Build a Gaming PC for $3000 - May 2012

**Building a $3,000 Gaming PC: Part 2**

In this video, we'll be discussing the power supply unit (PSU) and other components of our gaming PC build. As mentioned earlier, we're aiming for a total cost of around $3,000.

**Power Supply Unit (PSU)**

To power our system, we've chosen the Corsair HX 1050, which has 1050 watts of capacity. This is more than enough to power all our components, including extra hard drives and other peripherals. The PSU is also modular, allowing us to plug in only the cables we need and keep our cable management neat and organized. This unit can be purchased for around $200.

**Case**

For our case, we've selected the popular Corsair Obsidian 650D. As mentioned earlier, this is an all-around great performer, offering excellent airflow and room for all our components. The case has a sleek design that looks great out of the box, but if you want to customize it further, there are plenty of options available. The Corsair Obsidian 650D can be purchased for around $150.

**Optical Drive**

We're also including a Samsung Blu-ray drive in this build. This is optional, and if you don't need Blu-ray capabilities, you can step down to a standard DVD drive and save yourself around $50. However, having a Blu-ray drive allows you to read the latest Blu-ray discs and install Windows on your system easily. The Samsung Blu-ray drive can be purchased for around $75.

**Operating System**

Finally, we're including a copy of Windows 7 Professional in this build. This is optional, as some users may already have a version of Windows or prefer to use Windows 8. If you do have a version of Windows or want to use Windows 8, you can skip this step and save yourself around $140. Otherwise, the Windows 7 Professional copy will add an extra $140 to your total cost.

