S3 Series

Contemplating a new gaming system...
I want to spend as little as possible, but somewhere between $700 & $900

I have put together systems in the past but it's been a while and I'm mostly a "follow the instructions" type.

I'm currently running a core2 duo...4 gig of ram but I'm out of touch on today's processors and how they compare. Motherboards also... I've had good experience with Gigabyte, but am not tied to anything.

I'm thinking that AMD would be more cost effective.... am I wrong?
thoughts on which motherboards and Processors are very solid and work well together...
Also a good video card that might keep things in that range.
Is 16 gig ram where I want to be?



I play Arma2 and would like to possibly play arma 3


Is there a decent website where I could pick & choose components and list them all together easily?
I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts.

Newegg.com

Usually amazing deals and handy comparison button. In terms of cost, AMD is great at APUs and multicore threading. Good for modern games. I played Arma II easy on an AMD 8 5600K. Arma III looked fantastic still, but getting into helicopters the draw distance necessary to fly kinda kills the best graphic setting to basic because Arma draws 10s of kilometers in detail. A bit of a CPU hog. Regardless the A8 is the best value for the buck and can be OC'd if you build a good cooling system. Would highly recommend Cooler Master products. The only reason I maxxed my board to an A10 was for a better APU gfx chip so I could run Action separate from my CPU/GPU

That being said the A8 while a great budget chipset, is based on a socket FM 2 board, they are now on FM 3+. Also, if APUs don't matter and are looking for a strict CPU with a dedicated card. I would recommend, if affordable, looking at Intel. They have phenomenal single core processing power (useful for older games like WB) and the market general speaking seams to build their software to Intel standards so things usually gel together right out of the box.

Knowing what CPU you want to run will dictate what else to use. If you want to run the A-8, I have one I can give to you for less than the asking value online.