A $US500 PC That Rocks Out Crysis

Okay, for $US699, you might not be able to buy the best laptop in the world. But for $US500, you can build a PC that plays Crysis at a solid 40 frames per second.

Except for the RAM, I’m actually fairly impressed with the components Maximum PC picked out: an ATI Radeon HD 4870 at $US175, $US71 Intel Pentium E5200 2.5GHz Wolfdale, $US90 MSI Neo3-F LGA 775 motherboard, $US21 2GB DDR2-800 RAM (with a rebate, you can go up to 4GB of RAM for $US7 more, which I’d recommend), $US25 optical drive and $US50 320GB hard drive (for $US10 more, you can go up to 500GB). Finally, for the case and power supply, a Rosewill TU-155 II 500 Black, which is a good pick since Rosewill makes decent power supplies (I also like Seasonic, which is what I rock in my PC) and it’s only $US75 for the whole package. After rebates, that’s just $US479, although that doesn’t include Photoshop or Geek Squad visits.

A good 22-inch monitor can be had for $US150 easy, and obviously a keyboard and mouse can be found for under $US10 a pop if you really wanna scrimp. For the OS, Windows 7 beta is freeeee. Or you can find a copy of XP lying around somewhere, I’m sure.

Depending on the resolution you wanna roll with, at 1280×1024, Maximum PC got an average framerate of 44.42FPS, and at 1900×1200, a still respectable 36.22FPS.

If you’ve never ever built a computer before, check out Lifehacker’s first-timer’s guide to building your own PC. It’s a pretty excellent Saturday activity. And obviously a PC can do way more than play Crysis. [Maximum PC]