Build a PC for Battlefield 3, NVIDIA style

Note: Icrontic’s BF3 server is up. Join us!

You can purchase BF3 on Amazon, or on Origin.

The original Battlefield 3 PC article focused on building either an AMD or Intel system using AMD Radeon HD 6000-series GPUs, mostly because the cost of an equivalent NVIDIA GPU exceeded the budgets for those builds. This time the systems are specifically built around NVIDIA 500-series GPUs using the same budget points, plus one special build that most of us can only dream about.

To recap, these are the guidelines used for each build:

• The prices include shipping—I absolutely hate it when a system fits within a listed budget and all costs aren’t included. It’s disingenuous at best.
• All shopping was done at Newegg, because over time they are generally the lowest cost for the whole package and also provide good customer service.
• Rebates are listed, but not included with the cost since the focus is on “out-the-door” pricing, not what it will eventually cost after rebates.

Other items of note:

• Prices and availability are always in flux. Case in point, a 320GB drive was used for the previous builds. Since then prices have dropped and the same $39.99 now gets a 500GB hard drive. Prices also dropped for the power supply used in this article’s builds, allowing a little more budget space for other components.
• The NZXT Beta case used in the previous article is no longer available on Newegg. It is being replaced by the NZXT Gamma.
• Prices were recorded on September 21.

The NVIDIA GPUs are slightly more expensive at some power levels, and in the $600 builds the CPU had to be dialed back a bit to make the budget. Overall performance will be fine though.

Unforturnately the original CPU used for this AMD/NVIDIA build (the Phenom II X4 840) was deactivated on Newegg and will likely not resurface. It was the same $99.99 as the Athlon II, and truthfully there shouldn’t be much performance difference—aside from a minor speed difference, these two CPUs are otherwise identical.

The Intel Pentium CPU is still Sandy Bridge-based, and aside from a lack of Hyperthreading is otherwise identical to the Core i3.

The Gigabyte GPU is factory overclocked to 970/1940MHz (Core/RAM), making it one of the fastest GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards out there, and at $129.99 before rebates, it’s also one of the cheapest.

At $800 the system becomes much faster. In fact at this point these systems won’t differ significantly from the previous builds outside of the GPU.

Of course with a bigger GPU comes a need for a bigger power supply. The OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W will do the job nicely. The other benefit is its modular plug system. If you’re not using a particular cable, just remove it.

The ECS GeForce GTX 560 is the fastest card that would fit in the budget and seems to be a really good value—it’s clocked significantly higher (870/1740/1000 MHz Core/Shader/RAM) than stock (810/1620/1000MHz while only carrying a $5 premium over the lowest priced stock GTX 560.

Several improvements come at the $1000 price point.

First up is the move to 8GB of RAM. Windows likes memory, and the more you can give it the smoother things will get thanks to extra room for background tasks. Of course if Battlefield 3 ends up having 64-bit binaries, the extra RAM could come in handy.

An OCZ Agility 3 SSD as the OS drive will really reduce boot and load times. 60GB is enough for Windows, a few programs, and probably a single game which is why the 500GB drive remains—gotta have somewhere to store the rest of your data.

Moving up to a 700W power supply isn’t required, but it’d be helpful if you ever decide to throw a second GPU in later.

The GeForce GTX 560Ti is, like the other GPUs, a factory overclocked card (900/1800/1000 MHz Core/Shader/RAM vs 835/1670/1000 stock) and should provide a moderate boost in gaming performance.

The $1200 build increases SSD space and improves the GPU. A 120GB OS  drive is quite a bit more useful than the 60GB drive (some would say twice as much). No performance improvement, but a lot less space management is required.

The GeForce GTX 570 should provide an excellent level of performance—a single 1920×1080 display system should be able to run with maximum settings (though this is just a guess since we haven’t actually played BF3 yet).

Finally, for those with deep pockets or big dreams, here’s what I’d consider a pretty awesome system using desktop components and air cooling:

Both systems use the most recent top-end CPUs for their respective platforms. Yes, there are faster CPUs available from Intel, but they’re on LGA 1366, which will be replaced by LGA 2011, making the former socket effectively a dead platform. The same thing can’t be said about AMD’s AM3+ boards because those are the new platform. It just happens to support today’s CPUs.

Both CPUs have unlocked multipliers, so overclocking is pretty easy (and the only way with the i7 2600K). The Noctua NH-D14 heatsink is significantly better than either stock heatsink and will provide far more room for overclocking. Of course it’s great for running very low temperatures at stock speeds as well.

Both the MSI Lightning Radeon HD 6970 and the EVGA SuperClocked GTX 580 are factory overclocked. Either of the GPUs is great by itself. More is better though, and three is the practical limit, so that’s where we settle. Frankly I’d be shocked if three of either of these GPUs couldn’t absolutely max out the settings on any single display. They’d certainly also provide a great experience if you happen to have multiple displays.

The OCZ Vertex 3 is one of the fastest 2.5″ SSDs out there. In fact about the only way to get any faster storage is to move to a PCI Express solution such as the OCZ RevoDrive series. It’s quite a bit more expensive, but well worth it if you have the available slot.

Two 10K RPM Western Digital VelociRaptor drives will provide the fastest mechanical storage you can get without dabbling in the hybrid SSD-mechanical arena.

The LG Blu-ray burner may not be super useful at the moment, but if you want an optical drive and a medium that’s good for large backups, a 50GB disc isn’t a bad option.

On the Intel side, the Gigabyte motherboard is really the only one you’d want for SLI or Crossfire. Why? It’s the only one that has an NVIDIA NF200 PCI Express controller, a chip that acts as a secondary controller allowing two PCIe x16 slots to share the main chipset’s single x16 connection more effectively. Without it, you’d only be able to get two GPUs running, and each would be limited to PCIe 8x bandwidth limits.

The case of choice for this build is the Thermaltake Level 10 GT. Its unique design is sure to grab attention, and with hardware like this you’d definitely want to show it off.

So there we have it, another set of builds that will play Battlefield 3 nicely. The game releases October 25, so get building!