Budget PC build under $400?

hey,

I'm looking for a PC for a buddy with a budget of $1333, ideally something we can pay off in installments with shipping included.

He just wants to play WoW, Rocket League, and World of Tanks—nothing crazy, just something that won't choke when he actually tries to run them.

You guys are the best, thanks!

Is there an option for monthly installments online? Which credit card should I be using?

Is there any way to do about 6 to 12 installments online with my Visa?
Since I’m not sure what kind of financing options stores in Chicago offer, if I can't handle it online, we've got Best Buy and Micro Center right here in the city.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB graphics card.
The Cooler Master MasterBox case.
The ASUS Prime H310M-K motherboard.
I think there might be a typo in the name—that should probably be an Intel Pentium instead of an Intel Celeron G5400.
Maybe an EVGA 350 W1 could work, I guess.
Patriot Signature DDR4, 2400MHz, 8GB, CL15.
The Kingston A400 240GB SATA3 SSD (the 7mm version) comes with an 80TB TBW rating. I guess it’s a decent little drive for basic needs.

All in all: $1.25 Maybe I could look into getting this on a six-month installment plan through Best Buy.

Look, I hate to be the one to say it, but an Intel Pentium is going to seriously bottleneck a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti when you're playing World of Tanks.

wiredotter14 said:Sorry guys, but that Intel Pentium is going to seriously bottleneck the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti in World of Tanks.

Wtf? I'm running high settings at 60+ FPS on my Intel Pentium G3220 paired with a 260X with 1GB VRAM. That Intel Celeron G5400 is basically just an i3 from a couple of days ago...😲

Adam Moore3 said:Wtf? I’m running this at home on an Intel Pentium G3220 paired with a 260X (1GB VRAM) at high settings and getting 60+ FPS. That Intel Celeron G5400 is basically just an old i3 from ages ago.😲

I don't know. Maybe they optimized the game heavily for the CPU, but in my experience, the i3 3220 was already bottlenecking my HD7850 2GB—which is slightly better than your 260X—while the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is a massive step up.

Look, World of Tanks has always been terrible at multi-threading. Even an old Pentium could handle it just fine, whereas something like an AMD FX would struggle because its single-core performance was so weak. They’ve since improved the multi-thread optimization, but I still run it at home on an Intel Pentium G3220 and a 260X without any issues at all.

Honestly, World of Tanks has changed completely. It’s not nearly as single-core dependent as it used to be; even an AMD FX-4100 doesn't lag too far behind a Skylake i7 anymore. Since you almost never see someone pairing an AMD FX-4100 with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, CPU bottlenecks have basically vanished in real-world usage.



Sure, the game might evolve even further from here, but there's no doubt it hasn't regressed when it comes to multi-threaded performance.

Look, if single-core performance was the main bottleneck, I wouldn't even bother bringing up the Core i3, which handles single-threaded tasks just fine.
Back when I was playing this about a year ago, devs had already started optimizing for multi-core setups, but the game was still such a CPU hog that my Core i7 920 actually outperformed the Core i3 3220. Once I swapped that Core i3 3220 out for a Xeon 1245v2 (Core i7 3770), I saw a 10-15 FPS bump during stutters—basically, those annoying drops down to 30 FPS finally stopped happening. And that was just using a Radeon HD 7850.
On that exact same rig, upgrading to a Radeon RX 580 basically doubled my frame rate, jumping from around 50 to over 100 FPS.

P.S. Looking at those FPS numbers in the chart you posted, it feels like they were recorded on settings designed to offload work from the CPU, because there's no way those numbers were achievable otherwise.