06

Thanks for the comments. I saw this system so I thought I would see the opinions on it as I know some people are looking at new rigs. Sounds like there s a reason the bundle is so low cost.

it's a great system for just an out of the box low end gaming. It WOULD at least run GW2. It's just the cpu upgrade path that really worries me. The last thing you want to do is spend the money on a system that you can't upgrade 2 years from now. Once you add the video card though, it's suddenly not such a great price as the built in video on that A8 chip is equal to a mid range laptop video chip.

I Thought the new chip on the fm2 would be out by now which would have a better upgrade path and onboard video. Hmm should look at any ivy bridge build. I am just trying to get some discussion going to help people looking for new setups to play the game.

http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/ - A useful site for getting some excellent build critique along with plenty of other useful info.

» Edited on: 2012-08-05 06:42:50

@Bashir It is out in terms of OEM systems. I actually just helped someone get an A10-5700 system the other day. His use was just everyday business stuff but he wanted a bit of extra pop as far as video went. That's the trinity platform. However, being that it's based off the bulldozer architecture it's pretty weak when it comes to gaming performance. It's per-core performance is pretty bad. Unless you're doing something that's heavily multi-threaded it's not worth it for a gaming system. I really don't care which direction people go as far as intel or amd. Intel does make better chips overall right now, but if someone came to me and said they could get a cheap AMD system with say an FX 4170 or the likes I'd say go ahead. Really for gaming the video card is always going to have the most pull once you get a decent modern cpu. If you play at 1920x180 or above it's far more GPU limited than CPU.