Paladin

A friend of mine has asked me to help him build a gaming system. Problem is I haven't built a computer from scratch in almost 4 years, and I've never built one optimized for gaming.

Can anyone offer some good advice on what type (brand and speed) of hardware I should be focusing on to put together a decent system? He was looking to keep the price tag around $1k, but I suspect that's pretty low for a good gaming PC.

Oh, and I don't feel any driving need to absolutely build all or part of this myself. If there's a good company out there that makes these things, clue me in.

Thanks,
Paladin

by_m

Well, I know that there are people who can help you with parts better than I can, but $1K should be more than enough for a gaming machine if you are putting it together. I know of some very good gaming systems put together at about $700

TeraBlight

If you want to do some serious research, I recommend Tom's Hardware Guide. The $1k will be plenty if it doesn't include buying a screen, I'd say.

Baaklar

I just built one for $1.4k, and didn't buy peripherals.

TeraBlight's link is right on the money - Tom's Hardware is a fantastic site for such things.

Personal preferences:

Motherboard - Asus or Abit
Processor - AMD
Graphics - NVidia, either Asus or BFG Tech
Power Supply - Antec
Sound - not really necessary with the new generations of motherboards, but I tend to prefer Hercules (if you can find any) over Creative Labs.
RAM - Corsair, Mushkin or Geil.
Hard Drive - for gaming, go with SATA. 8mb cache and 7200+ rpm or better are the important things here.
Case - Unless you're going to spring top dollar for a Lian-Li case, Antec is the way to go. If room isn't an issue, a server case will usually get you better airflow than a standard ATX case.

Again, all of those you can find above at TeraBlight's link. The site contains tons of comparisons.

Good luck.

bear24rw

http://www.newegg.com/
Awsome website.

Rockoon

You might want to check out Soyo motherboards as well. I've been happy with mine and at the time of purchase (3+ years ago) they were one of the most highly rated in terms of performance.

And definately make sure you get at least one PCI Express slot for your video card.

DeX

By far the most significant part of a gaming machine is the graphics card. Then comes the processor. The hard drive is probably the next most important thing but you have to pay through the roof for anything mildly adequate (HD speed hasn't kept up pace with the advance of the rest of technology). Next is probably memory and motherboard.

If you really want to spoil your mate get them a nVidia 7800 GTX. It's supposed to be the mutt's nuts and not only that but much quieter than the previous generations of high-end cards. A good option is to go for a motherboard that supports SLI, that way in the future your friend can more or less double their performance by sticking another graphics card in and having them run both at once.

The processor is quite a tricky one for gaming. There are all sorts of new technologies emerging and it's hard to see which ones are best for games. Dual Core is not really great for games because most games at the moment are designed to use just a single core. Similarly with 64bit processors while they make great improvements over 32bits, most current games are still 32bit and for those that do support 64bits I think you may need to run a 64bit OS (IE XP 64). Anyway it seems 64bit is the way forward so you should probably go with whatever 64bit Athlon you can afford. Only go with Intel if feel like burning away your cash.

For your hard drive, do as suggested earlier get an SATA 7200rpm with 8mb cache. There are faster drives available which really make a difference to gaming but they are just not worth the cost. Space is probably most important as the space needed to install the newest titles is soaring.

Now for the motherboard it shouldn't matter too much what brand you go for unless you're interested in overclocking. I would just go with any of the trusted brands such as Asus, Abit or Soyo as mentioned earlier. Just make sure that it supports the processor you want and PCI-Express (which you'll need for a decent graphics card). As I said before going with SLI is also a good choice as it leaves you the option of upgrading in the future.

As for memory I wouldn't be fooled into paying 4 or 5 times extra for the high performance memory. It's been shown to make almost no noticable difference. The best thing is to just get at least 1gb and you'll be fine.

Paladin

Thanks for all the great advice. A couple of questions:

Last I looked into it, AGP was the thing to have for graphics. How is PCI-Express better/different?

From the posts, I get that SLI will let a system run two graphics cards at once, presumably to seriously boost performance. What does SLI stand for?

Paladin

Rockoon

Current PCI and AGP technologies relies on a single pathway for both uploading and downloading to and from every periferal device connected to the motherboard.

PCI-Express offers multiple pathways, per device.

In laymans terms, imagine a group of homes on fire in the "good old days." The community would gather together and move water in buckets in what is known as a "bucket brigade" to each fire. Thats pretty much how PCI-Express works. Regular PCI is like that community having only one bucket to their name. No matter how many people want to help, theres still only one bucket.

