 Welcome to our 2013 holiday gaming system buyer's guide. We're going to be taking three different price points, so that is $500, or what we're calling just game because it's a no-frills gaming box, I mean it doesn't even have USB 3. Our second price point is around $1,000 and we're calling that game now because it's a well-rounded gaming box built for today. It's that gamer's sweet spot. And then our third price point we're calling game on, or the more future-proof and upgradeable gaming box, although really I hate using those words because there's no such thing as a future-proof system. But at any rate, it has some extra bells and whistles and it costs a little bit more to go along with that. It comes in at around $1,700. Well, it always starts with the CPU, doesn't it? So the Athlon X4 750k at $80 is a great choice. It's about $5 more than the 740, but you get that K unlocked multiplier, which might not be relevant with the hardware we have in there. I really don't recommend overclocking the system in its current config, but who knows, you might make changes in the future that'll help that out. Now the reason we went with an AMD quad-core as opposed to an Intel dual-core is that in the past, or even really in the present, most games benefit more from fewer but more powerful cores. So we would recommend Core i3s normally, but we're seeing Frostbite 3 as well as AMD's Mantle API upcoming that are going to make much better use of more cores even if they're less powerful. So that makes me pretty confident in this recommendation for the near future. Now for RAM, we went with a single 8-gig module of whatever was the cheapest RAM we could find. It was $60, and the reason we went with a single module is that our FM2A55M VGS R2.0 motherboard only has two memory slots. So while we do get slightly lower performance for going with a single module versus dual-channel operation, what that means is we can upgrade to 16 gigs of RAM later on down the road by simply adding another 8-gig module rather than forcing ourselves to remove two 4-gig modules, throw them away, and add two 8-gig modules in order to achieve the same effect. Now this board doesn't have really any features to speak of. It doesn't even have USB 3, but for $50, it's hard to go wrong, and it does work. We do have one. So if you want other stuff, you can spend another $20 or whatever else, and you can get a more feature-rich board, but this one is just game. That's what it does. For our power supply, this is where we never recommend buying generics. So we went with the most basic brand name power supply we could get, which was the Antec Basic 350. At $30, it's around $10, $15 more expensive than a generic power supply, but at the very least, you know that it's rated for continuous power, and you know that if it says it has overcurrent protection on it or whatever safety certification on it, that it actually has it, and it was actually tested. You'd be amazed how many power supplies out there are not validated and don't have the features that they claim to have. So that's why we went with that. Again, the not overclocking-ready components, and speaking of not overclocking-ready, we are using the stock cooler and the cheapest Apex case we could find. You can get this thing for as low as $20. It's functional, but it doesn't have great cooling. So no overclocking so far except the CPU. So guys, you would need to make some upgrades to the config for overclocking. Now, okay, the case does have one thing going for it, though, and that is it does have ventilation in the side panel above the CPU area as well as above the graphics card area. So when we put that HD 7850, whether we get a 1G card or a 2G card, that'll affect pricing by about $25, but a 2G card will run you around $155. It'll have somewhere to exhaust the heat. Now, this card is an untouchable value. I would have loved to present you guys with here's the AMD option, here's the Nvidia option that makes sense at this price point. Nvidia doesn't really have anything that's that competitive at this price point, but the cold hard truth of the matter is neither does AMD. The 7850 is an outgoing card. It's a discontinued model. So once these are gone, they're pretty much going to be gone. So I would recommend grabbing one now if you're interested in it. For our storage, you have a couple of options. So number one is the Western Digital Blue 1TB. It's available for around $70. Number two is the Kingston V300 120 gig SSD for around $80. I had people telling me a little while ago, I was talking about something, oh, you're crazy Linus, you can't put an SSD in a $500 machine. Yes, you can. And yes, it absolutely makes a very big difference. It's a matter of whether you're willing to go for the SSD now, install just some of your games and wait until you can add a hard drive later when you get another allowance or you get another paycheck or whatever else, or whether you must have the storage now, in which case go with the WD Blue. Now our pricing for this system was before Windows. Windows 8 is about $100, but if you already have a Windows license that you can reuse or if you're planning to use a free OS such as Linux, then you obviously don't have to buy that. So that is what we'd consider to be