Folding Forum

i might think of building a custom pc, but what are the greatest PC parts, but at a low price?

Not entirely sure about what you are asking. Do you mean what parts should you buy or are you asking where to buy them?

If you are asking where to buy them, it depends on where you live....

If you are in the US, Newegg and Amazon are two major players and are often price-leaders.

Tom's Hardware has a good monthly feature of the Best CPUs and GPUs for the money. They break the market down into several commonly-targeted price points and give their recommendations on which card gives the best gaming performance at each price. Note that gaming performance doesn't necessarily correlate 1:1 with folding performance; for instance, they often recommend CPUs with fewer but faster cores over ones with more but slower cores since games don't usually take advantage of 4 or more cores, but folding benefits a lot from more cores. I'd still consider it a good starting point.

For everything else, I'd recommend looking at the reviews on Newegg to get a sense of which items are the best, even if you end up buying things from somewhere else. The Newegg clientèle is pretty knowledgeable, and many products have a lot of reviews; seeing a component with a 5/5 average across 200 reviews instills a lot more confidence than the 10 or so reviews I usually see at other sites. Plus, Newegg has a very good sorting system for trying to narrow down your search options.

One thing to keep in mind: do not skimp on the power supply. A bad set of RAM at worst is going to not work; a bad PSU can damage every component in your computer. The brands that I've seen regularly touted as very good are Antec, Seasonic, Corsair, Cooler Master, and PC Power & Cooling (if someone has an issue with one of those or with one that's missing, this is just my impression; I don't keep extremely up-to-date on PSUs). That's not to say that other PSU brands will automatically explode on you, but the cheaper brands tend to put in fewer safety measures, use cheaper parts that are more likely to fail, or don't actually provide as much power where it counts as they suggest.

There are a number of other factors to consider, so ask away.

Overall, Newegg will likely have the lowest prices for a full set of parts. You can probably price some individual parts better at various places, but that becomes a real pain in the butt. Save that for big items like printer and monitor, if applicable.

Also, if you aren't in a hurry, Newegg has a LOT of daily specials, so buying a few things at a time (once you decide on the components) will sometimes save a LOT of $$.

Newegg's combo deals can also be very good.

Epicmonkey wrote:i might think of building a custom pc, but what are the greatest PC parts, but at a low price?

Performance is a function of price. The more you spend, the faster the computer. You can spend $500 or $5000 or $50,000. Each has a very different answer and a very different list of PC parts.

So there are no "greatest" PC parts, only the "greatest" PC Parts for less than $500. Or greatest pc parts for less than $1000, etc. To give you a good answer, you will need to tell us how much you want to spend. Then we can suggest a good PC parts list for that amount of money.

i'm thinking of about $1000
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Just an example below for just over $1000 you can build a pretty good bigadv folding rig using your DVD player Graphics card etc from your current computer. I would provide links but I do not believe you are supposed to on the site.

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Item #: N82E16822136533 $79.99

High Current Pro HCP-750 750W TX12V v2.3 / EPS12V v2.92 SLI Certified CrossFire Certified 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular ...
Item #: N82E16817371052 $139.99

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000)
Desktop Memory Model F3-16000CL9D-8GBRM Item #: N82E16820231407 $129.99

ASUS P8Z68-M Pro LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
Item #: N82E16813131786 $129.99

Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I72600K
Item #: N82E16819115070 $314.99

XSPC Rasa 750 RX360 WaterCooling Kit $189.95