i picked up a gtx 260 like a week ago from a local tech shop for free and it works! the performance is still amazing for such an old card it ran gta v at 1280x1024p all settings on normal at 70 and 80 fps with an i5 660 and 4gb of ram, truly an amazing card
The first PC i built was in the summer of 2008. I was on a very tight budget so i reused the case, psu, hdd. The cpu was a core 2 duo E7200 (which i used on 3.5 ghz) the mb was a Gigabyte P31-DS3L with 2gb kingmax 800 Mhz ram and the vga was the then brand new AMD HD4850 512Mb(Sapphire reference card) . It was very powerful at that time for the 1280x1024 resolution i used. The only game it couldn't run on max was of course Crysis. I switched from a pentium 4 2800 with a geforce 7600GS.
the e8400 likely would have been the choice at the time, the 0.16 ghz wouldnt matter on a motherboard & ramkit that allows overclocking. Specially with how far the e8400 could be pushed. With my asus p5q premium, a pair of 2 gb 1066 mhz ocz reaper ddr2 sticks it reaches 4 ghz stable. The 9800 gt or a gts 250 would be a solid pick, maybe even 2 cards in sli for crysis.
My first build was an E8400 and 8800GT! I remember getting a 40GB Intel SSD for my OS and only keeping one or two games on it that I wanted to load super fast. Loved that PC
I had the exact motherboard wit that same CPU and 4gb ram. My graphics card was the HD 4850 1GB I duel botted with windows Vista Business and windows 7. It was my first gaming PC. It allowed me to max out Bioshock 1 & 2 and maxed out Mafia 3 + Need for Speed Pro Street at 1080p. mid to high settings for GTA IV. I had this computer all the way up until I got the FX 8120 and then the FX 8350. :)
