Slashdot Mirror
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!
These PC's are low-end when compared to my overclocked Commodore 64.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
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.
You mean the original Crysis, not Warhead, as the newer game was optimized to run on lesser hardware.
I know because I have both running on a Core 2 Quad Q9550 with 2 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 and a Geforce 9800GT. Warhead runs smoother on higher settings.
Your eyes can only pickup 80fps anyway; you wouldn't know if it was 100 or 10,000 fps unless the fps counter didn't say.
It doesn't matter what your eyes can see. It's about responsiveness. Faster rendering makes the game more responsive. See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS. The closer a game gets to that then the better it feels because it will respond at the exact microsecond you do something. It does make a very real difference.
Now granted many people don't care otherwise there wouldn't be people like you that think "80 FPS is enough for anyone." Gunny how that number keeps creeping upwards. First it was 24 FPS (because that was all the eye could see), then 30, then 60, now you're saying 80. LOL
Seriously, I'm honestly curious. I'm a huge PC gamer and I run Vista 64-bit. All 32-bit Windows apps, which accounts for most games made in the last 10 years or so, seem to run great natively. For older DOS games, well those don't run well in 32-bit Windows. You get no sound, video problems, etc. The NTVDM isn't really good fro games. So what you do is fire up DOSBox, which runs them great. However that runs just as well in 64-bit as it does in 32-bit.
Thus far, I don't see any gaming problems with a 64-bit OS. So if you know of some, I'd be interested in what they are.
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.
It's articles that really do pc gaming a disservice. All you need to get pc gaming at reasonable resolutions is a decent mid range card like a 9600 or 9800. I have an 8800 GTS 512 and even on the absolute newest games I still achieve great framerates on good looking settings.
You can easily tell the difference between 100fps and 10000fps by looking at high contrast fast motion. Human eyes don't see in frames, but the point where increasing framerate won't cause any perceptible difference is probably in the thousands of fps.
Here's a good explanation of the issues of motion reproduction:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/TempRate.mspx
The Unreal 3 engine and others happy put two cores to use. On top of that you still have OS processes and services running while you are gaming (unless you are playing some hot old DOS games off a boot floppy!). While I agree that for a "budget" style PC quad core is way over kill, dual core is far from being a silly investment. Once you consider the cost of a AMD Athlon X2 or something it is a no brainer.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
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.
I'm a little surprised they haven't added macs to reviews like that. This one was apparently not too intelligent, they look like they went shopping to see how much money they could spend on a system, not really looking to make sure they got the best hardware configuration possible. Macs do tend to be more expensive on the average, and there's a lot more shiny expensive options available at their store, so this would have probably helped them with the direction they were headed.
Lets play...
- 8 core (dual quad) xenon at 3.2 ghz
- 32gb PC6400 (800mhz) RAM
- hardware raid card (we don't want software raid to slow the monster down!)
- 4 x 1tb SATA drives to feed to that raid card
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB VRAM
- dual 16x superdrives (or you can aftermarket a pair of BR drives from mcetech.com)
- pair of 30" cinema displays of course
- wireless keyboard and mouse (tho you'll need to find some $250 controller too I'm sure)
(I think we'll skip the modem option)
(also even for this I think we can skip the fiber channel card and xsan, I can't justify it here)
- may as well install server on it, you're going to be pushing game updates to your lan buddies right?
- at this point the 2 yrs of added warranty is a great value since it doesn't price based on config
$22,195. But that doesn't cover the controller.
There are a wide variety of ways to cut corners. Sony displays instead of apple's, buy your own memory and hard drives since apple's markup on them is insane, forego server, you can drop it down to about $7500, but you'll have to get the displays and ram separately. But this was just to see how much you could drop on a system.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS.
The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but I haven't seen a lot of "heavy" new PC games that would require an "ultimate gaming rig" these days.
That's not to say that some good games/additions/etc haven't come out or aren't on the boiler, but what's out-or-coming that would require or make use of a souped-up gaming rig VS just a decent machine (with a decent graphics card)?
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!
The problem with just about every computer review is that the reviewers think that running a game at anything less than 1920Ã--1080 (1080p) is absolutely unacceptable.
I game on my HD TV in the basement which can only do 720p, a single 4850 will get you about 30 fps in Warhead maxed out.
Graphics cards are cheap. You can get one that plays every single available game nicely for 130 dollars (the 8800GT/9800GT for example).
Stop getting your ideas from stupid guides like this and check out a thread full of advice from people who aren't insane.
The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.
Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?
64.0 fps should be enough for anyone!
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.
And you can see the difference between 100 fps and 100000 fps in a display that uses a 60Hz refresh signal by counting the tearing lines you get per frame.
Ofc, you disable vertical sync to get to the 100000fps.
At some point it is better to invest in shorter display cables to get a feedback loop that is smaller. You should also invest in the smallest display you can pay so you can view it completely while being as close to it as your nose allows. That way you will reduce the space light needs to travel and your feedback loop is shorter. That will surely will give you that extra CS-or-whatever kill.
Tell me about it, I built a new PC earlier this year having been playing mostly XBox 360 games for the past 2 and a half years.
