Forums → Games → Building a Gaming Rig

Depending on the settings I would say $600 for low $900 for mid $1200 for high $1500 for ultra would be my estimate if your building it yourself.

Mine cost me around $900 and runs most stuff on med-high that I have played but I haven't played much but I did get bf3 beta and ran it on ultra but I couldn't see a difference from normal to ultra so I think the settings didn't do anything on the beta.

My specs are on my profile if your interested in my build.

One of the easiest ways I found to build your own high-spec rig is by first looking at commercially available builds. See what they advertise and check out the specs to get a good base idea, then go from there. A stupid amount of the cost for pre-built rigs is just the fact that they put it together. Kinda like going out and buying a $5 burger when you could of made one at home for a dollar.

The parts themselves (aside from graphics cards) are really quite cheap when bought yourself. Even the cases only run around $75.

Check out newegg.com for all the parts once you get a list together. They have some great prices for more or less everything you'd need.

Just focus on a machine that push's heavily on the graphics card end of things. Stick to the better value AMD processors

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

These links should help you compare different gpus and cpus

Well since we're already on the topic..... About how much would it cost to upgrade a windows 7 home Premium 64 bit with 1.5 TB of hard drive memory, 6 GB of RAM, intel core i5 processor 2300. And I'm not listing the other stuff because I'm sure I need to replace them. I'm looking to run skyrim on it, rather smoothly. I'm not looking to run it on max settings or anything, I'm just looking for somewhat reasonable graphics running smoothly.

P.S. I don't have a great monitor either

I actually want to build one too, and soon. I'm thinking of a cap of maybe $1300 and try and not spend too much on the PC itself to buy a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I was thinking that maybe going for a great or decent enough video card so it will run med-high settings on most games. The rest I won't exaggerate on, like the processor and the ram, etc.

Probably gonna have to start looking at a bunch of this stuff soon since I'll probably be buying everything in at least 6 months, maybe even less.

Though I do wonder if $1300 would be enough to get good hardware. If not I could always just save up some more money. I do believe that it would hold up though.

Well I guess I may as well add that it has: Intel GMA HD Graphics and Multi-in-1 media card reader.
So what do I keep and what do I replace?

Intel GMA HD Graphics

One of the easiest ways I found to build your own high-spec rig is by first looking at commercially available builds. See what they advertise and check out the specs to get a good base idea, then go from there. A stupid amount of the cost for pre-built rigs is just the fact that they put it together. Kinda like going out and buying a $5 burger when you could of made one at home for a dollar.
The parts themselves (aside from graphics cards) are really quite cheap when bought yourself. Even the cases only run around $75.
Check out newegg.com for all the parts once you get a list together. They have some great prices for more or less everything you'd need.

No it's not a laptop. But it's all good. I'm currently discussing the topic in he comments with gamer-Cale.