**Grand Total**

So, what's the damage? The grand total for this build comes out to be around $2,989.10. We'll include links to all the parts mentioned in the description of this video below.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys this is Austin and today me with the video going over a gaming PC for $3,000 now this is a request I got the other day and I definitely could not pass it up however before we begin I want to be super clear on one thing this is massive overkill for most people if you just want to play battlefield 3 on a single 1080p monitor through $1,000 game PC will do just fine if you want to go ahead and add some more bells and whistles and get a little bit better frame rates the $1,500 bill will also do a really great job however if you want the absolute best you won't play on two maybe even three monitors and have absolutely ridiculous frame rates and everything you throw at it then this is the build you want to go for to kick our build off we're going to be using an Intel Core i7 3930k CPU now this thing is an absolute powerhouse not only does it have six cores but it also has hyper-threading which means that Windows will see it as a 12 core CPU it's clocked at three point two gigahertz although since it's a K series part you can definitely overclock it and 4.5 gigahertz is not something unreasonable to get on the CPU and since it's based on the X 79 platform you get all the great benefits of that platform including quad channel memory as well as tons and tons of PCI bandwidth for all kinds of awesome crossfire and SLI setups for $590 is deathly expensive but it's the heart of our buildings going to an absolutely awesome job to get the best performance out of our CPU we're going to be going with the corsair hae liquid cooler now in general I'm more of a fan of air cooling most of my builds however this one is definitely going to be an exception the H ad is going to do a great job of keeping our CPU cool especially when overclocking of course when you do overclock that does produce more heat and of course all that heats got to go somewhere however the H 80 does a great job of dissipating out of your case now it is liquid cooled however you don't really have to worry about having a reservoir or anything like that it's also contained nice and easy to set up for about $90 this is a great addition to our build for a motherboard we're going to be going with the ax Sue's Pinay n-- x79 board now this has all the benefits that you would expect within x79 board including quad-channel memory support so basically what this means is you can put four different dims of memory inside and they will all work in conjunction to make your build even faster on top of that it has all the kind of modern things you would expect including SATA 3 as well as USB 3 it has plenty of power to handle all kinds of overclocking on your CPU it's a great deal for about 320 dollars for graphics cards we're going to be going with a pair of gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 overclocked edition cards now this is going to give you some absolutely awesome performance and this is what's going to allow you to run pretty much any game you'd want on to and sometimes even three monitors so the 7970 is the latest in the greatest as far as the AMD single GPU cards and when you put a pair of them together in crossfire expect some absolutely crazy performance each card is equipped with three gigabytes of gddr5 memory which is going to be perfect for powering multiple monitors on top of that these are of course the overall condition of these cards so that means that not only do they have a factory overclock but you can also push them much farther as they each have three separate fans on the PCB beyond that H have two mini display ports a DVI port as well as HDMI if you want to go and video on this one you can instead pick up a pair of gtx 680 s however these are pretty much impossible to track down as is much less if you want to actually pay anywhere near the normal price otherwise if you just want to go up to 79 70 s so pretty much in stock everywhere it's going to run you about $1000 for the pair for memory we're going to be using 16 gigabytes of Patriot gamer 2 Series Division 4 Edition so terrible name aside this stuff is going to be exactly what we need in our system so this consists of 4 dims of 4 gigabytes apiece so 4 8 12 16 please you can do the map there so the main reason that we want to do this is mostly to take advantage of the quad channel memory on our x79 board which of course will just kind of speed everything up a little bit but on top of that each of these DIMMs are clocked at 1866 megahertz which is going to be perfect for our bill for about 95 dollars another great way to go for storage we're going to be using a 128 gigabyte samsung 830 series drive so I like these for a couple of reasons for one they're fast so they may not be quite as fast as some of the absolute screeners on the market right now but in return for that you get some really really great reliability which is definitely not something you can say about all SSDs so in my opinion these samsung drives really do kind of hit that sweet spot now I did choose a 128 gigabyte drive for this however there's absolutely nothing stopping you from bumping this up to 256 or even buying a pair of these and putting them in raid otherwise though it will cost you about $130 to go along with the SSD we're going to be using a 2 terabyte Western Digital caviar black drive so this is pretty much the standard on the market right now it's fast it's reliable and pretty much the way to go as far as the spinning mechanical hard drive is concerned with 2 terabytes you can have plenty of room for your music for your photos media for games all that kind of stuff although if you did want to you think that's a little bit over I definitely could step it back down to a one terabyte otherwise this will run you about $200 to power the bill we're going to be using a corsair HX 1050 watts apply now of course we have a lot of high-end hardware in this bill nighy do we have a pair of 79 70s we also have a highly overclockable cpu hard drives all kinds of stuff which is going to really just suck all kinds of power and that's what you're really going to want something like this which of course has 1050 watts of capacity which would be plenty to go ahead and power this build as well as extra hard drives and all that kind of stuff now it is of course