Hello everyone!

My names Steven AKA Thefieldmarshal, and I specialize on budget PC's. I have a PH.D in computer engineering from CMU, have been working in the field for over 2 decades. I am recently published in the area of research and making budget gaming PC's. I've been very successful in making them at a low cost(sometimes I even make money when I sell them). I enjoy taking the time to help people with hardware questions and my focus is helping people with budgets max their performance needs. I will update my website weekly.

Home Page: http://budgetgamingpc.weebly.com/index.html

The Basics: http://budgetgamingpc.weebly.com/the-basics.html

Sandy/Ivy Bridge Technology: http://budgetgamingpc.weebly.com/san...echnology.html

$500.00 Dollar Gamer: http://budgetgamingpc.weebly.com/budget-of-500.html

Budget Gamer: http://budgetgamingpc.weebly.com/budget-gamer.html

Extreme Gamer: http://budgetgamingpc.weebly.com/extreme-budget.html

Budget Enthusiast: http://budgetgamingpc.weebly.com/budget-enthusiast.html

Note: The website ISN'T finished. I am still revising it, and if anyone finds any information incorrect or not worded properly, feel free to let me know. That being said if you have any questions feel free to ask as well!

EDIT: My email listed on the website is from Carlow where I am currently working with Cory Maloney in developing some new business solution software.

/bump

can you find a good rig for me? black friday is here and i would love to snag some stuff while its a big sale especially on newegg. I can spend around $600.00

What i have already that i dont want to replace is a OCZ Agility3 SSD+other HD's for all my storage needs. AMD Radeon HD 6950 video card. My tower is big i can replace if needed but yea. Whats the best i can get for around $600.00 to make my computer last me a good 4years+ for gaming.

Could you say more about your decision to go with an FX-6000 series and the GTX 650 over an i3 and a 7000 series AMD? From what I can tell the latter two tend to be recommended in budget builds, so I'm curious as to why you went with what you did.

Also, what do you think of the new AMD APUs? They seem extremely economical for those not pursuing games requiring strong video cards.

The FX-6300 is pretty much on par with an I3-3220 in gaming. The I3-3220 is slightly ahead. But the FX-6300 is a 6 core 3 module with 3 floating core processor. It can multitask 10 times better, AND it can overclock as well, but you would need a 970/990 board and a after market CPU cooler for that.

I chose the GTX 650ti because nothing AMD offers in that price range of 135 is as good. The HD 6870 is slightly ahead but goes over budget. the HD 7850 destroys it but way over budget. The GTX 650ti beats the HD 7770 and both are low powered cards.

I am working on a build that will have an A10-5800k crossfired with an HD 6670 GDDR5 atm. Currently an A10-5800k cross fired with an HD 6670 1GB GDDR5 with 2133MHz ram and OC'ed to 4.4GHz can completely destroy an I3-3220+HD 7770 in gaming and is just laughable in multithreaded performance as well.

EDIT: The piledriver(fx-4300 6300 8320 8350) are vastly improved from the bulldozer(4100 4170 6100 6200 8120 8150) in IPC's, which is what drives gaming. The old FX series was a joke in gaming, the new piledriver is very good in the budget area of 130-180 for a CPU, especially if you want to OC>

So you need a mobo, ram, cpu, dvd drive? I presume running an HD 6950 which requires decent amount of power your PSU is fine. Answer the following questions for me.
Do you want to overclock?
How much do you want to spent? If you WANT to spend 600 then I will max out that budget.
Do you need a copy of windows?

Is this based on anything that actually put it to the test? If I'm not mistaken, the tests on i3 vs the stock 6-core and even 8-core bulldozers showed the i3 coming out on top even in multi-tasking scenarios.

The i3 consistently came out on top above those processors in gaming and other single thread heavy situations. The FX 8xxx series did pull slightly ahead in heavily threaded situations, like encoding and decoding.

The new FX line based on Piledriver changes this a bit. The FX 6300 is right in line with the Core i3 in terms of gaming, and pulls ahead in multi-tasking pretty cleanly. To put it bluntly, the FX 6300 is close to on par with Intel's Sandybridge architecture, but at a lower price point. This is what makes the FX-6300 such a strong choice for a budget system. Yes, you can find higher performing processors from Intel, like the i5 line. The cost, however, doesn't match the small performance increase that you see going to it. The i5 crushed FX-Bulldozer, that isn't the case against the FX-Piledriver line.

If I were to put together a budget gamer today, I would be running to the FX-6300 over the i3. The performance is huge for the money! Pilerdriver has performed far better than what I expected.

^^^ I may need to rewrite some of my website if it wasn't clear in the sandy bridge technology part.
EDIT: Thank you for the response btw.

Something else I should add, the comparison of the Core i3 to the Piledriver based FX processors are off stock speeds. Overclocking is always a bit touchy when you are talking about performance benchmarks, but in the end, it is a real factor.

While the budget gamer might not have interest right out of the gate in overclocking, there is the potential that they will do it at some point. If that person has some inclination that they might want to OC, they can spend another $20 on their motherboard and get an AsRock 970, which will give them this option.

Once you start OCing the 6300 the budget to performance ratio just gets silly.