Photon $500 Gaming PC Build

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Who says you can’t build an awesome gaming PC without spending a pile of money? The Photon delivers a quad core CPU, dedicated graphics card and 8GB of memory in an attractive windowed case to let the world see your awesome and totally clean cable management job. While you might not quite be ready to crush benchmarks at 4K the Photon handles 1080p gaming no problem and leaves you with plenty of room for future upgrades.

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AMD Athlon X4 760K

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For less than $100 processors don’t get much better than the AMD Athlon X4 760K. Sporting a quad module design the 760K has a base clock speed of 3.8GHz along with the ability to overclock, giving you access to even more performance. It’s also compatible with the new FM2+ motherboards making future upgrades no problem.

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MSI A78M-E35

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PCIe 3.0? Check. USB 3.0? You better believe it. SATA 3? Something something Half-Life 3 confirmed. Considering the budget price the A78M-E35 is packing plenty of features including the ability to overclock your processor or even upgrade to one of the new Kaveri APUs.

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Sapphire Radeon R7 260X

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Sporting a fully enabled Bonaire GPU core clocked at 1050MHz along with 2GB of GDDR5 memory the Sapphire Radeon R7 260X has plenty of power for 1080p gaming along with supporting tech like AMD’s TrueAudio and Mantle.

 

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8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport

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These days having 8GB of RAM in your gaming PC is basically a necessity so that’s where this single 8GB DIMM of Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM comes in. With a clock speed of 1600MHz it’s nicely suited to the system and it also leaves room to upgrade the PC to 16GB of RAM later on.

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1TB Western Digital Black

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When it comes to a hard drive for a gaming PC there’s a reason the Western Digital Black is one of the most popular choices there is. While it comes short of a full blown SSD the WD Black still delivers plenty of performance for both games and normal use and with 1TB of capacity you’ll have enough room for your pictures, video, music, programs and more all at a much lower price than a comparably sized SSD.

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430W Corsair CX430

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The Corsair CX line of power supplies is my favorite for budget builds and the CX430 works perfectly here. With 430W of capacity there’s plenty of overhead even for future upgrades and the 80 PLUS Bronze certification means it will be easy on your power bill as well.

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Corsair SPEC-01

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Budget cases are typically boring, simple choices but with the SPEC-01 you get a red LED fan, nicely designed front fascia and a large window all wrapped up in an ATX mid-tower. Not only is it quite well built but Corsair also has made it easy to work in with a decent amount of room to cable manage, something a lot of other budget cases skimp out on.

 

 

So there you go, everything you need to build your very own Photon. Since this is a custom gaming PC feel free to customize it with some of these options!

OS – Windows 8.1 64-bit

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While you can go with a free operating system like SteamOS or Ubuntu for a gaming PC Windows is still the best overall choice with compatibility with an enormous library of PC titles.

Wi-Fi Adapter – Asus USB-N53

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Wired Ethernet isn’t always an option so having a good dual band USB Wi-Fi adapter is a solid option to keep you connected.

Case Fan – Corsair AF120

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While it’s not necessary adding an additional 120mm case fan at the rear of the SPEC-01 can help keep temperatures and noise down.

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