My nephew would like me to build him a PC for his birthday. His only demand, that it play Skyrim on ultra settings.

Can that possibly be done for less than $500 (Note: I have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, OS, and a PSU already just sitting here).

Sure, just don't build it with a new Intel Haswell CPU. :p

Should be possible, yes. Not overly sure of the cost of things stateside, but that doesn't seem unreasonable. What's the PSU (including brand)? Avoid Intel altogether more like. Intel let the door hit them in the ass on their way out.

As uncles go, I'd say you lean toward the exceedingly generous.

The only gift from an uncle I can recall is a set of history books by R.J. Unstead. I've no complaints, though. They were pretty interesting.

It's a Cooler Master 750 fully moduler PSU

ADDED IN EDIT:

Heh, I just looked at my order history at Amazon, and it says it's this one. (I don't have it handy to look at, it's in storage, and I'm going by memory).

I'm not really sure this one is it though, as maybe this is just the current version or something??? I purchased it in 2011 and could've sworn it was 750 watt, not 850.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RWJGC2/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 He's going to earn it though.

I've got a big yard, and he's agreed to mow it for me this summer.

I think I'm getting off cheap. :)

Tom's Hardware does a quarterly series of builds at different price points. Here is their most recent $600 build. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pc-gaming-overclock-build-a-pc,3443.html

You already have components that can be very costly.

All you need is a motherboard + cpu (you can get combos very cheaply on newegg and other sites like it) and I recommend a quad core. Besides Battlefield 3 and a handful of other games, most games are not optimized beyond 4 cores.

You should be able to find an AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition + mobo for a decent price. You can save by buying a mobo with 1 PCIE x16 slot and 2 slots for RAM.

That right there should put you somewhere around 120-150. Next you'll need RAM. AM3 mobos (the type of socket the Phenom II is) typically use DDR3, which is good for gaming. You can get an 8gb kit of DDR3 for 40-60 dollars. Don't go super cheap, but don't buy the most expensive stuff, either.

This should put you at roughly $200. That leaves room for a hard drive, optical drive, and graphics card. Hard drives fluctuate in price quite a bit, but optical drives are pretty consistently around $20. Let's assume the hard drive is ~$80 since he doesn't need a 3 terabyte hard drive. That leaves you at $300.

With $200 left I recommend the AMD 2 gb 7850, I use the HIS IceQ model.

I can tell you with this build you can play Skyrim on Ultra, the only thing being that antialiasing does not play nicely with the 7850, and besides it makes stuff look crappier. All other settings in Skyrim are maxed.

If you have further questions, Hit me up via PM. I'd love to help, and I definitely am not one of those who believes in getting top tech when it's not even widely used yet.
~Cym

Get him Morrowind and install the Morrowind Overhaul sound and graphics, much better than Skyrim :P

What PSU do you have, because if it's just some generic junk, it may not pull a gaming system.

If you mean "is it possible at 60 fps with all maxed up even the useless shadows?" my answer is "I am quite convinced you can't with first hand stuff"

It is time for you to introduce your nephew to the joys of ... HOMM3 (?)

Core i5-4670 is ~18% more expensive than a FX-8350, and offers significantly better performance in Skyrim (4670 is ~8% faster than the i5-3570K @3.4GHz shown in this chart)

That chart you link to seems instead to actually show that the 4770 is actually a few fps slower on average in Skyrim than the 3570, while it's lowest fps value was only 3 fps higher than the 3570. This is with both at stock speeds.

Wrong link, perhaps?

Skyrim's lack of decent multithreading disagrees with HyperThreading - the 3570 outperforms the 3770 in Skyrim, so the 4670 will probably outperform the 4770.

One thing to consider - the upcoming consoles have both been announced with "8-core" CPUs (whether this is 8 physical or 4 physical + 4 logical is not specified). HyperThreading and/or more cores in your CPU may be more important to performance in console ports / multiplatform games in the near future than they are currently.

Now see, I don't buy AMD products ever since I had an issue with one I purchased some time ago, but because I'm so broke I figured I had to use AMD for this build as the only way to get it done for less than $500.

And yet, look at both of those charts. The latest and greatest AMD CPU lags behind older Intel CPU's in performance.

What do the AMD fans have to say about this?? Do you guys just ignore tests like this, claim they're biased or wrong, or what? Because what I see when I look at that chart is very simple, AMD CPU's do not perform anywhere near where Intel CPU's do. And yet when I was looking at the feedback of the 6350 ($139) that I was looking at, it was all "This CPU is FAAAAAAAAASSST"

I would love to hear a comeback from an AMD enthusiast as to what s/he says about these kinds of test results, because I'm not going to waste my money either. Spending $500 on something that performs shitty is dumber than spending $800 on something that performs great.

I was all set with the FX-6350 (Vishera) $139, and the AMD HD 7750 (around $100 IIRC) and now looks like I'm back to only the option of Intel and Nvidia, which means no way it gets done for $500, which in this case likely means no computer because I'm not wasting my $500 either.

I should've known to not even consider AMD. I've always operated like that, and ALWAYS get ridiculed by some AMD fanboy as to how dumb that is. Okay, then please respond to these test results.

I was (and still feel like I am) an AMD fan. Every system I've built up til now has been AMD based. But, there's just no denying the power, speed, bang-for-buck of the Sandybridge and Ivy bridge cpus.

What's worth knowing is that for the budget gamer, there are still some AMD cpus worth looking at, if saving bucks is more important to you than power-per-buck.

Bottom line, give up your fanboy ways and buy Intel for now.

Cheers.