Centre Com Budget Gaming System

Many people these days are after a quick, small and affordable gaming computer that will give them decent performance for the price they paid, at Centre Com we acknowledge this and hence built a budget gaming system and reviewed it!

Our goal was simple, build a gaming rig that would cost the buyer $799 ready to go. And here is what we came up with.

Intel Core i5 3450
G.Skill 8GB 1600MHz Memory
Gigabyte B75M-D3H Motherboard
500GB Hard Drive
XFX 550w Pro PSU
Thermaltake V3 Black Case
XFX 7850 DD Edition

All up, quite a budget system that offers a decent gaming CPU coupled with enough memory and a fantastic budget graphics card. I think a lot of people underestimate the 7800 series graphics cards. In terms of price vs performance, the 7800 really do offer a bang for your buck!

The system is quite simple and is suitable for those looking at getting a gaming system to lug around LAN events. It’s quite small and lightweight making it perfect for distance travels. Looking inside it isn’t the prettiest. The back panel of the motherboard doesn’t really have any room to thread cables even though it has grommets to do so.

Let’s take a look at how the gaming side of things went with a few benchmarks. It should be noted that the first thing I did with the graphics card was push the clock up to 1050Mhz which is roughly the limit of it without having to play with voltages. So if you do grab one of these units or buy these cards, feel safe in pushing up to 1050MHz

3DMark and Unigine gave pretty normal results. The Budget Gamer scored as the 7850 would in comparison to the other cards.

Looking over the games Max Payne 3 came in at a pretty low score; however you need to remember these are the maximum settings available in game. Knowing Rockstar, their games really push limits of even the greatest cards so this card getting an average of 25 at its highest settings is somewhat a good result for it. Lowering a few of the shader and anti-aliasing options do offer great improvement and FPS of up around 50 which is a much more comfortable quality.

Split/Second was a strange one, normally 25fps would sound like a pretty low score, but with this game it was smoother than expected. Once again however this really is at maxed out settings and a simple cutting down to High settings will see you roughly double the average FPS.

Check out the videos below to get a glimpse on the systems performance! These were captured with either one of the AverMedia Capture Cards!

 

Temperature wise was quite surprising to say the least. With a stock cooler and just a rear exhaust fan I can honestly say I was worried it wasn’t going to work. I have been surprised before but the surprise with this was well above anything I’ve experienced before! With Prime95 running for a solid 20 minutes the temperature would max out at around 65-69 degrees. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a GREAT result but it is a GOOD result. It was a bit on the loud side but you can expect to get that on a stock cooler. The 7850 was equally surprising and performed well with load temps during BF3 up around the 70 degree mark.

So if you’re looking at getting a budget gaming system this could be one for you. If you’re not too fussed about maxing out settings in every game you play and just want a decent performing machine without a whole lot of quality loss this one could really be for you. At an amazing price you really can’t go wrong.

By Sahin Selvi
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au

The benchmark results may differ from user to user depending on what background software you are running and versions of benchmark software. These results aren’t portrayed to be seen as exact performance figures but merely as a rough estimate on the performance of the machine. These results are in no way bias to any company or person and are here to provide the end user in depth details and to provide extra assistance of potential purchases. All information on this page is subject to copyright. Please do not copy any parts of this article.