I spent £1,600 (equivalent to $3,200 US at the time) on my new machine. I bought high end named RAM (something I never usually do), I bought a high end gaming motherboard (again, I always used to just go for any old board) etc. etc. So imagine my display when as soon as it was built I fired up Crysis to find it would not run smoothly anywhere even close to highest detail at 1920x1200 and nor would it run at max detail at lower resolutions. Whilst games like Spore and Warhammer Online ran perfectly, they're not exactly top end graphical marvels.
So yeah, I agree, PC gaming for games that show off the latest graphics is an absolute waste of time when there are consoles out there that due to having fixed hardware (at least the hardware that matters when optimizing) is so much cheaper and games can be so much better optimized for. Games like Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty 5 end up looking so so much better than Crysis on the PC even at full detail and yet also run amazingly smoothly and for a mere fraction of the cost of my gaming PC and without any of the hassle of making sure drivers are uptodate etc.
I'm not sure there's really a solution either unless we really move everything off of the standard PC hardware like we have graphics and just have "gaming boards" that are effectively like console hardware but that slot into the PC and just utilise it for display etc. but have some standardised specs to allow for proper optimization. As it stands, PC hardware now can't even compete with the graphical quality and smoothness of console hardware that is now 3 - 4 years old since release, and even older when you factor that it was developed long before release.
Perhaps what I miss most though is extensibility, games like Quake were fantastically fun to mod, but similarly even that became a little silly with newer games. The increased complexity of assets (higher poly counts, shaders etc.) means you can't really create decent mods as a one man band or small team anymore bar some smaller innovative code-only mods. Anything that requires a change in graphical style requires many more bodies working on it than before and if you do build a team of the right size and skills then why build a mod anyway? Why not just outright make a game when the workload is similar if you use one of the many great cheap engines out there (C4, PowerRender, Torque etc.) or even OSS engines (OGRE, Irrlicht).
Anyone who spends that kind of money on hardware to play last gen games is a fool.
Plenty of current and next gen games when they arrive utilise 4 cores, it seems to make sense if you're spending money on a PC like that for it to be able to still play the games of tommorrow than to play the games of yesterday that can be run perfectly well even if using only 1 of 4 cores anyway.
To create an example to make this point clear:
Game A is out now
- it can be run on a single core higher clock speed CPU at 150fps
- or a lower clock speed quad core CPU utilising only one of them at 140fps
The difference will be narrow (or may not even exist in fact) because the OS still utilises multiple cores to ensure the game has a core to itself whilst single core has to share the core with the OS and background processes so even if the game doesn't use 4 cores, the OS does. Then onto the next scenario, a new game:
Game B comes out in a month
- it can be run on a single core higher clock speed CPU at 20fps due to not supporting the latest SIMD extensions etc.
- or it can be run on a quad core CPU utilising all cores, with the latest SIMD extensions and such at 200fps
So tell me, if you're laying down this kind of cash for a PC that you'll probably want to last for a while, what makes the most sense to go for?
Only a fool uses the "quad core is pointless, existing games don't use them all" argument when spending the amount of cash required for a high end gaming PC.
depending on the monitor's refresh rate, 80 fps may be the best a monitor can do: 8 ms response time = 125 fps 12 ms = 83 fps 16 ms = 63 fps And many monitors have response times of 12 ms or more. So if you aren't paying attention, you could build a system that updates faster than the monitor can display.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?
Over 6 billion cores and counting...
I fell obliged to serve this link http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm/. Short story: 500fps.
Wrong. Mine, which is specced to run Duke Nukem Forever, runs your game at that resolution just fine.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Never say never when it comes to statements like that. Remember those guys who said back in 93: "You'll never play a blood soaked slugathon like DOOM on a kiddie console". Or the ones who said a few years later "You'll never have internet play on a console".
There are two console MMORPG's, both PS2 games (though FFXI has an Xbox port), both with keyboard support. Past trends prove that there will be more, it's only a matter of time.
What say we all universally switch to a 300fps system for now. It divides by 20, 25, 30, 50, 60, and 100, so it would convert most of the old signals smoothly. And I bet OLED technology would allow it.
At a push maybe even 600fps, so that 24fps would divide also.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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.
The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.
Holy frak. What sort of high-spec machine is our universe running on then?
could be infinite...according to wikipedia:
The Planck time is simply the time it takes a beam of light to travel a Planck length. As of 2006, the smallest unit of time that has been directly measured is on the attosecond (10â'18 s) time scale, or around 1026 Planck times.[3][4] There is also speculation that one Planck time after the Big Bang, statements can be made about the universe displaying properties equal to some of the other Planck units. (Some hypothesize that gravity must have separated first due to its homogeneity to the others. Some propose that the strong nuclear force is the most likely candidate due to its strength.)[5]
One Planck time should be the smallest measurable unit of time, according to quantum mechanics. But according to news reports, analyses of Hubble Space Telescope Deep Field images in 2003 brought up a possible discrepancy. Images should have been blurry at very far distances, but the news articles stated that they were not, challenging the theory that Planck time is indeed the smallest measurable unit of time in the universe.
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.