New LINUX Gaming Rig Review

 

Finally! It’s about time I get this to you guys right?? :). Well here it is at last, the full review of the Budget Gamer that I told you about in a previous post.

Here is the list of hardware components again for you:

 

Case CM Storm Scout
PSU Cooler Master UCP 700W 80 PLUS Silver
Motherboard MSI 770-C45 AM3 AMD 770 ATX
Processor AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0ghz
Memory OCZ Reaper HPC 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Hard Drive Western Digital 500GB Sata 3.0Gb/s 7200 RPM
Video Card Sapphire Vapor-X 4890 1GB, factory over-clocked at 870MHz/1050MHz.

 

That’s it! My gamer system that came in at around $740 with all parts purchased through Newegg. I’ve had this system for just about 3 weeks now and it has definitely been a pleasure to work with.

I’m certainly not the biggest gamer (or best at reviews for that matter), and this is the first PC that I have owned that could be considered to be even remotely close to a (mid-)high end machine. Being that, I of course love this system since it’s so much better than anything I’ve ever had previously :D. It’s also the first complete system I built from scratch. It makes me just a tad biased I think ;).

But, raw numbers don’t lie – so while I personally love my new computer because of it’s inherent awesomeness :), I will be posting benchmarks with numbers so that you can peruse the intrawebz and compare what I’m getting with other relevant reviews to your section of interest.

Only three components really warrant reviews in my opinion, and that’s the case, the CPU, and the video card. I don’t have any kind of tools or know-how to “benchmark” the memory, I am ill-equipped to properly benchmark or analyze the PSU, and benchmarking the motherboard, well.. I have no idea how you would do that.

For those components I’ll say these things:
1) The computer is running, evidently the PSU works well enough. (Though I am Hypothesizing it is preventing me from reaching full O/C potential on my Radeon 4890).
2) I had to change settings, timings, and other stuff in the motherboard BIOS to get 1600 from my DDR3 memory. It defaulted to 1066.
3) On Ubuntu Linux, my free -m is showing me 3900MB memory. This is less than 4GB, but when I googled it seemed normal? I still want to look into this.

Alright then, now that all of that is out of the way, lets get this party started shall we?

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