Build your gaming rig for roughly 1.2 lakhs

We’ve seen two budget rigs already, one for around Rs. 35,000 for the cautious, budget oriented gamer and another for about Rs. 50,000, for those looking for a more potent rig. Today, we have a little something for those who don’t know what a budget is and simply want the best gaming rig money can buy. Now just because we have an unlimited budget doesn’t mean we just pick and choose the most expensive components out there, we’ve done this wisely and have splurged only where absolutely necessary. We’ve not included the price of the OS in the build as this is a list of just hardware components. Also, remember that these are all Mumbai prices which as you know, are always more than Delhi and Chennai. Prices and availability of components will vary depending on your location but for the most part, we’ve tried to stick with parts that are widely available in the market.

The Holy Trinity
Since Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E processors haven’t hit the streets yet and AMD made a big boo boo with the Bulldozer series, our real choice is Sandy Bridge, which is currently the best platform you can opt for. We’ve chosen the Core i7-2600K processor for its tremendous overclocking potential overall and excellent performance when it comes to gaming.

Speed racer

It’s a quad-core CPU with Hyperthreading giving you a total of 8 threads. It runs at 3.4GHz with the ability to Turbo up to 3.8GHz. The best part is that it has a TDP of just 95W and supports Intel Quick Sync, among others. We’ve also ditched the stock cooler and gone with the Antec Kuhler H2O 620 water cooling solution. We tested it on a 2600K itself and were very impressed with the performance, especially after overclocking.

Feature rich

For the motherboard, we’ve gone with the Asus P8Z68-V , a solid feature rich motherboard for the price. We test drove the P8Z68-V Pro which is a bit more expensive but to be honest, you’ll never use four SATA III ports anyways so might as well save a little. Asus packs in everything but the kitchen sink. You get UEFI BIOS, memory support up to 2200MHz, LucidLogix Virtu, Bluetooth v2.1, well laid out expansion slots and a ton of BIOS and Windows utilities. Also, the 12-phase power design for the CPU ensures more stability during overclocking.

Finally, we come to the RAM and we’ve chosen a tried and tested memory kit, the G.Skill RipjawsX (F3-14900CL9D-8GBXL) which is an 8GB memory kit (4GB x2) rated at a native speed of 1866MHz. It performed extremely well in our tests and more importantly ran cool, thanks to the heatspreaders. For about 4.5K, this makes it really good value as well. With, the main components out of the way, let’s move on to the fun stuff, the graphics cards.

Double whammy

We’ve stuck with the MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II, only added another one for uncompromised gaming. The reason we chose the GTX 560 Ti over the AMD HD 6950 is more robust drivers with fewer bugs, better compatibility with games (especially PhysX titles like Arkham City) and better power management under idle and load. Instead of a single GTX 580 or GTX 590, two GTX 560 Ti’s in SLI will give you a lot better performance. SLI has evolved over the years and with better drivers and newer games being optimized for multi-GPU setups, it’s definitely more future proof and plus, not that we really care in this build, a lot cheaper as well.