The case was by far the most lackluster part of the entire setup, but it doesn’t have to be pretty to run games, right? And frankly, for what hardware lies within the case, the 400W power supply unit is enough, even without any sort of certification. The result? A $396 gaming PC, with OS included. Yes, we dug around to find some good deals, and yes, the case, mouse and hard drive are on the very cheap side of things. Despite that, the configuration is pretty high quality (especially the mother board and GPU), and runs smoothly.
- CPU: AMD Athlon X4 750K Trinity 3.4GHz Socket FM2 100W Desktop – $79.99
- Mother Board: ASRock FM2A55M-VG3+ FM2+ 95W / FM2 100W AMD A55 – $42.99
- Graphics Card: SAPPHIRE 100367L Radeon R7 250X 1GB 128-Bit GDDR5 – $99.99
- Hard Drive: Seagate ST500DM002 500GB 7200 RPM 16GB Sata 6.0Gb/s (Open Box) – $38.99
- Case & Power Supply: TOPOWER TP-4107BB-400 Black SGCC 0.4mm ATX with 400W Power Supply – $29.99
- Memory: G.SKILL Value 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 1600 CL11 – $34.99
- Mouse & Keyboard: GIGABYTE GK-KM3100 Black USB Wired Standard Keyboard + Mouse Combo – $13.99
What can you expect from a $396 PC? Not much would be the logical answer, despite that, this system pulled off an impressive 42 FPS in Titanfall with AA disabled, at 1920x1080p and with maxed out settings. With AA enabled, it fell down to an average of 26 FPS, which is playable, although some players would expect better. It did a fine job with Battlefield 4 however, getting 56 FPS with High Settings and AA enabled, and 33 with Ultra. Mantle at its best, as we can see. Elder Scrolls Online was perfectly playable too, running at 54 FPS with Medium-High Details. Maxing the details completely resulted in 28 FPS, which is playable, but barely. Then again, in all fairness, most Xbox One and some PS4 games run at 30 FPS constantly. Lastly, Assassin’s Creed IV was also playable. With everything maxed out, we got 28 FPS, but tune things down slightly and you’ll be looking at 35-40 easily, without compromising too much on the visual size.
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To conclude, we’ve shown you several different setups. Obviously, the $396 system struggled a bit here and there, but still managed to provide around 30 FPS in most games, with details maxed out or towards the high-end of things, proving to be worthy competition to the Xbox One at least. As for the our main AMD and Intel/Nvidia systems, not only did these manage to run everything smoothly, they proved to run most games considerably better than an Xbox One or a PS4. All this for about the same price. Even if our example gaming PC’s are slightly more expensive than either consoles, they are also outperforming them, so the difference in price can be justified by the difference in performance.
Tweak a little bit here and there, hunt for some great deals and you can assemble a gaming PC to rival both the Xbox One and the PS4, for the same costs of a console. Add to that the functionality and benefits of a PC (let’s face it, you can do a lot more with a PC than you can with a console), and you’ll see clear proof that PC gaming is nowhere near being dead or reserved for the very rich. Also keep in mind that the Xbox One and PS4 don’t always run games at 1080p or at 60 FPS (rarely so in the case of the former), so for the titles that are not exclusive, the PC is definitely a safe and, as proven, relatively accessible option.