I own a monitor, 300GB SATA hard drive and ATX mid-tower case (but the case is Dell-Made). I also own two Windows 7 licenses, one for Home Premium and one for Professional, both are legitimate.

As many who have played with me lately know, I get an average of 15-20 FPS depending on the map and player count, with a bottom-end of 8, and a top-end of 50. I achieve these numbers using Game Booster 3.1 and Chris MaxFrames config. My current system is a Dell 560 model with a celeron and onboard intel (non-HD) graphics and 2 gigs of RAM. I can barely load Steam, nevermind play anything with a decent frame rate.

My plan is to buy parts individually, spending at most $750 and be able to swap things out until I've gutted and replaced the entire thing save for the monitor, hard drive and if possible, the case.

I'd like your recommendations as to what I'd replace first, and continue in purchase order, maintaining the budget I have set.

Your goal is to play CSS?

I have 2x GeForce 9500's that I was going to give away anyway. Get a Mobo with 2 PCI-E slots, decent processor, Decent PSU, and some RAM and you got yourself a system.

Wait you live close to me don't you? If not PM me your address, I'll toss those in the mail next chance I get.


Oh, you only need 1 of the cards for CSS, it runs it great. 2x for newer games that support SLI.

Assuming I have your video cards (Thank you, by the way), do you or any other n00bs have suggestions for mobo, cpu, psu and ram totalling no more than $750?

Paging Chris/Gman/Clorox to this thread :) You'll have no shortage of advice from guys who love to do that shit. I'm not one of them :)

♥ Also, I had some decent AMD stuff picked out (super low wattage phenom II, sabertooth AM3+ board) but word on the street is that unless AMD has some uberpowerful horse still not out of the stable yet, that it isn't the way to go.

I believe you're talking about bulldozer, which was a huge dissappointment.

$750 for mobo, cpu, psu and ram is going to be severely overkill and the 9500 video cards are definitely going to be your bottleneck.
Tell me, what do you want to use it for? (What games?)

I only plan to use it for CSS, CS:Go (if I upgrade video cards next year perhaps) and maybe video/sound editing and doing botnet-style supercomputing and that's about it. If I am really bored I might see about getting Skyrim but that's a maybe.

I just read a 3-page report on bulldozer at ars technica and yes, it isn't a bulldozer of a product line, it is more like the stuff being bulldozed.

Preferably, a higher-end board for upgrade purposes with a lower end cpu, not a celeron though, and I only need 4-8gb of DDR3.

You could easily get/build an Intel C2D (like E8400, those can be had for super cheap nowadays) or an AMD Phenom or something that would work just fine. But that would be the way to to go if you needed video card(s), too.

If you're JUST looking for processor, motherboard, RAM, and PSU for $750 - I would go with (and plan on using the two 9500s) a Sandy Bridge setup - Here's what I picked out and you still have $150 left to buy you something to replace that shitty dell case.

i5 2500k (you could look into the 2600k if your money is burning a hole in your pocket)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115072

MSI P67 GD67A (MSI is good shit)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813130574

2x4GB GSkill Ripjaw PC12800
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231445

PCPNC 910W
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817703022
or Mushkin 1KW
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817812012

Comes to $620 and would be a killer setup. Sure the 9500s would hold you back but once you upgrade those, you'll have a hell of a rig. If you want to get closer to the $750 budget on those four things, maybe look at moving up to 16gb of memory (just buy 2 of the 8gb kits duh), and go up to the 2600k. PCPNC power supplies have always been one of the best brands in terms of efficiency and DC quality. I have a 1000W Mushkin (aka the Joule, i think it's discontinued) and it runs an i7 920 at 3.6ghz, 2x6970s, 1tb hd, and several fans without breaking a sweat. The PCPNC would also have no trouble with whatever video cards (s) you end up (if ever, but recommended) replacing the 9500s with.

