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The Best Gaming PC Money Can Buy
SlappingOysters writes "Gameplayer has gone live with their best PC hardware configurations for Q1 2009. They've broken it into three tiers depending on the investor's budget. And while the prices are regional, it is comparative across the globe. The site has also detailed the 10 Hottest PC Games of 2009 to unveil the software on the horizon which may seduce gamers into an upgrade."
Budget machine has a quad core? And is almost a grand?
Tom's Hardware does these, and the budget is usually closer to the $600 mark, with the mid range around $1200.
And the fact that they put two optical BD burners on the extreme one (one on each page) makes me think that this article was slapped together instead of fully investigated. Where's the benchmarks? The proof that you built a good machine?
Looks like a buncha kids opened up newegg and built themselves machines in their head...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
On the Extreme 4 GB of Video RAM? Seriously?
Someone please Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're mapping 4GB of video RAM you'll not be able to run a 32 bit OS. Given that this is a gaming PC, wouldn't this be a deal breaker? I mean even the uber gamers occassionally like to run older games right?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
last time i checked, the i7 boards had 6 ram slots, for an easy 12GB. Also im pretty sure its possible to find boards with atleast 3 PCI-E slots, so they are missing an extra graphics card there. 6 SATA slots is also do-able, so with one to the BD burner, that leaves 5 for a raid 5 SSD config to give 1TB of SSD. And only one screen? 3 cards means 6 screens, i feel they missed some obvious extras
Seriously, can we please, please stop describing people who purchase dubiously durable consumer goods that will be obsolete within a few years as "investors"? And, obviously, stop describing those goods as "investments".
There is nothing wrong, per se, with buying such things; but the notion that you are "investing" in them is patent nonsense.
Why not the best for the bucks?
I usually never spend more than 800($CAN) for an upgrade... and I'm good for gaming for a few years with that... Why 4 cores? Currently games only use 1... so it's better to have 1 good core than 4 half-good...
A good old P4 Prescott with watercooling (a littlebit overclocked) is still better than a quadcores!
Are graphics chipmakers making investments in the newer game development to "ensure" that the games require and/or perform better with the newest chips, or is it purely a result of the chips' improved performance on games that is naturally enticing upgrades?
Considering how few high-end PC games actually come out, getting a flashy PC just to play them isn't worth it.
Hardware issues aside, serious gameplayers need to be where the developers are, which at the moment means the Xbox 360. A Nintendo Wii or DS is optional, for those people who want to see some of the more innovative designs. (PC gaming diehards can now interject the usual comments about FPS controls and real-time strategy games and mods.)
And, yes, I'll point out that a 360 + Wii + DS + several years of Xbox Live is still cheaper than the PC mentioned in the article.
While I agree, the counterpoint is that you get a lot of diminishing returns for your PC investment. Depending upon what you get, maybe $800 well spent (not counting the monitor) will get you 80 fps.
Bump your PC spending to $1800, and the extra $1000 gives you better graphics, maybe 120 fps, maybe 200, whatever. But unless you have money to burn, that extra grand wasn't well spent. Just put it into the bank, and buy another $800 machine in 3 years.
That these machines would not run half as well as some system that would cost half as much but built by someone with a clue. Not just someone who went down line and picked out parts based on how much they cost.
For anyone really interested in performance rigs spend some time on a overclocking site. Those guys and gals really will show what it's all about. I know I'm damn amazed at some of the stuff they pull off and have learned a bunch just browsing.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
If investing for you means exclusively monetary returns, then you forgot the reason you need money in the first place. You failed to invest in your life.
Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?
Remember that your perception of passage of time is determined within he universe machine itself, so the universe machine need not be powerful, just have the proper amounts of (real) time, memory, and energy.
Actually, that assumes it's running in a universe like the one it's simulating.
Exactly: we don't know if real time is running at real time. If we're being simulated post-singularity using reversible computations (to provide an unbounded number of simulated frames by running the simulation slower as the energy density of the universe decreases) real time would be running asymptotically slower than real time over time, but we'd never be able to detect that even after we start running our own reversible computation engine to computationally extend our own apparent time into the apparent real time heat death of the simulated universe inside the real heat death of the real universe. You can apply a thought experiment similar to Cantor's diagonal proof to show that this system can be indefinitely nested, if the real universe is unbounded and uniform, even when you bring relativistic communication limits into play.