Looking for a Fast and Cheap Intel CPU & MB for single card gaming

look at my sig rig man!

lol

u can OC the E5200 ($72 is a steal at newegg!) for him. i hit 3.33ghz first try. its a great chip @ stock too. the E7x00 only have 1mb more chache, so they arent worth the big price jump. for me, its either the E5200 or the E8400 ($165) (the E8400 is much more expensive, but they are basically the same chip, but hte E8400 has more cache and has a higher stock clock speed. the cache will make the biggest difference in encoding/editing, but it will help games too) the Q6600 ($200) is great, but its more than needed for a budget gamer, and its more expensive that both of the chips above. the E8400 will outperfrom the Q6600 in most games, and will keep up with it in all. the E5200 can keep up with the E8400 if its OC'ed well. overall, get the E5200 and OC it to 3.0ghz+, or leave it stock.

for the motherboard the gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R is a great board for OCing, and has great perfromance for me. but it only has 1 PCIe slot. the UD3P version has 2 PCIe SLots for Crossfire, if u buy ATi. no intel chipset will do SLI (except the X58 for the i7). so if u want SLI get a 750i/780i board, like the Evga 750i FTW board has great reveiws.

for a budget video card, u can get a 9800GT for $99 after rebate. there are also lots of 9600GTs that will do well. someone will recommend some ATi cards probably, im not as familiar with them cause i will never buy another ATi card for as long as i build computers. just my personal preferance cause i have lost lots of money on ATi cards. guess i have bad luck

overall, i spend ~$500 on my sig rig (i re-used my case, powersupply, and windows XP) and it has never disappointed me. i blow through games, never seeing anything below 60fps (it is capped at 60fps and stays there) in the first person shooter Americas Army (similar to COD) and i play WoW also. WoW has HUGE open areas for this card to render, specially when flying around to different places. i wish i had founda 1gb version of the 9800GT for WoW, but i still dont see anything below 30fps in the most difficult of areas and large open spaces. (television runs at 30fps, which i consider to be "smooth gameplay". your eyes cant tell the difference above 30fps)

I'd buy an E5200 and a Gigabyte EP45-UD3L. I don't think there is a need to spend the money on the better UD3R or UD3P. The UD3L can probably overclock enough to get decent clocks out of the chip. I'm almost positive that he won't crossfire.

As for the chip, it can play games as long as he has a good video card. The money saved on the chip compared to buying an E8400 can go towards a better video card. In all honesty, you don't need top of the line or close to top of the line to play games at good fps, or too look decent. The E5200 can overclock to 3.0ghz easily and should be able to do 3.5-3.8ghz.

You have to remember, that if you want to overclock the chip, you will need to buy an aftermarket cooler. I'd overclock the chip enough to where I don't have to raise the vcore and use the stock cooler.

Something like a 9800gt or GTS 250 would be fine to play games with that combo. I'm not sure on ati pricing but a 4850 should be more than enough as well. I had an E2180 with a 8800gt a year ago and it played most games just fine.

forgot to get u a cooler

the Xiggy Dark Knight in my Sig is a GREAT cooler for $40. comes with all the mounting goodies, including a backplate brace behind tho mobo for support. i dont recommend OCing with the stock HSF. i had to raise the Vcore to get 3.33ghz, not by much, but i wouldnt be comfortable with the stock cooler.

and the gigabyte Ga-Ep45-UD3L recommended above will do well too. it has a different south bridge, but i dont think ull be needing RAID. it still has the P45 chipset, which is a proven OCer. i believe i got the UD3R cause it has nice heatsinks on the north and south bridge chips to help them stay cool when i OC'ed.

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if u want a higher video card, i suggest the 9800GTX or 9800GTX+. those cards run up to $180. and the GTX 260 core 216 is a great performer in the $200 range.

its true ur CPU doesnt have to be great to play most games, just enough so it doesnt bottleneck your video card. an OC'ed 5200 will be just fine. just make sure u get a good OC on the E5200 so u wont bottleneck the 9800GTX+ or the GTX260

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a bit more expensive, but i second this recommendation, if u have the cash.

if u dont want to spend that much, go with the E5200 and but get either the UD3R or the UD3P

he doesn't want to oc for his friend.

i am for thr E5200 build. that and a GTX 260.

and for yourself, another GTX 285

Ya, double posting, sue me. lol

Anyways, update to this thread:

I bought the E5200 and the Gigabyte GA-EP45-U3DL mb.
Got the dark knight heatsink/fan for it.

Been working great. I kept getting thrown off by it's powesaving mode or something for the cpu. It would say it was at 2.5 ghz, but then say it's running at 1200mhz at the bottom. lol took me a few to figure it out.

It's the first board that didn't actually set itself to the cpu's default setting out of the box that i've dealt with in awhile.

I have a few questions about the board, nothing big really. Probably just need to do some searching, i'm sure they've been asked before.

But one question is. It has the F2 bios installed, but using Qflash, it will flash the new bios (F4), but then after the reboot it will say it's invalid/or doesn't meet the crc or some weird crap, then revert back to the previous bios.
maybe i need to use the windows bios update program for it.

Probably doesn't matter right now, the systems stable and runs most the games over 60fps, so i probably won't even OC it right away.

once again, thanks for the help and I rep'd ya all a bit ago. =)