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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!
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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
Upgrade your head.