Nothing impressive.
Unlike some, I had to work on a severely limited budget. (even then, I paid more for it than I could realistically afford - Credit cards are a real health hazard. XD)
It's about a year and a half old now, and being budget concious wasn't top of the range.
But, it does quite well considering all that.
Here it is:
-2 gb ram (Not the best stuff. PC-1500 or something like that officially, but I can't get it stable at it's rated speed. I have to down-clock it to stop the system restarting at random.)
- Intel Core i5 760 2.66 ghz quad core (this was consistently the best value quad core CPU for quite some time. Probably not anymore though)
- (Sapphire) Ati/AMD Radeon HD 5770 1gb - Sapphire fits better than usual coolers typically, but otherwise a typical 5770. again, out of date now, but the 5770 was at the time among the first directX 11 cards, and the best thing around in terms of performance/cost
- 250 gb laptop sata drive. - Not in the least bit impressive, but shows the standardisation of the sata interface. This is an older drive I had left over from the second time I upgraded my laptop. It only required a physical adapter to fit it into a desktop drive bay. All the interface stuff is otherwise identical.
As you can tell, I cut some corners because I was running out of money. The RAM is something I wish I could replace, the motherboard works well enough, but is a fairly low-end part (also constrained by needing a micro-ATX board due to my case). I salvaged the HDD from another computer...
The case is a small form factor gaming case though, made from brushed aluminium, and after a lot of prior disasters, I learned not to cut corners on my PSU.
Oh, and to top off all the budget measures, while I bought the mouse, the 2 monitors I used are old 19" CRT displays. (Which cost me a total of £5 between them), and the keyboard is something I found being thrown out somewhere.
End result? Pretty good actually.
OK, so it won't win any awards for speed, or the sheer prestige of just owning something amazingly expensive.
But in terms of hardware (windows 7 cost a lot of money on initial release, which sucks), this cost me maybe £500 in total, and it can run pretty much everything I've thrown at it without serious problems.
OK, so getting it to run Crysis at 'very high' caused it to choke somewhat, but... You can't have everything if you have an actual budget to consider. XD
