$1000 computer build for FFXIVFollow

If you need a monitor and whatnot too, that basically makes your budget for everything else about $850 +/- .

You cannot build a high end gaming PC for $850 unless you steal half the components. You can make a decent low-midrange PC, but there are going to be compromises. Something along the lines of this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.770956 is going to be your best bet, and even with that you are looking at anohter $100-$200for the operating system. That particular platform has a few problems (the motherboard is ****, the case is ****, and the power supply is too low a wattage for a gaming PC) but it has the advantage of being cheap. You would realistically be looking at upgrading at least the case, power supply, motherboard if you ever wanted to try some sort of SLI gaming setup. With hard drive prices being what they are at the moment, you aren't going to be able to go much cheaper than something along those lines unless you drop the processor down to an i3 and drop the video card down to the cheapest piece of junk you can find, which would bring it in at around $600, but wouldn't be capable of really even loading FFXIV.

You might be better off going with a Dell or some other premade type computer that comes with a monitor. They aren't going to be very upgradeable, but they can generally do the low end PC's cheaper than the build your own route at that level, and that gives you a starting point for building a higher end one later. Something along these lines maybe: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-8300/pd.aspx?c=us&~ck=mn That or http://www.ibuypower.com/Store/Intel_Z68_Core_i5_i7_Configurator

For FFXIV, you do need to bother about the video card, at least a little. My PC isn't a monster, but it's a workstation class machine that has as much horsepower as some of the servers I use at work, and yet it struggles with XIV because it uses a low voltage weaksauce video card ($75 about a year ago.) If you're building a rig for XIV, you cannot skimp on that component. Also, the more powerful the video card, the better it handles most other modern games as well. (The inverse is true for XI these days, where you'll get better performance with some older cards than you will new ones!)

SE officially recommends:
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460 or better with VRAM 768MB or more
Graphics Card
ATI HD 5830 1GB or better.

I'm told that these days it uses more of the GPU engine than it did before, with a preference for Nvidia CUDA/FERMI equipped cards, but it is still pretty brutal on the CPU and more cores definitly helps.

Edit: Regarding video card release dates, the Nvidia 6xx series GTX cards are slated to be out in Late July, though that typically slips to closer to november. They utilize PCI express 3.0, which in this particular price range your eventual computer probably won't have, so I wouldn't worry about that too much.

Edited, Mar 13th 2012 6:39pm by Kaolian