Need advice for a cheap rebuild of my rig

[geekminxen]

My gaming rig died and I need to replace it. We're looking at building one around what I already have to work with, and I'm not very tech-savvy, so if anyone can advise me, that would be great. I need to build around DDR3 RAM and Windows 7 64 bit (and being able to play Fallout 4). I have a 2TB HDD (Seagate, if that matters). I need a power supply, motherboard, CPU, and graphics card. For the card, I'm favoring the Nvidia GeForce GTX 750.

 

I need the build to be as inexpensive as possible, though, because my last backup failed (unbeknownst to me, sadly), so I'll soon be investing way too much money in recovering data off the old rig's hard drive...including the updates to my mod I was working on. Yay.

 

Thanks for any help!

 

 

[obobski]

What kind of budget do you have? GTX 750 or 750 Ti isn't a horribly expensive card, and you could get a decent Core i3 and LGA 1150 motherboard for not too much more (maybe $300-ish for all of it), and then throw it in a case (can be cheap, can be expensive; whatever you want) and decent PSU (~$50) and you'd be set, assuming you have RAM, hard-drive(s), optical drive(s), OS licence, monitor, etc. I'd also give a look at some of the less expensive Radeon options - there's a lot of good stuff out currently under $200 for a graphics card (GTX 750 is probably on the low-side for knocking Fallout 4 out; check out Guru3D's review: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/fallout_4_pc_graphics_performance_benchmark_review,7.html - they're running maxed/Ultra settings, so if you're okay lowering the settings a tad the performance will improve some too - the R9 380 can be had for right around $200, and the GTX 950 for a little bit less; this isn't to say I'd expect the 750 to not run FO4, but it probably won't do it at 1080p on Ultra/max settings).

 

I may regret this, but what failed and why do you think you need to spend money on "data recovery" on the hard-drive? Unless the hard-drive itself failed (and if that's what brought down your gaming PC, just replace that disk), you can probably just hook it into another machine and the data will be right there.

 

Also, totally unrelated, but I've played Benny Returns in the past and found it very good!

[mark5916]

Even if i don't know your budget, this one will do the job just fine on Fallout 4 (1080p)

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/mMBp7P

Edited December 17, 2015 by mark5916

[obobski]

Even if i don't know your budget, this one will do the job just fine on Fallout 4 (1080p)

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/mMBp7P

 

Very nice; I dig that red/white GTX 970 too.

[geekminxen]

obobski and mark5916, thanks tons for your recommendations. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to reply, though....

 

At this point, my budget is as far under $800 as possible. We're currently trying to revive my old Asus (Essentio CM6850) with a new hard drive and a fresh install of Windows 7. It's what I'm using right now, though I can't get the new OS install to play nice with the monitor-- that's a whole other complaint, though. Urk. If I can get that straightened out, then I'll look at upgrading it eventually with one of the video cards and power supply you guys are recommending here (it currently won't play FO4). If not, then we'll go the total build route. I REALLY appreciate your help on this!

 

obobski, we think the hard drive has failed because we've tried hooking it up to a working computer and it couldn't find it. We also tried accessing it with a SATA cable, and the computer couldn't find it that way, either (we also tried that with a known good drive, and it found it). We replaced just the hard drive in the failed computer and it's back up and running (though currently giving me lip, as I complained above, but I think that's the system reinstall-- don't know, though). If you have any other thoughts, though, I'd be happy to hear them.

 

And thank you for the kind words about my mod. I'm glad so many people have liked it!

[obobski]

Looked up that Asus; it appears to have originally shipped with Windows 7 so it *should* work as long as you have all the appropriate drivers installed. Monitors themselves don't require drivers, but some have INF files that provide Windows with more information about the monitor's capabilities (and usually a "friendly name" for the display, so it shows "Asus [model number] on [graphics card]" instead of "plug'n'play monitor on [graphics card]").

 

Anyways, spec-wise, the Asus website is far too broad in terms of how that machine could be configured - do you have more specifics? On the high end it may have a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, a 4TB hard-drive, Blu-ray burner, GeForce GT640 graphics card (which should be able to run Fallout 4, likely on lower settings), etc but on the low end it may have a Pentium, integrated graphics, 2GB of RAM, etc. Where does yours fall in that mix? I'm asking because if its on the very low end, just adding a high performance graphics card may not be the best idea - it would likely end up significantly bottlenecked.

 

As far as the hard-drive - not being recognized by itself doesn't always indicate failure, but if the SATA controller in the other machine is working and able to access other drives, that's a good sign for the other computer and a potentially bad sign for your disk. Can you hear or feel the disk spinning up when powered? (it will vibrate softly as it spins up - I don't mean "dance off the table" but you should still be able to feel it) Does the system's BIOS see the disk? (e.g. go into BIOS on the other machine with it hooked up - does it show the disk at correct capacity and such?) It may be that the contents of the disk are corrupted or damaged (e.g. the MBR) but the disk itself is not damaged, or it may be that the disk died (e.g. if it isn't spinning up that's likely a good indication its toast).

[geekminxen]

Got the monitor issue resolved. The computer still has other problems, but at least that is out of the way. And of course, it was an embarrassingly simple fix (7 needed to update).

 

I really appreciate the trouble you're going to in order to help me, obobski. My computer has a core i7-2600 CPU and 8GB RAM. The hard drive was 1TB (it is now 2). I can't remember the original graphics card specs, but I upgraded it to an NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 some time ago. We don't think the power supply will support the better graphics card, but I don't know about the rest of the computer. As I said, I'm pretty ignorant in these things.

 

The hard drive spins up (you can feel/hear it) and doesn't make any abnormal noises. I don't know if we tried going into the BIOS to look for it-- I'll have to ask my boyfriend if that's one of the things he tried. I'll let you know.

 

Thank you!

[obobski]

Got the monitor issue resolved. The computer still has other problems, but at least that is out of the way. And of course, it was an embarrassingly simple fix (7 needed to update).

 

I really appreciate the trouble you're going to in order to help me, obobski. My computer has a core i7-2600 CPU and 8GB RAM. The hard drive was 1TB (it is now 2). I can't remember the original graphics card specs, but I upgraded it to an NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 some time ago. We don't think the power supply will support the better graphics card, but I don't know about the rest of the computer. As I said, I'm pretty ignorant in these things.

 

The hard drive spins up (you can feel/hear it) and doesn't make any abnormal noises. I don't know if we tried going into the BIOS to look for it-- I'll have to ask my boyfriend if that's one of the things he tried. I'll let you know.

 

Thank you!

 

 

See if the drive appears in the BIOS; if its spinning up normally (or as normally as we can ascertain at this point) I'm inclined to believe there's an issue with its formatting/partitioning and not the physical hardware. OFC more testing is really required to know for sure.

 

On the machine itself, the i7-2600 is perfectly suitable going forward, so I'd say let's just upgrade your existing machine and go with it. To figure out what kind of PSU it has, it'd be easiest to just take the side panel off and see what the sticker on the PSU says. If you have a normal size case you could just spend your budget on a new PSU and a much more powerful graphics card and be set - the 2600 is fast enough to keep up, and 8GB is enough memory (and adding more RAM is cheap if you ever needed to in the future).

[geekminxen]

Excellent! Thanks so much!