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Why do you want 2GB of VRAM on your graphics card? I don't really think that 2 GB is necessary, however, your wish is my command... |
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Here's what I would do to accomplish a cheap gaming rig: Buy a reasonable new-ish desktop PC from a reputable company, Upgrade the Power Supply, upgrade the RAM if necessary, slap in a nice card, put the cover on, enjoy. Did that with a Compaq I had once. Bought a 600w power supply then got a nice 1GB GDDR5 Graphics card. Worked nicely for Portal and Minecraft. I could even record with 60FPS with Fraps. Costed a total of... probably 400 or 500 dollars. |
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All building a computer is is basically finding the components, screwing a few things in, and cable management. With a little bit of digging you can buiold a computer for almost any price range. One time I threw together an entire rig built basically for minecraft for just over $400, so you don't even have to spend the $700 if you don't want to. |
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Your requirements are a bit strange. Minecraft asks some resources, but not so much you need a high end pc. If you want to live stream it with skype in the background and maybe edit video on it, I can get why you'd want a system like that. If it's just for a casual friday night, put the money in a $700 dollar notebook and upgrade it to 8GB of RAM. |
I hope you know that lower mid range cards with 2GB ram are generally overpriced for what you get. they are often priced close to higher end cards with less memory. (the 2GB is mostly marketing hype in order for the videocard makers to charge new release prices for last gen cards)
Most games will not use 2GB video memory unless unless you take a very demanding game and do something like force 16X AA and AF along with a few other enhancements
(for a high end card it is not much of an issue with most current games but for a mid range card, it will render most games unplayable, especially when force settings that are higher than what the game engine offers. (eg if the game engine goes up to 4xAA and you use the driver override to get 8X or 16X then you will get an extreme drop in performance as it cannot efficiently handle it)
I recommend going for a 1GB card that is much faster for the same or less money.
PS minecraft is mostly CPU limited. It is run entirely in java and this causes a huge performance overhead.
For me in minecraft, I get around 200-400FPS with a GPU usage of around 20-30% on my GTX460
To get more performance you need a CPU which faster single threaded performance
I am currently using a AMD phenom 2 CPU and it is the limiting factor in my performance.
if I were to move up to a core i5 or i7 system then I would get significant performance boost (may even double it with just a faster CPU)
minecraft eats up to 1.5GB of ram by it's self (it requires a 64 bit java install as the 32 bit version will not allow a single java app to allocate more than 1GB from the java virtual machine.
The 64 bit java must be manually installed, the auto detected link on the java site always defaults to 32 bit (if you are having issues with your current system with minecraft then the issue is most likely 32 bit java virtual machine, especially if it starts off running smooth and slows over time.