It's that time again! No, not christmas, you at the back! Time for me to upgrade my PC! Uncle Ghhyrd has had his computer for a very very very long time now, and needs you hip young'uns for specification advice!

Who wants to hear my current specs? Go on then, I'll treat you!

Processor: Intel Pentium 4
RAM: 256 Mb
Hard Drive 1: 55 GB
Graphics Card: 64 mb NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500

Can any o' you folks please give me a reccomendation for overall:
What I would basically need in a computer for gaming
What I would resonably want in a computer for gaming
What would last in a computer for gaming
What is affordable
But overall
What is reasonable*
e.g

Processor: Dual core or Quad core?
Ram: 2GB?
Hard drive: ?
etc

All responses valued.


*Just remember my current computer is slower than traffic lights when you are at the front of the queue, can successfully complete -3 tasks at one time before moving on to the next, is out of memory by the time it has loaded Windows, the hard drive can hold as much as a handless man, and the Graphics Card can process FS2 SCP in about as much glorious detail as I can.

ghhyrd wrote:Can any o' you folks please give me a reccomendation for overall:
What I would basically need in a computer for gaming
What I would resonably want in a computer for gaming
What would last in a computer for gaming
What is affordable
But overall
What is reasonable*
e.g

Processor: Dual core or Quad core?
Ram: 2GB?
Hard drive: ?
etc

I'm going to assume you have around a grand to spend. I'm also going to assume that you don't need MoBo advice.

Power Supply: $100.00 (lifetime warranty)
Processor*: $180.00
Fan/Heatsink*: $60.00 (after $20.00 rebate)
DDR2 RAM**: $55.00 (after $40.00 rebate)
Hard Disk: $75.00
Graphics Card: $140.00 (after $10.00 rebate).

Total: $610.00 (after $70.00 rebates)

*If you live in a rather warm environment, you might want to get a new case that has good airflow.

**If you're upgrading to Vista, get four gigabytes of RAM instead of two.

2G of ram works just fine in Vista thankyouverymuch

Taristin wrote:2G of ram works just fine in Vista thankyouverymuch

I've seen Vista idle with 400MB in physical RAM, which gives you a grand total of 1.6GB.

Get an 8800GT rather than 8600. I have a (XXX version) 8800GTS, which is the older mid-range card and it's ace. Also, the Intel **50 series C2D chips (i.e. 6750) are better value & performance than AMDs currently are - just make sure to get a P35 motherboard (which supports the faster FSB speed on the **50 chips).

In terms of dual / quad core... at the moment most games don't (AFAIK) parallise enough to make a quad core worth the extra expense (especially as they'll run on a single core of your multicore processor). So get a fast dual core, and you should be able to upgrade to a quad core later on without having to replace the mobo.

Oh, and don't bother with Vista if you can avoid it for at least 6 months, as it's still a bloated memory hog with very immature drivers (plus the 'certification' for a device working with Vista is completely inadequate and doesn't actually provide any guarantees).

aldo wrote:Get an 8800GT rather than 8600. I have a (XXX version) 8800GTS, which is the older mid-range card and it's ace. Also, the Intel **50 series C2D chips (i.e. 6750) are better value & performance than AMDs currently are - just make sure to get a P35 motherboard (which supports the faster FSB speed on the **50 chips).

In terms of dual / quad core... at the moment most games don't (AFAIK) parallise enough to make a quad core worth the extra expense (especially as they'll run on a single core of your multicore processor). So get a fast dual core, and you should be able to upgrade to a quad core later on without having to replace the mobo.

Oh, and don't bother with Vista if you can avoid it for at least 6 months, as it's still a bloated memory hog with very immature drivers (plus the 'certification' for a device working with Vista is completely inadequate and doesn't actually provide any guarantees).

Thanks, and I was actually going to install XP anyway. But what of
RAM? 3GB? 4GB? 64GB?
And how big a Hard Drive? What will the games of today, tomorrow, and maybe next week need?

And where could I find a computer for all of this to work in Aldo?

The 32bit version of XP Pro (If you're getting XP, get Pro) can only allocate 2 gigabytes of RAM to any single program. So if you're getting the 32bit version 2 gigs will do fine as long as you don't run memory intensive programs while playing a game.

If you get 64bit, the amount of RAM that can be allocated is higher, so 4 gigabytes is appropriate for that version.

2GB of RAM should be ok methinks, it's easy enough to upgrade later on.

I have a 160GB hard drive, which was pretty cheap and crucially had a larger cache size / faster spin speed. How big an HDD you want depends largely on how much you dislike installing / uninstalling.

I only have one thing to say: SATA2