I decided that I wanted to make a budget rig to attempt to counter Linus' and Luke's build. A budget of $300 and a time-frame of one month to buy the parts and build. I made the mistake of buying ALL brand new parts. After Scrapyard Wars, I felt rather defeated in terms of hardware. No parts were provided by suppliers, everything was my own money. Here's the build, price doesn't include HDD or Optical Drive (Some parts had good sales like the PSU, Case, and RAM)
Parts list:
Motherboard: GIGABYTE F2A78M-D3H
APU- AMD A8-7600
RAM- 8GB GSkill RipJaws 2133Mhz DDR3
PSU- Corsair CX430M
HDD- Old 500GB laying around
Optical Drive- Old LG DVD Rewritable
Case- Sentey GS-6000r
GPU- Integrated Kaveri GPU (Will be expanded to an r7 260x later on)
The machine achieves solid frame rates in games I love to play, a solid 60 fps on medium in Call of Duty BO2, I can bump it up to high and get a good 35 to 45 fps.
In Far Cry 3, I get about 45fps on medium setting with no noticeable fluctuation, even during intense explosions.
Battlefield 4 was also advantageous due to Mantle. The chip sat above most others with a solid 60 fps on high.
Finally, where my machine started to fall back, Far Cry 4 achieved a mere 25-35fps on medium if I was lucky, usually in the 20-25 range.
Finally Finally! In 3dmark Firestrike, the machine only achieved a 1265 on the regular demo, only getting 8-12fps.
Thus, my attempt at a $300 PC was lackluster, probably due to some poorly picked parts. For $350 I could've based the system around an A10-7850K, giving me better performance. With this, I could've overclocked the memory to 2400Mhz, as the 7600 only supports up to 2133Mhz.
Looks like everyone has learned a little something from scrapyard wars, Thanks you guys! 