How to Build a Gaming PC for Titanfall to kick Xbox One

You are probably excited about the release of Titanfall. We spent some time to configure some systems that we think many of you might be interested. These ones are kind of target varying resolutions for Titanfall specific gaming.

Now, there is a lot of debate. This game is really coming out on Xbox One and PC at the same time. Image quality wise, I think even our base level system that targets 1920 by 1080 is going to have a better image quality than what you will find on the Xbox one. We can do that for surprisingly low budget, in fact let us go, and start talking about the parts.

For the 1920x1080 targeted systems, this is where most PC Gamer said, this is where most of their displays a resolutions are going to be set. We start with an Intel Core i3 4330. It is a dual core processor but do not worry about that. It is still more than enough computing power for gaming and for other tasks but it is a low cost option.

The MSI H87 G43 motherboard, this is an H87 board not a Z87 board. It is going to have fewer features than you would find on most enthusiasts level boards but again this is a sub one hundred dollar price point. Price was the biggest determining factor.

We still got eight gigs of Corsair Vengeance memory here running at DDR3 1600MHz not an overclocking memory but again we are looking at budget here under ninety dollars for that.

For the graphics card, arguably the most important part of the build, we are going with a GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Since the release of this card, it has been one of the more popular selections. It has a starting SRP of around a hundred and fifty dollars. The one we picked is a little bit overclocked, 179 dollars and it is able to do that with very low power consumption. The reference card does not have any 6-pin power connection although depending on the model. It is a great video card for 1080p gaming and it’s low-cost as well.

For storage, because of the target of pricing on this build, we went with a standard hard drive. The one here is a Western Digital Blue drive at one terabyte; you can get for fewer than sixty dollars. SSDs are faster but they are significantly more expensive in terms of cost per gigabyte and talking about PC gaming where Titanfall itself still require somewhere around 50 gigabytes to install. You will need some capacity.

For the case, I am still a fan of the Corsair 200R. This is a $72 to $75 case depending on current pricing. It is a mid-tower full size ATX. IT has great capabilities. Case is one of those areas very user-dependent. you may not like the styling, you can look around and find the hundreds of other cases with similar price ranges that will offer close the same feature sets with different visual appeal.

For the power supply, we like the Corsair CX500M. This is a kind of a builder series low cost 500-watt unit, more than enough power to keep your processor and GPU running.

If you do not already have a copy of Windows, we use a copy of Windows 8.1 64-bit.

In total that brings us to $781 for a machine that will be a complete PC ready to do any kind of regular tasks, internet browsing, productivity, multimedia, you hook up your TV; make it a home theater design. However, it is also going to be great for 1080p gaming and that is really the target here.

Titanfall, keep in mind, is not hugely dependent on graphics horsepower. As you increase the resolution or image quality, it does require more, but in terms of PC games, it is not overly demanding. The 750 Ti has more than enough power to keep 1920 by 1080p going smoothly.

2nd Build

The next build, it targets resolution of 2560 by 1440. This is a very common in 27-inch displays. I guess we will call them the Korean LCD monitors that have been very popular recently. You can find these even on Amazon now for three hundred fifty dollars or below. 2560 by 1440 is about 75 to 80 percent more pixels than a standard 1080p screen so we had to increase our specifications at least a little bit in a couple key areas.

For one, we have upgraded to the core i5 4670K processor. It is a true quad core part. It has no hyper-threading but a little bit more power for games, as well as other tasks that you may use. By the way it is completely plausible to use a core i3 4313 in this build.

If you want to, we also upgraded to a gigabyte Z87 motherboard, just fewer than 150 dollars. This will add more features support for multi GPU if you want to go down that road as well. This is still using the same Corsair 8GB of memory.

For other changes, we have actually upgraded from the 750 Ti into the GTX 770. Now, the 770 from Asus is the DirectCU unit. It is going to be about 332-340 bucks. It is overclocked. it's the same horsepower that you would find a GTX 680. For this particular game, for Titanfall, it has more than enough horsepower to push 2560 by 1440.

We also upgraded from a standard spindle drive to an SSD. in this case, we are using a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB unit and that does constrict you in your storage capacity but PC boot times, game load times, anything like that is going to be greatly improved with an SSD. If you still need a storage drive, you can add a Western Digital blue drive, 59 bucks to add a terabyte of storage to it.

This build still use the Corsair 200R. We upgraded the power supply to the Corsair CX600M. There’s a little bit more juice for the 770 and then including the Windows copy as well. We are total in just under twelve hundred dollars, so for just fewer than 12 hundred bucks, we can get a complete PC build from scratch, ready to play Titanfall at 2560 by 1440.

3rd Build

Now for those of you that are maybe a little bit on the crazy side. You are interested in 4K, like this is the ultimate way to play games on a single display as it is now. A 4K monitor like the Asus PQ 321 will cost you $2900. That is a lot of money but it is by far the best gaming experience you will have. It is also useful for productivity.

You need changes on your hardware to improve this kind of high DPI usage models on a Windows environment.

We have pushed up to the core i7-4770K, which is a $320 processor. That is quad core with hyper-threading. This will increase overall system performance.

Get the same gigabytes Z87 motherboard, same amount of memory although you could go from 8GB to 16GB depending on your budget. However, I am guessing if you are playing on a $2900 monitor, you probably have a little bit more budget to play with.

For a graphics card, we go with the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked. You know, this is a seven $725 video card. It is the flagship from NVidia. It is the fastest single GPU that we have tested. It has more than enough performance and memory on board to run the Titanfall at 4K.

I will say up front that Titanfall is a little bit easier on GPU than some other games, maybe like Crisis 3 or Metro Last Light. If you plan to play 4K at very high image quality settings with those other games, it is possible you could need a second 780 Ti, so keep that in mind as you start to budget.

We have upgraded the SSD from 250 gigs to 500 gigs. Again, we got a little more budget to play with. That is going to help you lessen your dependency on a standard spindle drive.

The Corsair 200R is still included in that build. Chances are again, if you are playing at 4K on this type of monitor, maybe you want to show off your System. You can definitely upgrade to bigger better Corsair, NZXT cases, or Coolermaster case. There are many options out there, so keep that in mind.

The power supply, we bumped up to 750 watts from Seasonic and again with the copy of Windows included here. Our total is $1830. That is actually an impressive amount of hardware that you will find inside that budget. Being able to play at 4K, although that price does not include a monitor, it is nice and I can tell you that this game we will look amazing at 4K.

Conclusion

All three of these system builds will produce gaming experiences that are well beyond the Xbox One will provide. Even the 1080p low-cost build that we have here is going to produce better image quality than what you will see on any Xbox One. Moreover, I think you have a much better gaming experience if you are going to use a keyboard and mouse as opposed to being required to use a controller.