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Comment by gtaylor | Hacker News Reader

It was surprisingly easy. I'm not saying you over-paid, but for $2,500 I could have built something pretty ridiculous. Most of my money went into processor and GPU, which are typically your two big ticket items.

I trolled around Newegg looking for upper-middle tier components with a higher quantity of good reviews. A lot of the times you won't see a lot of the recently released stuff with useful reviews, so some of the parts were actually circa 2009'ish instead of being latest and greatest (2010).

I didn't splurge for a super expensive case, and my power supply wasn't modular (making it pretty cheap). i7 with a decent mobo. Went AMD for the GPU since (at the time) they were the best bang for buck. Got some cheaper G.SKILL 1600mhz DDR3 RAM (which has worked awesomely for me) for next to nothing, and I was ready to roll.

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Post your specs to give your post some legitimacy… I hope you didn't skimp out on your motherboard…

2010 $1000 rig running all 2013 AAA titles at the highest settings sounds unlikely to me…

More like impossible. The Internet has many PC building communities and none of them could do it. Hell an i7 and good GPU at the time easily brought you over 600$, which means very little money for a motherboard than can keep up.

Not the parent poster, but I also bought a computer in 2010 for about $1000 and am very happy with it today. I still play games at max or near max settings with no problem. This does not include a monitor though; also I only bought a 1650x1050 monitor, so I save a bit on graphics power by not having the full HD pixel count (or more).

EDIT: don't know my full specs offhand; i5, gtx 460, either 4 or 8 gigs RAM (4 I think), a 120gb SSD and 2G HD

My i7-875K (overclocked, but not exhaustively; my Gigabyte motherboard has an auto-overclock function that raised the multiplier without killing stability) with 16GB of RAM, entirely too many SSDs for any one person, and a Radeon HD6870 is capable of playing every new game I've bought this year (Dishonored, Saints Row IV--I don't buy games from EA so the new title list is pretty short right now) at max settings at no worse than 35FPS--I personally can't detect a difference between 30FPS and 60FPS, so I don't care.

Neither Dishonered or Saints Row IV are particularly intensive games. I get in excess of 100FPS in both and my cards (GTX 670s SLI) barely hut 30-35% usage…

I don't doubt the OPs rig is powerful enough to play modern games, but I seriously question the "any modern game at highest settings" statement.

FWIW, I built a rig a great rig in 2010 which I still use from time to time. i7 920, 12GB DDR3, SSD, SLI GTX 460 2GB.

Well now you should just post some core specs so we can test your claim. Exact CPU, GPU, and RAM amount?

Looking at the Tom's Hardware system builder challenges from a year ago or two years ago, and the comparing them to the $500 and $1000 machines that they have now in their System Builder marathons should showcase the tradeoffs in performance vs price more starkly.

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