The Heart of the Rig: A Balanced CPU Choice

At the heart of our Sweep Spot PC rig is an AMD FX 6350 six-core CPU, which may not seem like the most powerful option, but it provides a great balance between performance and price. If you're willing to do some light overclocking, the AMD FX 6300 eight-core processor would also be a great choice. However, considering the growing support for lower CPU overhead APIs like Mantle and DirectX 12, we feel that spending a significant amount on a more powerful CPU might not be the best investment for our Sweep Spot rig today.

Our motherboard is an MSI 970 Gaming board, which looks nice and has been reasonably well-built. It includes support for two-way Crossfire, making it easy to add another graphics card in the future if needed. Although we'll likely stick with a single graphics card, this feature gives us flexibility. The motherboard also has a solid I/O layout with four USB 3 ports, which is perfect for our needs.

We've kitted out our rig with eight gigs of DDR3 memory, which should be sufficient for most users. If you're a heavy multitasker, you might consider upgrading to 16 gigs of RAM later on. As for the drive, we've used a 240GB Kingston SSD as our boot drive, but any value SSD would work just fine. For mass storage and large games and programs, we've chosen a 2TB WD Green hard drive.

The Power Supply: A Bronze Standard

Our power supply is a Seasonic 400W 80+ Bronze unit, which provides us with reliable and efficient power for our rig. The case is an NZXT S340, which offers great airflow, clean looks, and an affordable price tag.

The Graphics Card: A Sweet Spot

Our graphics card of choice is the AMD Radeon R9 285, which stays within the sweet spot of $200-$250. It has enough horsepower to run modern games at high settings even at 4K resolutions. This rig should be able to handle a wide range of games without breaking a sweat.

Benchmarking Our Rig

We took a suite of popular games that had over 10,000 viewers on Twitch TV and benchmarked them on our rig. We used an Acer B326HK IPS monitor with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 and cranked up the details to see how they would run. The results were surprising – even in games like World of Warcraft, which requires significant graphical resources, we only needed to turn down the details slightly to achieve playable frame rates.