modular so you can simply just plug whichever cables you need in and make sure that you get all your cable management nice and neat for about two hundred dollars it's a great way to go for a case we're going to be using the corsair obsidian 650d this is a very popular case and for good reason it's an all-around great performer Helder before we go into it I definitely do want to mention that if you want customize anything as far as the aesthetics of this build go the case is definitely where you should start so the 650d and my opinion looks great it's very clean it's very understated but it still says hey look this is an awesome gaming computer you got out side window and all that kind of stuff or if you want something with more you know over the top it nests are the top and this is a work by the way just does roll with me here if you want to go with something that's a little bit more has more Flair or whatever you want to say you can definitely feel free to do that just make sure that it has enough room for all your parts which of course the 650d does and also it has enough airflow which again the 650d does so anyway this one is going to run you by $150 although of course if you want to customize and go with a different case by all means feel free for an optical drive we're going to be using a Samsung blu-ray drive so this is actually kind of optional so if you want to have comic the ultimate set up you won't be able to read blu-rays and this is a great way to go however if you never really deal with blu-rays you can definitely step down to a standard DVD drive and save yourself about $50 that's what actually I have in my system I don't really ever use blu-rays but of course if you want to go ahead and have that blu-ray capability it's definitely a great way to go on top of that you can also just shove the DVD or the blu-ray or the optical drive you just get rid of that altogether and that works fine but in general I do at least recommend to pick up a DVD drive so that you can you know install Windows and kind of get your programs everything on there nice and easy anyway if you want to go with the blu-ray drive it's going to run you about seventy-five dollars last but not least we have a copy of Windows 7 Professional so this is actually kind of the optional part of the build if you are have a version of windows or you want to use windows 8 you can absolutely feel free to skip this so I should really don't like including windows in my builds a lot of people usually have windows already or they're going to use Windows 8 or whatever however I thought it would be kind of weird to do a three thousand dollar bill without including windows a thought maybe a couple complaints might be had so if you guys want to go ahead you're on I already have a version of Windows you can feel free to skip this or of course if you want step down to Windows Home Premium you'll save about $40 but otherwise this will run you about one hundred and forty dollars so what's the damage the grand total is going to be two thousand nine hundred and eighty nine dollars and ten cents now I'll have links to all the parts I mentioned in the description of this video anyway guys if you enjoyed this video definitely be sure to leave it a thumbs up I really appreciate that and if you're interested in more gaming PC bills like this be sure to subscribehey guys this is Austin and today me with the video going over a gaming PC for $3,000 now this is a request I got the other day and I definitely could not pass it up however before we begin I want to be super clear on one thing this is massive overkill for most people if you just want to play battlefield 3 on a single 1080p monitor through $1,000 game PC will do just fine if you want to go ahead and add some more bells and whistles and get a little bit better frame rates the $1,500 bill will also do a really great job however if you want the absolute best you won't play on two maybe even three monitors and have absolutely ridiculous frame rates and everything you throw at it then this is the build you want to go for to kick our build off we're going to be using an Intel Core i7 3930k CPU now this thing is an absolute powerhouse not only does it have six cores but it also has hyper-threading which means that Windows will see it as a 12 core CPU it's clocked at three point two gigahertz although since it's a K series part you can definitely overclock it and 4.5 gigahertz is not something unreasonable to get on the CPU and since it's based on the X 79 platform you get all the great benefits of that platform including quad channel memory as well as tons and tons of PCI bandwidth for all kinds of awesome crossfire and SLI setups for $590 is deathly expensive but it's the heart of our buildings going to an absolutely awesome job to get the best performance out of our CPU we're going to be going with the corsair hae liquid cooler now in general I'm more of a fan of air cooling most of my builds however this one is definitely going to be an exception the H ad is going to do a great job of keeping our CPU cool especially when overclocking of course when you do overclock that does produce more heat and of course all that heats got to go somewhere however the H 80 does a great job of dissipating out of your case now it is liquid cooled however you don't really have to worry about having a reservoir or anything like that it's also contained nice and easy to set up for about $90 this is a great addition to our build for a motherboard we're going to be going with the ax Sue's Pinay n-- x79 board now this has all the benefits that you would expect within x79 board including quad-channel memory support so basically what this means is you can put four different dims of memory inside and they will all work in conjunction to make your build even faster on top of that it has all the kind of modern things you would expect including SATA 3 as well as USB 3 it has plenty of power to handle all kinds of overclocking on your CPU it's a great deal for about 320 dollars for graphics cards we're going to be going with a pair of gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 overclocked edition cards now this is going to give you some absolutely awesome performance and this is what's going to allow you to run pretty much any game you'd want on to and sometimes even three monitors so the 7970 is the latest in the greatest as far as the AMD single GPU cards and when you put a pair of them together in