optional. Our GameNow system, I actually struggled with a fair bit. I ended up with some recommendations that I think are going to sound a little bit unusual, but if you guys hear me out, maybe you'll agree. And if you don't, of course, let me know in the comments. So for the CPU, I went with a Core i5 3330. This is a non-K skew, but unlike Haswell, Ivy Bridge non-K CPUs can be overclocked a little bit and you can get around 3.6 comfortably out of these chips, which will put it in about the same performance range as something like a 4670K, which costs a full $50 more. That gives us a lot of money to work with elsewhere in the build. So for memory, we went with 8 gigs of RAM again at around $60. You can get either a single module or a dual channel kit and you can decide whether you care more about having the extra little bit of performance from dual channel now or if you care more about being able to expand to 32 gigs of RAM in the future, depending which way you go, because both boards that are options at this price range, the Z77 Pro 3 or Pro 4, are available for around $95. However, Z77 boards are becoming less common, so pretty much buy whatever you can. For the power supply, we went with the Seasonic 620W. This is the S12 II. This is a much better power supply than the one in the last system, which was nothing special other than that it just had a proper brand name and proper certifications on it. At $65 to $80, the Seasonic 620W unit is efficient, it's quiet, and it is just fantastic. Speaking of things that are efficient and quiet, we went with the Hyper 212 Plus. Again, we're talking about a moderate overclocking system here, and for $30, this is a great value because the stock cooler just really isn't good enough for any overclocking these days. For the case, we went with the 200R. Same thing, more solid build quality. So this is around a $50, $60 case than that $20, $30 case that we looked at before. Much better ventilation, better brand, better looks, just better in every possible way, in very practical ways. Now the video card is something that some people will agree with and some people won't, but I narrowed it down to I really think the GTX 770 makes the most sense in this configuration. You can get great performance out of it. Remember, this is basically equivalent to a GTX 680, and with the holiday bundle, which includes Assassin's Creed 4, Batman Arkham Origins, and Splinter Cell Blacklist, there's just not really much on the AMD side that is comparable to that. The 280X is about the same price. I was able to find 770s as cheap as around $310 and just doesn't have the same oomph that the 770 does. Not to mention, I am a huge advocate of Nvidia Shield. I think it's awesome. And 770 is the lowest end card that allows you to get $100 off a shield, so you can get it for $200. Now because of some of the money that we saved elsewhere in the build, our storage solution becomes a lot more robust. So for our SSD, we went with the Kingston V300 120-gig drive. It's not the fastest SSD in the world, but for $80 to $90, it is a very compelling value, and you will notice a difference if you install your OS and your most frequently used programs on it. Then we were able to grab a 2TB Seagate hard drive and throw that at the system for mass storage. That gives us a ton of flexibility. We could go with 90 gigs of OS SSD and allocate 30 gigs to use as a cache using smart response technology on the hard drive, or we could just go 120 slash 2TB or whatever else the case may be. Either way, because of that money that we saved by giving up.4 GHz and a 10% IPC improvement and then doing a little bit of overclocking, we were able to get this great storage solution and a rockin' video card. And then of course, if you need Windows, then that's an extra $100. And whether or not you already have that is your business. In the performance game on segment where we're future-proofing things a little bit and color matching them a little bit, it became a lot easier because I have a bit of flexibility. I don't have to worry about every $3 that I'm spending and is it contributing to the bottom line in terms of performance. So we started with a 4770K, which gives you pretty much no benefit today over something like a 4670K, but again, Frostbite 3 and Mantle coming with there being more benefit to more threads, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna sort of place our bets and spend an extra $100 on something with hyper-threading and overclocking potential and all that stuff. For RAM, we went with 16 gigs right out of the gate. Both of the other configs went for 8 gigs, and while there's really no benefit from a gaming perspective to 16 gigs of 1866 Corsair Vengeance Blue today, it matches our motherboard and it is a little bit more future-proofable, but again, I really hate that word, I hate that word. For motherboard, we went with the ASUS Z87 Pro. It's got wireless AC, it's an extremely solid board. ASUS really is my number one choice when it comes to motherboards, so anything other than ASUS, you know that I'm probably making a compromise somewhere along the line. Either of those other configurations, you could pay an extra $20, $30, or even $40 and get an ASUS equivalent board, but that's exactly the