It is essentialy lightyears ahead of PCI. PCI-Express was known as "3GIO" (3rd Generation I/O) before the standard became adopted by the manufacturing community.

Baaklar

Here, Paladin, is what I just built for myself.

Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2 ghz)
Graphics: BFG Tech NVidia GeForce 7800 GTX OC - this came overclocked out of the box
RAM: Corsair TwinX2048 3200 Proc
Case: Antec Sonata II - comes with their SmartPower 450 watt psu.

The above cost me about $1400, all on newegg.com. The Maxtor DiamondMax 9 140gb SATA drive I already had from a previous machine, as I did the monitor/keyboard/mouse, etc.

Motherboards, I've used Asus, Abit and MSI. Asus and Abit are tops in my book; I've never used a Soyo board. MSI makes good boards, but their attention to detail lacks a lot, and their customer service is far behind what a tier-1 motherboard maker should be. If you want to seriously (and safely) overclock your board, Abit is known for it.

Processors, I believe Dex covered the 64-bit arena well, however buying a 32-bit processor and wanting to replace it in 18 months with a 64-bit processor will mean replacing the board too. Incidentally, the Athlon FX-series processors are WAY overpriced. Athlons generally outruns P4s in terms of performance on games, at usually much less cost. Incidentally, if you're considering price vs performance, you won't see a noticeable difference between a 2.2 ghz processor and a 2.4 ghz processor. The extra $100-150 wasn't worth it to me to get the 2.4.

Graphics. I love my current card, though it's pricey as hell ($550). Well worth it to me - if you need to save a few dollars, go with a 6600 GT version (would save you close to $200). Asus and BFG get my vote for these, with BFG on top since they overclock the card at the factory. I've never used an ATI-based card, so I couldn't tell you who's better. Rockoon covered PCI-express very well. Essentially, you get a *lot* more bandwith from PCI-e than from AGP8x.

Ram. I like Corsair and Kingston. I've heard people claim Geil and Mushkin are the best in the world, and they just might be (I couldn't say from experience), but they're also very pricey for the limited amount of performance increase you might get from them. The trick to buying Ram, is the FSB (front-side bus speed) and the number of modules. If your FSB of the Ram doesn't match what the processor's FSB is, you'll create a bottleneck. Number of modules: on a 2gb system, 2 sticks x 1024 will run faster than 4 sticks x 512. Remember most if not all boards produced today are designed to run in dual-channel mode. For this to work, your Ram modules have to be the same size, timings, and I believe manufacturer. Buy a *matched set*. The link above is a matched set of 1024 modules. If you're into online gaming, 2gb is far better than 1gb, as your zone loading times are WAY decreased.

Cases. Really, it's a matter of taste. I didn't need a modding case, as mine sits under the desk. I went for noise reduction. Antec is probably the best bang-for-the-buck here. The case I listed above, complete with their power supply, was about $104.

Cooling? See TeraBlight's link for Tom's Hardware. I've never been a fan of water-cooling (can't stand the thought of having a leak and frying the entire system), but some swear by it.

If you want to price things out, try Pricewatch.com. Newegg.com is probably the best online retailer for these things (see bear24w's post for the link).

Also, compare the system I built above with a comparable system on AlienWare.com or FalconNorthwest.com, and see what it would cost you to buy it pre-built from them...

Have fun, but post what you build! Would love to see the specs.

Iceplug

I wrote a relatively long article about my experiences building a 'gaming computer' here: http://iceplug.vwebservices.com/main.htm and scroll down to July 4th.

Baaklar

What a read!

HAHA you poor guy. I think everyone that ever tried to build a computer for the first time went through pretty much the same thing. Though I've never bent a CPU pin, I have inserted them incorrectly (something that's not supposed to be possible).

I learned the hard way as well - I now mount everything that isn't in a PCI slot on the board before I mount the board in the case, including the mess of wires from the front of the case. Makes putting the CPU cooler on a piece of cake, relatively speaking.

I've built a half-dozen + computers over the last couple of years - that little crunch that you noted when closing that *zero-force* CPU lever still makes me cringe, and of course, the unbelievable amount of pressure required to actually mount the CPU cooler makes me wonder why I've not shattered every single board I've put one on.

Thankfully though, my last build was a flawless install.

Thanks for a good read!