My AMD-Asrock Rig

• This offered more SATA ports
• Supported 1600Mhz DDR3 which was a higher-end feature at that time
• Has PCI slots

Final build includes the following hardware:

• Motherboard: Asrock 880GM-LE (AM3+)
• Processor: AMD Athlon II 4X 640
• Graphics: Sapphire HD 6770
• Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1600Mhz
• PSU: FSP Supersonic 550W
• Chassis: NZXT Guardian 921RB
• Boot/Storage: WD Blue 500GB

I'm a gamer on a budget obviously and the beginning was a little rough to be honest. It doesn't look good at first, just see the image below.

It was my first build, I didn't really care how it looks as long as it runs my games. Getting into the enthusiast builder spirit, I did the best I can to make it look cool and appropriate as a 'gaming PC'. 

I added LED fans and I painted the chassis with metallic blue along with the blue LEDs. Sorry for the messy modular cabling. It's really the best that I can do at that moment. Not really some hardcore pro modding stuff but I was just thinking it would be nice to make it look different so I painted the chassis.

The front panel was challenging to disassemble. The front panel temperature reader and sensors along with the front I/O panel needed to be removed.

This chassis is very unforgiving for neat cable management. I had to flatten a portion of that piece of metal in between the motherboard tray and ODD drive bays. I used an acrylic based paint, blue metallic color. I think it suits the space-age design of the NZXT Guardian 921RB.

Added some blue anodized screws to complete the blue theme of the rig.

The completed build has a blue color theme, mostly painted. At the time I built this rig, the Asrock 880GM-LE was the best bang for buck motherboard option I found. I like that it had 6 SATA ports for expansion and 2 PCI slots. I did utilize one of the slots later on, adding a sound card.

Gaming with the Asrock 880GM-LE Build

I only game at 720p, medium settings with this build except for the older game titles like Neverwinter, Neverwinter II and some of the Command and Conquer titles, I believe it was Red Alert 3. I loved the Athlon X4 640 processor. It can handle pretty much everything I can throw at it at 720p and even 1080p gaming. If there was a bottleneck, it was the HD 6770 which I upgraded to GTX 560TI and an Intel sandy bridge build later on to play Call of Duty: MW3, Battlefield 2 and 3, Alan Wake and Mass Effect 2 and 3.

For budget gamers, I would highly recommend an AMD build with an equally capable Asrock board. I'm still a proud AMD user, currently with an FX 8370 on an MSI 970 Gaming but I won't mind going back to my first love Asrock AMD boards!