Thinking about getting a new desktop, mainly for games, need opinions

reply to post by buni11687

Want my advice? Build your own. Better machine for a lesser price. Here are places I shop at a lot:

Outlet PC

NewEgg

Tiger Direct

Construction is not at all difficult, just follow instructions. These companies are reputable, and will replace any part that is defective easily and at no extra charge. You will need:

1. Case
2. Motherboard (prefer MB and CPU Combo, cheaper)
2. Random Access Memory Sticks (RAM) (At least 2Gb, prefer 4Gb)
3. Hard Drive, (prefer a large capacity SATA)
4. Switching Power Supply (owner's choice, prefer 450 Watt or greater)
5. Optical Drives (A good choice is one DVD-RW, and one CD-RW)
6. Floppy if so desired
7. Video Card (Most newer MBs come with on-board Audio/Video)
8. Audio Card (I have a Soundblaster, better quality that stock Nvidia)
9. Fast Ethernet Card (again, newer MBs have it on-board)
10. TV Card (If desired)

Assemble, fire it up, configure the BIOS, set computer clock, set BIOS defaults, or Performance, or any optional settings. Place your install CD-DVD in the drive, and save your settings. Follow install prompts, configure your operating system, and know that YOU did this.

I know Microsoft Windows OS are very expensive to buy. Linux is FREE, and and easily be downloaded and burned to CD-DVD.
I run Fedora 17 Beta KDE 86_64
myself, cutting edge software, not for beginners, there are many others to choose from. PCLinuxOS is a good choice for newcomers, very easy to install and configure. Ubuntu is another popular choice. Check Distro Watch for a full listing of Linux Operating Systems.

reply to post by Grifter81


One of my favorite benchmarks.


Operating System
MS Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i5 2500k @ 3.30GHz 101 °F
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
8.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard
ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3
Graphics
GeForce GTX 560 Ti
SSD Hard Drives
117GB Volume0 (RAID 0)
SeaSonic Power Supply. 1000w

I would build your own, cheaper and more freedom. I have to 6970s x fired running the GPU clock at 950 Mhz and the memory clock at 1450 Mhz with a 20% voltage boost. It has a quad core running at 4.0 and 8 gigs of ram.
I can play crysis while watching a blue-ray and alt-tabbing between mass effect 3 and battle field. And it was still cheaper and better than what Alienware has to offer.

Just start off with a good CPU and good video cards.Things like RAM and extra hard drives can be added and upgraded latter. I started off with one 6970 and 4 gigs of ram and a 500 gig hard drive.

One thing i will recommend starting off with is getting something like an 80 gig solid state drive for windows and getting a separate drive for your games. That way you can have the performance boost from a solid state without having to pay for a huge one to fit all your games. If you look into it the game performance increase from a solid state drive is really nothing.

edit to add:
DO NOT GET LINUX

I know it is free but if you want games you will be disappointed, linux gaming has not even caught up to smart phones yet. Unless you like quake linux is REALLY good at playing quake, but then again what 15 year old computer isn't? It is easy to get pulled in by the church of linux but don't fall for it.

reply to post by PhoenixOD


Your right, but someone of my co-workers told me you need atleast 4GB of RAM using Win7 x64 if you want to use the potential of the 64 bit adressing/feel any difference between 32bit/64bit. Dont know if thats BS but normaly this person can be trusted when it comes to hardware.

To OP, you really can keep the CPU. I´m running a AMD x2 2x3GHz with only 3GB of RAM currentl, dont know about L1/L2 cache anymore but its no problem for her to stream 1080p to the mediaplayer, while working on a virtual machine running a modified XP. On this XP I run SIEMENS step7, MS VisualStudio2010 and some other heavy Applications. Normaly, theres a Firefox running in Win7, too with lots of tabs opened (like 300-500mb RAM). Sometimes I run Anno1404 in the Background on Win7. And it works fine. I could have more RAM, thats true but I´m currently fine with it.

reply to post by DavidWillts

I installed Suse10.? on my fathers machine (73) a time ago, and he loved it. I admit he only used it for surfing, printing and a little gaming with the delivered games. Linux is a great OS for many different things, but MS is and will be the OS of the masses. The more you worked with windows, the harder it is to change to linux for starters because there are so many differences between the concept of both OS. If you want to Game, use Windows. For everything else, if you aren´t bound to a Windows-only Application, you take the better choice with any linux distribution.

The main things I would suggest-

Windows 7 x64.

CPU: Intel 2500k (reason: cheap, effective, overclocks EXTREMELY well. Conversely, you could go with a 2600k if you absolutely must have hyperthreading, but it's pretty much useless for gaming, and you'll pay a hefty chunk more for it. Even more conversely, you could go with the REALLY new Ivy Bridge stuff.... I personally wasn't impressed by Ivy Bridge... but that's me.)

8gb of DDR3 1600 ram. It's the sweet spot for gaming. More will be a waste of money unless you frequently do other things such as audio editing, video editing, graphic design to name a few. DDR3 1333 has a slight performance dip over DDR3 1600. Anything above 1600 won't make a difference at all. G. Skill Ripjaws are decent.

GPU: Currently, I'd recommend at LEAST a GTX 580. The new GTX 680's are not too much more, and offer a decent performance increase. It is true the new 680's are PCI-E 3.0, but they will work on any PCI-E 2.0 slot, and there won't be any performance issues as a result. PCI-E 2.0 lanes will NOT be saturated by a GTX 680, despite it being a PCI-E 3.0 gpu. Currently, if I am not mistaken, nothing can push more bandwidth than a PCI-E 2.0 slot can handle, except for possibly a couple PCI-E SSD's.

Storage: This won't affect your framerate during a game, but it WILL affect how fast your game loads.
Putting your installed games onto a nice SSD will cause them to load SO much faster, it's ridiculous. Once loaded, they won't really perform any better than if they were on a HDD. The downside to SSD's, obviously, is they are much more costly than HDD's, so it's hard to recommend a SSD for gaming, but if you can afford it on top of other high quality stuff, DEFINITELY do it.

Cheers