crossfire expect some absolutely crazy performance each card is equipped with three gigabytes of gddr5 memory which is going to be perfect for powering multiple monitors on top of that these are of course the overall condition of these cards so that means that not only do they have a factory overclock but you can also push them much farther as they each have three separate fans on the PCB beyond that H have two mini display ports a DVI port as well as HDMI if you want to go and video on this one you can instead pick up a pair of gtx 680 s however these are pretty much impossible to track down as is much less if you want to actually pay anywhere near the normal price otherwise if you just want to go up to 79 70 s so pretty much in stock everywhere it's going to run you about $1000 for the pair for memory we're going to be using 16 gigabytes of Patriot gamer 2 Series Division 4 Edition so terrible name aside this stuff is going to be exactly what we need in our system so this consists of 4 dims of 4 gigabytes apiece so 4 8 12 16 please you can do the map there so the main reason that we want to do this is mostly to take advantage of the quad channel memory on our x79 board which of course will just kind of speed everything up a little bit but on top of that each of these DIMMs are clocked at 1866 megahertz which is going to be perfect for our bill for about 95 dollars another great way to go for storage we're going to be using a 128 gigabyte samsung 830 series drive so I like these for a couple of reasons for one they're fast so they may not be quite as fast as some of the absolute screeners on the market right now but in return for that you get some really really great reliability which is definitely not something you can say about all SSDs so in my opinion these samsung drives really do kind of hit that sweet spot now I did choose a 128 gigabyte drive for this however there's absolutely nothing stopping you from bumping this up to 256 or even buying a pair of these and putting them in raid otherwise though it will cost you about $130 to go along with the SSD we're going to be using a 2 terabyte Western Digital caviar black drive so this is pretty much the standard on the market right now it's fast it's reliable and pretty much the way to go as far as the spinning mechanical hard drive is concerned with 2 terabytes you can have plenty of room for your music for your photos media for games all that kind of stuff although if you did want to you think that's a little bit over I definitely could step it back down to a one terabyte otherwise this will run you about $200 to power the bill we're going to be using a corsair HX 1050 watts apply now of course we have a lot of high-end hardware in this bill nighy do we have a pair of 79 70s we also have a highly overclockable cpu hard drives all kinds of stuff which is going to really just suck all kinds of power and that's what you're really going to want something like this which of course has 1050 watts of capacity which would be plenty to go ahead and power this build as well as extra hard drives and all that kind of stuff now it is of course modular so you can simply just plug whichever cables you need in and make sure that you get all your cable management nice and neat for about two hundred dollars it's a great way to go for a case we're going to be using the corsair obsidian 650d this is a very popular case and for good reason it's an all-around great performer Helder before we go into it I definitely do want to mention that if you want customize anything as far as the aesthetics of this build go the case is definitely where you should start so the 650d and my opinion looks great it's very clean it's very understated but it still says hey look this is an awesome gaming computer you got out side window and all that kind of stuff or if you want something with more you know over the top it nests are the top and this is a work by the way just does roll with me here if you want to go with something that's a little bit more has more Flair or whatever you want to say you can definitely feel free to do that just make sure that it has enough room for all your parts which of course the 650d does and also it has enough airflow which again the 650d does so anyway this one is going to run you by $150 although of course if you want to customize and go with a different case by all means feel free for an optical drive we're going to be using a Samsung blu-ray drive so this is actually kind of optional so if you want to have comic the ultimate set up you won't be able to read blu-rays and this is a great way to go however if you never really deal with blu-rays you can definitely step down to a standard DVD drive and save yourself about $50 that's what actually I have in my system I don't really ever use blu-rays but of course if you want to go ahead and have that blu-ray capability it's definitely a great way to go on top of that you can also just shove the DVD or the blu-ray or the optical drive you just get rid of that altogether and that works fine but in general I do at least recommend to pick up a DVD drive so that you can you know install Windows and kind of get your programs everything on there nice and easy anyway if you want to go with the blu-ray drive it's going to run you about seventy-five dollars last but not least we have a copy of Windows 7 Professional so this is actually kind of the optional part of the build if you are have a version of windows or you want to use windows 8 you can absolutely feel free to skip this so I should really don't like including windows in my builds a lot of people usually have windows already or they're going to use Windows 8 or whatever however I thought it would be kind of weird to do a three thousand dollar bill without including windows a thought maybe a couple complaints might be had so if you guys want to go ahead you're on I already have a version of Windows you can feel free to skip this or of course if you want step down to Windows Home Premium you'll save about $40 but otherwise this will run you about one hundred and forty dollars so what's the damage the grand total is going to be two thousand nine hundred and eighty nine dollars and ten cents now I'll have links to all the parts I mentioned in the description of this video anyway guys if you enjoyed this video definitely be sure to leave it a thumbs up I really appreciate that and if you're interested in more gaming PC bills like this be sure to subscribe