It's clear that modern games don't require as much horsepower as they used to. If you're looking for a gaming rig that can handle the latest AAA titles without breaking the bank or running at lower resolutions and with interpolation, our Sweep Spot PC should be more than capable of handling your needs.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's build log time again but this one's gonna be a little bit different instead of trying to put a computer under liquid or in space or anything like that we're actually gonna be building something a little more down to earth it's only around a thousand bucks for a gaming rig and you might kind of go okay well linus what could be interesting about this and i'll tell you this is actually based on a challenge that was issued to me by the folks over at amd who kind of went 4k displays are becoming a lot more affordable right now but the perception among gamers is that you can't really drive games at that resolution and to a degree that is correct in the latest aaa titles running at ultra res you're going to need like multiple of the highest end graphics cards in order to get a playable enjoyable experience but they also continued what about the titles that people are actually playing all the time your free to play games like league of legends or team fortress 2 or your more mainstream or esports titles like cs go or starcraft 2 what could you build an affordable computer that can run those games at 4k now that the price of really nice displays like this acer i've got right here are coming way way down all the time well let's find out shall we going back to my purchase of a viewsonic p95f plus b i've believed that a display can last you through several of these bad boys if you choose one of sufficient quality for your needs now and in the future my old dell 2405 fpw actually got retired from use by my wife only a couple months ago when she saw lg's 29 ultrawide so the component choices for this rig were a little different than normal we didn't over build the pc in an attempt to run every game at 4k but we also didn't want to build the most budget cheapo gaming rig ever either it was meant to be a reasonable bang for the buck sweet spot so around 900 to a thousand dollars gaming and multi-purpose amd-based pc with some upgradability and with the ultimate plan of passing it along and replacing it with a new sweet spot rig when the time is right a strategy that can actually yield much better value for the money in the long run versus trying to spend you know twice as much on a machine in the first place in an attempt to get it to last twice as long not to mention that this way you end up with two machines so you can repurpose your old rig for a friend or family member or server or whatever else down the line so at the heart of the rig is an fx 6350 six core cpu although a 6300 is also a great choice if you don't mind doing a little bit of overclocking we could have stuck with the eight core that amd accidentally put in the motherboard that they sent us but given how many threads modern games support and the growing support for lower cpu overhead apis like mantle and directx 12 i don't feel like spending a bunch more on a cpu is a great investment for a sweep spot pc today okay i don't know the word song our motherboard is an msi 970 gaming board it looks nice if that matters to you it's reasonably well built it includes support for two-way crossfire if you wanted to add another graphics card in the future although it should be noted that sweet spot rigs usually live their lives with a single graphics card and it's got a solid i o layout with four usb 3 ports we kitted it out with eight gigs of the heaviest memory that we've ever seen no i'm just kidding it wasn't heavy but we had to justify needing two people to build one computer somehow we used an amd branded kit but any dual channel ddr3 would work just fine if you're a heavy multitasker you might opt for 16 gigs right off the bat but ram upgrades are one of those things that's easy and inexpensive to do later on down the road when and if you need more that's where all my print jobs went i mean what's a print job our drive power supply and case choices aren't terribly important for gaming performance but i'll let you know what we used anyway we went with a 240 gig kingston ssd that we had lying around the office although you could pick any value ssd for your boot drive these days a 2 terabyte wd green for mass storage and for large games and programs a seasonic 400 watt 80 plus bronze power supply and an nzxt s340 case for its solid airflow clean looks and great price which leads us to the last key component for any gaming rig the graphics card we chose the radeon r9 285 because at under 250 bucks with some available for as little as like 200 and change on promo it stays within that fps per dollar sweet spot that usually exists between about 120 to 280 dollars and it also has at least we were hoping when respect to this thing enough horsepower for the games that we're gonna be running on this rig with graphic settings turned up even at 4k so here's the finished build and with it done it's time to benchmark all the games for me and by me i mean luke and by all the games i mean we took anything that had over 10 000 viewers on twitch tv so like the mainstream and competitive stuff added in a couple choices of our own fired it up at 4k on an acer b 326 hk a gorgeous ips monitor and crank the details to see how they would run and actually the results surprised me a little bit across our test suite of dirt showdown starcraft 2 team fortress 2 counter-strike global offensive league of legends dota 2 and wow only world of warcraft likely thanks to its recent graphical update with warlords of draenor needed the details turned down at all in order to spit out not just playable but actually very enjoyable frame rates at a massive 3840 by 2160 resolution now this won't be the case across the board we didn't make a magical computer here if you're gonna grab the latest aaa omg photo realism titles from a series like assassin's creed battlefield crisis or the like then you'll need to run at a lower resolution and deal with the interpolation that comes along with that unless you want to step up to some seriously more powerful hardware but not everyone is interested in that and i was still i don't know what the right word is so i'll say amused when i realized that the most popular games that gamers are really spending the bulk of their time on these days just aren't that demanding and there's no reason that a reasonable modern gaming rig can't run them cranked on a 4k monitor today so thanks amd for sponsoring this fun little build login experiment thanks to you guys for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked as always check out the links in the video description to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can give us a monthly contribution or you can change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so whenever