Maybe consider adding a decent cooler as well. The retail one works fine but if you ever feel like overclocking, I wouldn't recommend it. Fully loaded and overclocked, my i7 will approach 100°C with the stock cooler

Airman hit the nail on the head with his post. I'd go with his suggestions for sure.

Oh, and don't buy it one-piece-at-a-time unless you can get use out of what you buy. This shit depreciates in value so quickly that unless you're going to be able to use a part within a week of its arrival to your doorstep, don't buy it. Wait until you have the money to buy everything -- or at least enough "upgraded" parts that you'll be able to make a rig out of it -- and then buy everything. That being said, if you have free video cards, go ahead and upgrade everything else and worry about the video cards later. It'd just be a shitty thing to have a new motherboard sitting around and depreciating when you're not using it.

Yeah I plan on getting the mobo/cpu at the same time so that I can use the mobo. I was already looking at a PC Power and Cooling PSU, I have always heard/read that they were the best regardless, even after being bought out by OCZ a while back.

I used to have an MSI K8N-NEO2 board and had to RMA it two or three times, and the other boards failed too. I am wary of buying their products so I would need to have some sort of assurance that the company is making more reliable products.

Fully agree here. Except the anything above 850 is overkill, with 650-750 higher quality PSU being a better bet if you're gfx cards don't need more.
I have an 850W Corsair AX, i5 2500k, 2x6950s, 1 SSD, 4 HDDs and all is well.

So if I go with a 760w Silencer instead of the 910w, I'd be good to go?

1kW is a good even number, that's why I suggested it. Peak power draw from my outlet at full load (with just the computer, nothing else) is just shy of 500W with one 6970. With two it's a little over 750W. Now that's AFTER the ~84% ish efficiency difference - so technically my parts would only be pulling about 630W. So, even for a dual card setup, I'd be fine with a 750W power supply but I'd be at the end of its capabilities.

What I see with most power supplies is that the efficiency figures are like a bell-curve - peak efficiency being in the middle of what the PSU is rated (aka peak efficiency would be at ~500W and then taper off in both directions for a 1kW PSU). Granted the efficiency may drop from 86% to 77%, but hey, it'd eventually pay for itself because of how often my computer is loaded.

For example - assume you eventually throw in two high-end video cards (6970, 570/580) and you have a DC (output from power supply) requirement of 700W. A 1000W power supply *theoretically* would draw, say, 830W from the wall. The same 700W DC requirement would pull over 900W from the wall on a 750W power supply. That's only fully loaded, at idle I'd expect a power draw of ~250W from both (with dual cards, < 200W with single). Keep in mind that your two 9500s will give any 750W power supply no problems, I'm merely suggesting that a larger-capacity one would allow for your video card setup to eventually "catch up" to the rest of your computer and enough overhead to not stress out the power supply by fully loading it to capacity. Would you and four of your buddies be comfortable cramming into a '98 accord? Sure, it's got 5 seats...

Either way, you won't have any problems. This power supply was "supplied" to me so it wasn't my choice, but after learning about the efficiency I would still probably buy a 1kW [or close to it]. Plus, I like safety factors - I'd rather only load something at MAX by 70% as opposed to pushing it to it's rated limit at 90%+ and not have a lot of overhead.

Just ordered 8gb of this:

You can get a great source box that can run modern games on medium for about 450 bucks.

My system

Amd athlon IIx3 445 Rana (3.1Ghz) not a greta cpu but for games like css and cod it does fine
Memory: you could get about 4 gigs for 20 bcks or 8 gigs for 50-75 depending on how many dimms u buy and the clock speed
GPU: Radeon Hd 5750 (1gb) <it gets roughly 120 fps average in css and 70+ in other source games maxed, Newer games like Bf3 run on medium at about 35-50
Motherboard: I went with asrock but you can always go with a higher level brand.

*** You don't need an expensive pc for css, if you want to play the newest games on a high resolution i would go for something better, Probably an I5 or a phenom IIx6
8gb ram and a a gtx 560

I want to play CSS in a window split-screen with photoshop.