How to Build a Kick-ass $800 Gaming PC

A good gaming PC can cost quite a bit but with only US$800, you can build yourself a computer that will surprisingly kick some gaming ass! From Maximum PC:

We put this $800 PC up against our standard zero point machine to see how it matches up against a rig that costs twice as much. It’s not hard to guess that the zero point system with a Core 2 Quad and a Velociraptor would beat our budget rig on every test possible, but the $800 wonder did surprisingly well in some of the tests. Premiere Pro tests showed a two minute difference but in Photoshop we only experienced a 4 second difference while Photodex ProShow Producer showed a 41 second difference. MainConcept Reference hit our budget PC hard, though, and further shows that MainConcept is optimized for four cores.

We went into our gaming benchmark with low expectations from our budget card, the Radeon HD 4850. Obviously, it is no match against the dual GeForce 8800 GTX setup in the Zero Point system. With settings cranked up to the max, our card was barely able to spit out 16 FPS in Crysis. While playing Crysis at the highest settings possible and a resolution of 1920x1200 simply isn’t an option, turning down the graphic settings to medium resulted in 43 FPS made the game much more playable. Unreal Tournament 3 managed to give us a stellar 78 FPS. If you’re running at typical 22-inch LCD resolutions, this machine should kick ass.