you buy cpus graphics cards motherboards heatsinks ssds or whatever else we got a small kickback that kind of thing helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe youit's build log time again but this one's gonna be a little bit different instead of trying to put a computer under liquid or in space or anything like that we're actually gonna be building something a little more down to earth it's only around a thousand bucks for a gaming rig and you might kind of go okay well linus what could be interesting about this and i'll tell you this is actually based on a challenge that was issued to me by the folks over at amd who kind of went 4k displays are becoming a lot more affordable right now but the perception among gamers is that you can't really drive games at that resolution and to a degree that is correct in the latest aaa titles running at ultra res you're going to need like multiple of the highest end graphics cards in order to get a playable enjoyable experience but they also continued what about the titles that people are actually playing all the time your free to play games like league of legends or team fortress 2 or your more mainstream or esports titles like cs go or starcraft 2 what could you build an affordable computer that can run those games at 4k now that the price of really nice displays like this acer i've got right here are coming way way down all the time well let's find out shall we going back to my purchase of a viewsonic p95f plus b i've believed that a display can last you through several of these bad boys if you choose one of sufficient quality for your needs now and in the future my old dell 2405 fpw actually got retired from use by my wife only a couple months ago when she saw lg's 29 ultrawide so the component choices for this rig were a little different than normal we didn't over build the pc in an attempt to run every game at 4k but we also didn't want to build the most budget cheapo gaming rig ever either it was meant to be a reasonable bang for the buck sweet spot so around 900 to a thousand dollars gaming and multi-purpose amd-based pc with some upgradability and with the ultimate plan of passing it along and replacing it with a new sweet spot rig when the time is right a strategy that can actually yield much better value for the money in the long run versus trying to spend you know twice as much on a machine in the first place in an attempt to get it to last twice as long not to mention that this way you end up with two machines so you can repurpose your old rig for a friend or family member or server or whatever else down the line so at the heart of the rig is an fx 6350 six core cpu although a 6300 is also a great choice if you don't mind doing a little bit of overclocking we could have stuck with the eight core that amd accidentally put in the motherboard that they sent us but given how many threads modern games support and the growing support for lower cpu overhead apis like mantle and directx 12 i don't feel like spending a bunch more on a cpu is a great investment for a sweep spot pc today okay i don't know the word song our motherboard is an msi 970 gaming board it looks nice if that matters to you it's reasonably well built it includes support for two-way crossfire if you wanted to add another graphics card in the future although it should be noted that sweet spot rigs usually live their lives with a single graphics card and it's got a solid i o layout with four usb 3 ports we kitted it out with eight gigs of the heaviest memory that we've ever seen no i'm just kidding it wasn't heavy but we had to justify needing two people to build one computer somehow we used an amd branded kit but any dual channel ddr3 would work just fine if you're a heavy multitasker you might opt for 16 gigs right off the bat but ram upgrades are one of those things that's easy and inexpensive to do later on down the road when and if you need more that's where all my print jobs went i mean what's a print job our drive power supply and case choices aren't terribly important for gaming performance but i'll let you know what we used anyway we went with a 240 gig kingston ssd that we had lying around the office although you could pick any value ssd for your boot drive these days a 2 terabyte wd green for mass storage and for large games and programs a seasonic 400 watt 80 plus bronze power supply and an nzxt s340 case for its solid airflow clean looks and great price which leads us to the last key component for any gaming rig the graphics card we chose the radeon r9 285 because at under 250 bucks with some available for as little as like 200 and change on promo it stays within that fps per dollar sweet spot that usually exists between about 120 to 280 dollars and it also has at least we were hoping when respect to this thing enough horsepower for the games that we're gonna be running on this rig with graphic settings turned up even at 4k so here's the finished build and with it done it's time to benchmark all the games for me and by me i mean luke and by all the games i mean we took anything that had over 10 000 viewers on twitch tv so like the mainstream and competitive stuff added in a couple choices of our own fired it up at 4k on an acer b 326 hk a gorgeous ips monitor and crank the details to see how they would run and actually the results surprised me a little bit across our test suite of dirt showdown starcraft 2 team fortress 2 counter-strike global offensive league of legends dota 2 and wow only world of warcraft likely thanks to its recent graphical update with warlords of draenor needed the details turned down at all in order to spit out not just playable but actually very enjoyable frame rates at a massive 3840 by 2160 resolution now this won't be the case across the board we didn't make a magical computer here if you're gonna grab the latest aaa omg photo realism titles from a series like assassin's creed battlefield crisis or the like then you'll need to run at a lower resolution and deal with the interpolation that comes along with that unless you want to step up to some seriously more powerful hardware but not everyone is interested in that and i was still i don't know what the right word is so i'll say amused when i realized that the most popular games that gamers are really spending the bulk of their time on these days just aren't that demanding and there's no reason that a reasonable modern gaming rig can't run them cranked on a 4k monitor today so thanks amd for sponsoring this fun little build login experiment thanks to you guys for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked as always check out the links in the video description to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can give us a monthly contribution or you can change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so whenever you buy cpus graphics cards motherboards heatsinks ssds or whatever else we got a small kickback that kind of thing helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe you\n"