Built Budget PC For My Cousin. Another Console Killed!

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This is a budget build I recently put together for my cousin since the new consoles are a overpriced failure. 

Case: Deep Cool Tesserac SW $35

CPU: Intel G3258 @ 4.2ghz / 1.25v $64

Cooler: Enermax ETS-T40 $35 (not shown)

Mobo: Asus Z87A $70 (Refurb)

Ram: G.Skill 2x2gb 1333mhz $40

Vid Card: EVGA GTX460 FTW 1GB $60

Hard Drive: Western Digital Blue 1TB $60

Opt Drive: LiteOn DVD-RW $10

PSU: Corsair CX600M $40

Total: $414

During the Steam holiday sale he got a hand full of great games for about $30. This would have not been possible if he had bought an Xbox One.

The G3258 overclcocked to 4.0ghz / 1.125v with stock cooler was hitting 70c under load and 36c at idle. Once the Enermax ETS-T40 was added we went up to 4.2ghz / 1.25v with a load temp of 48c and idle of 26c. We did push it to see how far it would overclock and 4.4ghz / 1.4v was the highest stable clock we got. To bad cause the Enermax cooler had plenty of room only hitting 56c load at 4.4ghz 1.4v.

Benchmark Results: Intel G3258

Geekbench 3 (32 bit):

Stock 3.2ghz (Single Core 2960)(Multi Core 5296)

OC'ed 4.2ghz (Single Core 3471)(Multi Core 6266)

OC'ed 4.4ghz (Single Core 3603)(Multi Core 6548)

Cinebench R15:

Stock 3.2ghz - 235

OC'ed 4.2ghz - 303

OC'ed 4.4ghz - 319

PassMark Performance Test (CPU Mark):

Stock 3.2ghz - 3822

OC'ed 4.2ghz - 4728

OC'ed 4.4ghz - 4906

The used GTX460 FTW was hitting 80c during gaming so we replaced the burnt up old thermal paste with some Arctic Silver 5 I had laying around and set a new fan curve with MSI after Burner. After this quick fix it was only hitting 65c while gaming. The GTX460 FTW does very good for an older card playing most games on med/high settings at 1280 x 1024 / 50+ fps. Most likely will be upgrading to the AMD 360x or 370x when they come out.

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1 Like
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Nice build. Have you run any gaming benchmarks yet? I'm looking to throw an OC G3258 into a new system soon and I'm interested to see how it performs at 1080p medium/high.

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I don't have the benchmarks on hand, but I can say It plays FarCry 3 at med/high setting 40-60 fps @ 1280x1024 resolution. The G3258 stock had no problems achieving this and it is now at 4.3GHz/1.28v.

Our previous best 4.4GHz/1.4v was resolved with some further tweeking. We ended up getting a new best of 4.6GHz/1.3v scoring if I remember right 332 in Cinebench R15. Anything beyond 1.3v seemed to get rather touchy with this chip. At 4.6GHz/1.3v with the Enermax ETS-T40 cooler and upgraded to Arctic MX4 paste, idle 28c / load 48c.

The main thing limiting this budget build is the GTX460 FTW 1GB. It was purchased used for a good price and has served very well for an older card. At this point the games my cousin plays the GTX460 maxes all of them out. Once GTA V comes out he will be upgrading to AMD R9 370X soon as its available.

After getting some quality time with the Enermax ETS-T40 cooler I have no doubt its a better cooler than the Cooler Master 212 Evo. They are priced the same but the Enermax has better mounting hardware, fan, and build quality.

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I paired a G3258 running the "auto OC" function on a Cheap (but quite nice for the price) Asrock H97M Pro4 for 4.3GHz it ran together with an HD 5850 1GB (with a decent OC as well running @ 800MHz) card and ran BF4 at 1080P on medium settings 40-60 FPS

at the OP I think this is a great build for the price and good job identifying and fixing the heat issue on the GTX 460 which is pretty common on older used parts in general.