problem is on a $1000 rig or on a $500 rig, I don't feel comfortable spending that kind of extra money on something that really just doesn't contribute to performance and contributes more to features and robustness, so this is something I'd feel very comfortable overclocking as high as we could go. Speaking of overclocking as high as we want to go, we went with a Corsair TXM 750-watt power supply. It has four PCI Express connectors for a potential dual GPU SLI or Crossfire upgrade in the future and is very well-built and modular. It has disconnectable cables, again we're wasting a few bucks on something that doesn't contribute to performance, but it does make your system look better and it does actually make your airflow slightly better depending on how your cable management goes. For cooling, we went with the NH-U12S. It's quiet, it performs extremely well, and it's knock to us, so of course I think it's the bee's knees because just all their stuff is fantastic. In fact, I probably have knock to us stuff here. See, this is an excellent fan, the NF-P12, although it's not my favorite fan anymore. The NF-F12 is now my favorite fan. For the case, I went with a Fractal Design Define R4. The extra $60 we're spending on this case versus the Corsair 200R is purely for looks and overall build quality and quiet, sound dampening material and stuff like that. Does not contribute anything to performance and in fact, the thermals probably aren't even quite as good as the 200R. This is a really, really, really nice case and we're going for a more luxurious build here. Everything else about this system was relatively easy, I really struggled with the video card on this one because at this kind of a price range, you can probably afford to jump up to a 780, but it costs a full $100 more than a 290. It does come with three games as opposed to one, so you can find 290s that come with Battlefield 4 or you can find 780s that come with the Assassin's Creed 4, Batman Arkham Origins as well as Splinter Cell Blacklist bundle. And the 290 is louder, noticeably louder, runs hotter than the 780, but is nearer in terms of sheer FPS performance and costs about $100 less. So you guys got to make a decision here. Do you want to spend an extra $100 for better temperatures, lower noise, potentially better game bundle depending how you feel about the games that are included in it, the $200 discount on Shield, Nvidia G-Sync potentially in the future if you wanted to upgrade your monitor in a couple months and get something because it really is revolutionary, it's awesome. Or if you want to go ahead and go for the more value oriented solution now and you're willing to take a hit on power consumption as well as acoustics and temperatures, you think AMD Mantle is going to be an outstanding piece of technology even though we really haven't seen it yet, then 290 looks like a good bet. So if I had to pick one, in this price point, I kind of had to go with 290, but I think the 780 is also a very solid choice if you have the extra $100 to spend. Now for storage, things got easy again because the Samsung 840 EVO is just plain a better drive than the more value oriented SSD we were looking at before. We can afford a 250 gig drive so you can actually fit your OS and a fair number of games and programs on it and it's got some awesome features like their data migration software as well as rapid which allows you to use RAM in order to accelerate the drive itself and is very intuitive to set up and actually works really well. And then for our storage drive we went with the WD-RED 3TB. This might seem like a weird option because it's a RAID drive, but the things that make it a good RAID drive like the fact that it's more resistant to vibration and is just generally more robust, even though it's not the fastest drive in the world compared to something like a blue or a black, makes it a very compelling option if you're not putting your most performance sensitive data on it, which you're not because you have a 250 gig SSD in your system. So overall this system is very well rounded. Windows 8 is of course another $100. Very well rounded, extremely high performance when it comes to gaming and I think is a more normal overall build. I hope that you enjoyed our shopping for a PC holiday build guide. Generally why did we do this? Well reason number one was that you guys have been asking us to do this absolutely forever and reason number two is that we've, I don't know if you noticed this, but we did not have a pre-roll on this video. So we are experimenting with using affiliate revenue where we take the knowledge that we have about what's good that you guys want to know and we tell you and then you click on the links that we provide you with to buy them and then we get a commission out of that. We're experimenting with using that as a way to supplement or even long term perhaps replace paid advertising spots on our videos. So let me know what you think of that idea. Let me know what you thought of the holiday buyer's guide and I think that's pretty much it. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment if you have something to say about my choices and how they were terrible or how they were fantastic and as always guys, don't forget to subscribe.