Introduction

When NVIDIA launched the GTX 550 Ti, it was interesting to see in their slides that they made mention of how it was the perfect model to build a $599 US gaming PC. As someone who has more power than I need in video and just about every other component of my system, I really found myself wondering, could we build a $599 US PC?

The answer to that was "Yes!" of course, because you can build a PC on most budgets these days. But what we really wanted to know was just how loosely, if at all, was NVIDIA throwing the "Gaming" term around.

So I thought I'd get some parts together and see exactly what we could achieve. Unfortunately by the time we got everything together and I got around to testing the PC the price had jumped around a little bit, and while the system came in originally around the $620 US mark, it blew out a little more. The good news is some of the items we've added are more so an optional extra.

We'll get into all this on the next page when we talk about exactly what we're dealing with as far as parts go. Then when that's done, we'll get into the performance side of things and see what the system is capable of.