Gaming PC on the Cheap c/o Tom’s Hardware

System Builder Marathon, Sept. ’09- $650 Gaming PC

For a 30-35k peso PC, this is no slouch, being able to run demanding video games like Crysis and Far Cry 2, easily. The set-up involves the AMD Athlon II X2 550 Black Edition (also known as a ‘crippled’ Phenom II processor with 2 cores), a Gigabyte Crossfire AM3 motherboard, several gigabytes of DDR3 RAM and DUAL ATI Radeon 4850s (cheap but no slouches in performance)!.

If you need quad core performance, you can opt in the AMD Athlon II X4 660, however, it will perform slower than the dual core processor as the ‘crippled’ part of the processor is the all powerful L3 cache (the reason why Phenom II chips are on par with Core 2 Duos).